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Re: newby asks: is complexity enough for AI?
Lester D. Shubin (lshubin@erols.com)
Mon, 09 Sep 1996 13:21:17 -0400
H. M. Hubey wrote:
>
> Peter Lupton <lupton@luptonpj.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> >However, one might argue that, in certain sorts of situations (and natural
> >selection might be one of them), the mere fact that the system becomes more
> >complex might, in some sense, force intelligence to occur. Not 'forcing' in the
>
> Actually many of the arguments against evolution not having
> a direction are overdone. The reason is that these people
> can't think of any other way of arguing against those who
> use statistical/mathematical methods for racism instead of
> against.
>
> There is plenty of evidence that the direction of evolution
> is in the direction of increasing intelligence. I can't
> recall the author now, (it might be Jerison) who's collected
> info on brain size from lots of different phyla/species, and
> the data shows the same thing for mammals, reptiles, etc.
>
> That the earliest ones had small brain size and small variation.
> Now the variation is large, and the mean brain size has increased
> for all of them. One of the reasons the variation is large is that
> the earliest species have not yet gone extinct, but despite that
> the mean brain size has increased.
>
> In addition to this we know very well that if we did compute
> some kind of a moving average we'd see the same increase since
> even animals with brains don't show up until late and homo
> sapiens shows up even later.
>
> Plots of distributions of brain case size was in a book on the
> brain by Scientific American. There might be someone who has
> more info on the book.
> --
> Regards, Mark
>
> http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu
I believe that if evolution is directed towards increased intelligence,
we have some distance to go, since we elected two creationists to the
School Board, one of whom appeared on TV stating that evolution was just
a theory, wasn't it? Lester
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