Artificial life meets computational creativity?

I review the history of work in Artificial Life on the problem of the open-ended evolutionary growth of complexity in computational worlds. This is then put into the context of evolutionary epistemology and human creativity

Quantum Mechanics Unscrambled

Is quantum mechanics about 'states'? Or is it basically another kind of probability theory? It is argued that the elementary formalism of quantum mechanics operates as a well-justified alternative to 'classical' instantiations of a probability calculus. Its providing a general framework for prediction accounts for its distinctive traits, which one should be careful not to mistake for reflections of any strange ontology. The suggestion is also made that quantum theory unwittingly emerged, in Schroedinger's formulation, as a 'lossy' by-product of a quantum-mechanical variant of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. As it turns out, the effectiveness of quantum theory qua predictive algorithm makes up for the computational impracticability of that master equation.Comment: 25 pages, no figures, final versio

The Machine Conception of the Organism in Development and Evolution: A Critical Analysis

This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In developmental biology the MCO underlies a logically incoherent model of ontogeny, the genetic program, which serves to legitimate three problematic theses about development: genetic animism, neo-preformationism, and developmental computability. In evolutionary biology the MCO is responsible for grounding unwarranted theoretical appeals to the concept of design as well as to the interpretation of natural selection as an engineer, which promote a distorted understanding of the process and products of evolutionary change. Overall, it is argued that, despite its heuristic value, the MCO today is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems