Replicators Don't!




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Replicators Don't!

©Barry McMullin

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Abstract: Replicators don't. Replicate, that is. This is the shocking conclusion to which I have been forced by my attempt to figure out what precisely Richard Dawkins means by the term "replicator" . Actually, it seems that Dawkins uses the term in at least two fundamentally different ways; but according to Dawkins' own specification of the problem which the "replicator" concept was intended to solve (namely, what entities can qualify as things that evolutionary adaptations are "good for" ) then "replicators" turn out to be a special form of lineage (what I shall term a similarity lineage); and these, in turn, do not actually "replicate" (in Dawkins' sense of the term) at all! Does this matter to the research programme of Artificial Life? Well yes, I believe it does. Dawkins has explicitly argued that there are principled reasons why Darwinian evolution, in any medium whatsoever, must rely on the participation of "replicators" . Within limits I am inclined to agree. But it follows that, if we wish to realize artificial Darwinism, we had better be clear what a replicator actually is - and all the more so if it turns out that it doesn't...






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McMullin@eeng.dcu.ie
Mon Mar 4 14:08:30 GMT 1996