Newsgroups: comp.ai.genetic
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!galileo.cc.rochester.edu!prodigal.psych.rochester.edu!stevens
From: stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Greg Stevens)
Subject: Technology and Fitness
Message-ID: <1995Mar24.014846.2336@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
Keywords: technology, fitness landscapes
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Date: Fri, 24 Mar 95 01:48:46 GMT
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Has anyone out there done work on looking at technology as a mechanism
allowing a population to alter its own fitness landscape?  More specifically,
I can imagine different heuristics / cultural norms a population could
be assumed to have about the use to put its technology to, so that,
for example, level of technology might transform the fitness landscape
for that population so that the fitness landscape is raised  over the
area of the average genotype of the population.  Perhaps, for example,
technology would add some factor T to the regulat fitness functions
which would be proportional both to the "level of technology" and the
distance between the individual's genotype and the average genotype of
the population.

In more plain English, this would be interpretable as technology being a
device the population uses to increase their own survivability, specifically
geared towards making the most people in the population survive.  I would
expect that the result would be that higher technoloy populations would have
larger populations, and in a society where technology was increasing, the
population number would also be increasing.

Greg Stevens

stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu

