Abstract: Abstract—Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated queries. Crafting a search algorithm to most efficiently extract this information is the job of the programmer. In many instances this is done using the programmer’s experience and knowledge of the problem being solved. For the Hamming oracle, we have the ability to assess the performance of various search algorithms using the currency of query count. Of the search procedures considered, blind search performs the worst. We show that evolutionary algorithms, although better than blind search, are a relatively inefficient method of information extraction. An algorithm methodically establishing and tracking the frequency of occurrence of alphabet characters performs even better. We also show that a search for the search for an optimal tree search, as suggested by our previous work, becomes computationally intensive.

[ IEEE | pdf ]

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

RICHARD DAWKINS: The implication you make is that there’s something about religion which is personal and upon which evidence doesn’t have any bearing. Now, as I scientist I care passionately about the truth. I think that the existence of a supreme being – a supernatural supreme being – is a scientific issue. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either there are gods or there are no gods. That is a scientific issue. Yes, it’s a supremely important scientific question. If the universe was created by an intelligence, then we are looking at an entirely different kind of scientific theory than if the universe came into existence by natural means. If God or gods had something to do with the creation of life, then we’re looking at a totally different kind of biology.

So I think you can’t just say religion and science have nothing to do with each other. Science can get on and you let people have their own religious – of course you let people believe whatever they like. But you cannot say that science and religion are completely separate because religion makes scientific claims. It certainly makes scientific claims about miracles, and you cannot reconcile an authentic approach to science with a belief in miracles or, I suspect, with a belief in supernatural creation. At least the very least you should say is that this is a scientific question.

MORALITY

RICHARD DAWKINS: I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way though the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, “Look at that. That’s religion,” and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, “Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.” Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion. Jesus said some wonderful things and the sermon on the mount is terrific. Modern morality goes back to that and says, yes, that’ll do. That’s very good.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Let’s be realistic about this. We have brains. It’s brains that do the thinking. Our brains are going to decay. That will be that. But when you say, “Is this it?” How much more do you want? I mean this is wonderful. Wouldn’t an afterlife be incredibly tedious after the first thousand years or so?

It’ll be interesting to see the reaction of the Darwinists to this story.

I have been told by several research leaders that any attempt to change curriculum, or do anything with public schools, is a Bad Idea™. I understand where they are coming from. But let me tell you my personal story, and why it leads me to think that biological science itself needs the controversy to be taught.

When I graduated from high school, there were three things that interested me – theology, computer science, and chemistry. I had trouble choosing degrees, so I just decided to get a B.A. in theology and a B.S. in computer science. It was a hard choice, but I decided to drop chemistry.

Now, you see, biology was not on my radar screen. Why not? In a word, the problem was neo-Darwinism.

The problem wasn’t evolution, per se. I did not believe in evolution at the time, but that wouldn’t have prevented me from entering into biology. The problem was that I actually believed what they said about the nature of biological change. That is, that biological change occurs through random mutations and natural selection.

How Boring!

The two sides I knew of biology was either (a) memorizing names of organisms or their parts, and (b) waiting for and observing pointless (by definition!) changes in organisms.

So, basically, if I wanted to mess with something dynamic, I should choose a different branch of science.

Really, what is cooler than the non-Darwinian research? Bacteria which re-engineer their biochemistry to respond to specific threats? Tuning knobs in the genome? Genomes that plan for the future using targetted randomness? Untemplated genetic changes being thrown in to accomodate for stress? Systems which are made from a metaprogramming template and then refined through highly targetted mutations?

Now, of course, none of these things are going to be taught. Not because they aren’t believed by everyone in biology, but because they don’t support the standard neo-Darwinistic viewpoint. If they are taught, they won’t be taught as the awe-inspiring mechanisms they are, but rather as just another instance of random mutation and natural selection. That’s not only untrue, it’s also HIDEOUSLY BORING.

If you want to bore kids out of their mind and get them to major in something else besides the biological sciences, by all means don’t teach the controversy.

I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed.

Pubmed is run by the NIH, and its purpose is to help the dissemination of information for medicine. Rather than argue tirelessly about what constitutes the introduction of religion into the classroom, why not just punt the definition of science to the NIH, and simply say something like “any paper indexed by Pubmed within the last 20 years should be considered a valid topic of discussion in the sciences.” That way, if someone thinks that these papers are about religion, then someone needs to explain what the NIH is doing indexing papers on religion!

I think this would give the academic freedom movement a more objective means of determining scientific discourse, and would mean that our detractors would have to spell out why they think that the NIH is incapable of distinguishing science from non-science, and why they think that the NIH is indexing papers on religious topics.

I, frankly, would enjoy listening to that conversation.