chaz wyman wrote:[
There is no answer to your teleological question.
Except I have completely described answers to them in terms of Evolutionary Genetics. Recombination (a genetic process) is the key reason for the evolution of sex.
I've read all of Dawkins works.
Well then you should be very familiar with Dawkin's concept of
Fidelity.
Secondarily, when I say things like "Evolution favors such-and-such" you should know very clearly that what I'm actually telling you is that the statistical and mathematical properties of the process itself will trend towards "such-and-such" over long spans of time. You should understand that very clearly, instead of covering your ears and yelling "Teleology!" at me, like some bratty child.
What we know from simulations shows us that artificial organisms will trend their genotypes towards shorter and simpler "snippets" of code throughout the lifetime of a simulation. They do this even when endowed with powerful mechanisms. Powerful mechanisms include capacities for communication, memory, and conditional actions. They discard those mechanisms and instead evolve "zombies". (Dan Dennett gave a lecture on this). Why? When one first encounters evolution and natural selection as a young person, one is almost invariably going to interpret it to mean a process which trends towards, bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. Except what you actually see in simulation is a statistical trend towards organisms whose genotype is IMPERVIOUS TO MUTATION.
Genotypes that are impervious to mutation are trending towards genotypes who can make identical cloned copies.
Okay so what? Well this is completely consistent (indeed representative of) what Richard Dawkins called a tendency of evolution towards
Fidelity. Evolution is not concerned with bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. On the contrary-- evolution is first and foremost concerned with organisms who genotypes can be replicated with
high Fidelity.
Mr. chaz wyman, when I said to you that every simulation, if allowed to, will evolve the mutation rate to 0.0 in all organisms. You should have not been surprised by this answer. If you have actually read Richard Dawkin's books (which you claim you have) you immediately should have recognized this as a tendency and strong trend towards
Fidelity. If given the chance, natural selection will always favor situations in which the genes are replicated exactly, or more exactly, than situations in which they are constantly mutated.
