Thursday, May 31, 2007

Teaching evolution.

This is how evolution by natural selection should be taught in schools.

How do you turn this:

Shuffled Deck:
33 5 12 37 44 27 39 16 11 29 28 4 22 43 6 30 21 47 41 48 2 34 46 24 18 8 7 26 45 36 1 49 3 9 17 25 14 10 13 20 31 15 32 50 40 42 52 38 19 51 23 35


into this:

Darwin:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52


using only random changes?

Selection.

Dustin provides the code to be able to do this experiment yourself using MatLab. I don't know anything about coding, so I won't comment on that part, but I can say that I hope he turns this into a little Java program that anyone can run, and see in real time how we can make order out of random noise in a simple program.

Digg!

2 comments:

Vacuous Implication said...

Hey, a link! Thanks very much. As for the Java script, that isn't going to happen -- I can't do it.

I know MATLAB, Shell scripting, C, and HTML enough to hamfist my way through most elementary applications, but I'm pretty bad at programming overall.

Vacuous Implication said...

Here's a link to a Weasel applet:
http://home.pacbell.net/s-max/scott/weasel.html

It doesn't use interchanges like my deck of cards, but that's the way it was originally intended when Dawkins came up with the idea.