Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 12:51:23 -0600
Subject: darwin, speciation, optimization


Adam Rose wrote regarding Origin of Species:
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 96 08:58:10 GMT
Subject: Darwin ( dialectics ? ) 
... Also, it's clear that he could not have written the book without
standing at the end of a long tradition of almost anti theoretical
gentleman collectors.

Lisa:  What do you mean by "gentleman collectors" ?  I'd say he was
much more than that.  

AR: His argument that natural selection advances at its fasttest when
the sea level rises and falls, sometimes isolating islands, where
specialisations can "mature" , and then allowing
these specialisations to compete on a continental scale when the sea
level falls, could show how to apply "genetic algorithms" to really
large optimisation problems, which at the moment they don't solve
effectively [ applicable to some stuff I do ].

Lisa:  I didn't know you were into that.  So was Steve Keen, formerly
of M1, perhaps before your time there.  I don't know much of that
application, but I know he was talking about a plain with mountains
on it, mathmatically, in computer simulation.  

In biology some thing identical to sea levels connecting islands
happens, as temperature and rainfall zones move up and down
mountains.  As desertification occured after the most recent ice age,
many species became fragmented into isolated populations on "island"
mountains.

Also, Lake Bonneville filled up the eastern side of the Great Basin
during the ice age, its eastern shore was the Wasatch mountains,
which are the western-most range of the Rockies in this region, and
the place where I live.  So, all the streams out of all the canyons
were connected by this large fresh water lake.  Now, some native
species still survive in the isolated mountain drainages.  They still
connect sometimes, but only by all of them draining into the Great
Salt Lake, which prohibits trout from migrating from one drainage
into another.  But, enough bio examples.

What sort of optimization problems are you working on?

Lisa


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