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Article 6566 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Memory and store/retrieve.
Message-ID: <BILL.92Aug4160710@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 4 Aug 92 23:07:10 GMT
References: <1992Aug3.200351.3632@mp.cs.niu.edu>
	<1992Aug3.220654.20920@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
	<1992Aug4.165958.17775@mp.cs.niu.edu>
	<1992Aug4.181806.28275@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
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In-Reply-To: pauld@cs.washington.edu's message of 4 Aug 92 18: 18:06 GMT

pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) writes:

  >The question I am asking is "given that a trait
  >exists, what is the chance that it is actually beneficial ?", which is
  >the one you suggested next. I claim, very tentatively, that the state
  >space for biological organisms, along with the actual ecological
  >terrain in which they interact, are structured so that much of the
  >diversity we see in living systems is merely diversity for its own
  >sake, and that the most of the traits reflected by that diversity are
  >neither beneficial nor harmful.

For this claim to be meaningful, you must have some way of quantifying
diversity.  This is easy to do in gene-space, but much more
problematic in trait-space.  How many distinct traits does an animal
have?  Without at least a sketch of an answer, the claim that "most"
traits are neutral doesn't make much sense.

	-- Bill


