Dawkins's Weasel
Mar. 20th, 2009 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesI've been playing with Dawkins's Weasel. Not the bitey mustelid, but the program - it's a demonstration of how random variation and selection pressure can make order out of chaos, using as its example the text string "methinks it is like a weasel" - hence, Dawkins's Weasel. Some nice nerds wrote it up in Perl. You start with a bunch of completely random strings, then you keep the one most like "methinks it is like a weasel" and randomly mutate it to create the next generation. Repeat until you have weasels.
What astounds me isn't the creation of order out of chaos, because I was sold that years ago. It's the speed, the tiny number of generations, that it takes to get from "nothing like a weasel" to "one or two characters away" - "methinks it is somrthing like a weasel". The speed with which the string is roughly weaselmorphic is astonishing.
Context? If we 're going to be changing selection pressures in the natural world in a big way, watch out for some fascinating new mutants.
What astounds me isn't the creation of order out of chaos, because I was sold that years ago. It's the speed, the tiny number of generations, that it takes to get from "nothing like a weasel" to "one or two characters away" - "methinks it is somrthing like a weasel". The speed with which the string is roughly weaselmorphic is astonishing.
Context? If we 're going to be changing selection pressures in the natural world in a big way, watch out for some fascinating new mutants.
