kingsley@hpwrce.HP.COM (Kingsley Morse) (01/05/91)
reiser@pmafire.inel.gov (Steve Reiser) writes in sci.med: >In tests reported in a 1989 issue of "Noetic Science Review", it was >found that a bacteria exposed to a virus which is fatal to the bacteria >had a 70% survival rate due to a genetic double mutation which required >mutation "A" to occur before mutation "B" at specific locations on the >DNA. The mutations protected the bacteria from the virus. > >The article suggested that much of evolution may have been non-random >and selective mutations occur allowing species to advance at an infinitely >faster rate than would be probable by random genetic mutation. > >This finding suggests that evolution is harder to explain away than it >had been when statistical probabilities of evolution creating man was >used to suggest that it was necessary for a god to intervene. This seems to imply that *genetic algorithms* might be speed up if mutations aren't random. Has anyone heard of "selective mutations" and how they work?