The outcome of Dawkins' WEASEL program was prespecified

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Response 4 References 5 Acknowledgments

Claim

Richard Dawkins [1996] demonstrated a program that starts with a random string of letters and, via random copying errors, evolves it into the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel" in just a few generations, demonstrating the power of natural selection unaided by intelligence. But intelligence is involved in predetermining the target sentence.

Source

• Gitt, Werner, and Carl Wieland, 1998 (Sep/Nov). Weasel words. Creation Ex Nihilo 20(4): 20-21. [1]

Response

1. Dawkins does not claim in The Blind Watchmaker that the WEASEL program demonstrates that evolution can produce information without intelligence. Instead, it is intended to demonstrate one important aspect of evolution: cumulative selection. The WEASEL program remembers the best (i.e. most similar) string of letters it has produced so far and uses this to produce new strings in the next step. Thus, the strings will be increasingly similar to the target string after each step, and will be identical to the target string much, much faster than if the program had not remembered the best string (single-step selection). It is the high rate of convergence towards the target when cumulative selection is used that is the important result here. Whether the target is specified in advance by Dawkins, randomly generated or obtained in any other way is irrelevant.
2. This is a transparent attempt to put evolutionists in a no-win situation: either they are accused of having no experimental evidence of natural selection, or if they have, as in this case, they are accused of having intelligently designed the experiment, thus "proving" that without intelligent design, nothing goes.
3. While it is a different program than Dawkins described, adding crossover (recombination) in the standard manner of genetic algorithms achieves even faster convergence. Crossover more closely resembles natural selection.
4. Dawkins does not claim that evolution is target-oriented. Evolution does not have a final goal.
5. Creationists are famous for falsely asserting certain randomness assumptions of evolution that make a straw man of it and run contrary to any notion of "selection", so it should be relatively easy to see Dawkins's true point, i.e. that the algorithm of natural selection runs in polynomial rather than exponential time, and the creationists' response to his evidence is simply an attempt to distract their audience from the fact that he has totally disproven the exponential time hypothesis on which many creationist arguments are based.
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References

1. Dawkins, 1996. The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Company.
2. Lenski, R.E., C. Ofria, R.T. Pennock & C. Adami, 2003. The evolutionary origin of complex features. Nature 423: 139-144. [2] See also: National Science Foundation, 2003. Artificial Life Experiments Show How Complex Functions Can Evolve. [3]

Acknowledgments

• 130.243.110.126
• Thomas Kettenring