Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
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From: A.J.Hirst@uk.ac.open (Tony Hirst)
Subject: Re: a theoretical biology for alife...
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Message-ID: <A.J.Hirst-100495123606@uu-igor-mac.open.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 12:36:06 GMT
References: <A.J.Hirst-280395145129@uu-igor-mac.open.ac.uk> <3l9erl$632@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <A.J.Hirst-070495170717@uu-igor-mac.open.ac.uk> <797345616snz@smithg.demon.co.uk>
Organization: HCRL, The Open University, UK
Followup-To: comp.ai.alife
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In article <797345616snz@smithg.demon.co.uk>, Chris@smithg.demon.co.uk
(Chris Gordon-Smith) wrote:

> In article <A.J.Hirst-070495170717@uu-igor-mac.open.ac.uk>
>            A.J.Hirst@uk.ac.open "Tony Hirst" writes:
> 
> > 
> > wrt fitness functions, I think there's scope for much confusion between
> > fitness as a measure of pop behaviour, fitness as a statistical predictor
> > of pop dynamics, fitness as a statistical prescriber of evoly direction and
> > fitness as an optimisation (prescribed) goal of evolution 
> > 
> > monty
> 
> I'm relatively new to the field of Evolutionary Computing (EC) and Genetic 
> Algorithms (GA), and as a basic education decided to read Richard Dawkins' book 
> "The Extended Phenotype". One thing that has puzzled me is that while Dawkins 
> seems to feel that fitness is not a useful concept, it is still very much in 
> evidence in then world of EC / GA.
> 
> As I understand it, Dawkins' point is that the real battle in evolution is 
> between genes and their alleles at the same chromosome loci, whereas fitness 
> has several different meanings, none of which can be easily applied to this 
> view of evolution (eg because they tend to focus on survival of individual 
> organisms or of species).
> 

I was under the impression that the genic selection view utilises additive
fitness of individual genes to give the fitness of an individual, 'atomic
gene fitness' being based on observation of the evoly success of
individuals carrying those genes - so you work out how fit a gene is by
seeing in how many successful individuals it appears...Selection is thus
best seen at the individual level...

EA's often use explicit fitness functions because many EA's are
optimisation algorithms applied to the prob specified by the ff.

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 All opinions etc etc...
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      | Tony Hirst ("Monty")          | e-mail:  A.J.Hirst@open.ac.uk
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