The next NAME meeting will be held in two weeks time - 4:30pm on Wednesday, 4th July, room TBC.
The topic of the next meeting with be Chris Adami's discussion on biological complexity. I have attached Adami's 2002 review paper to this email. Please read and come armed with questions and comments!
Joel Peck will be leading the discussions. He would like us to consider the following three questions:
1 - Is the measure in this paper really a reasonable measure of biological complexity?
2 - What practical difficulties might be encountered if one tried to applied the measure described?
3 - If you have problems with the proposed measure, what alternative measure might be used to measure biological complexity?
The room may change from ARUN401 as we would prefer something more conducive to group discussion.
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2 comments:
A couple of other relevant references to this topic:
(1) One of the earliest papers in this general area of information-theory <=> evolution (that JMS was keen to cite) is
Kimura, M (1961), "Natural Selection as a Process of Accumulating Genetic Information in Adaptive Evolution", Genetical Research 2: 127-140.
Available in main Sussex library -- recent journals on shelf QP1 Gen but I think ancient stuff like this accessible in N Basement
(2) A paper that has always intrigued me (I cover it in my Artificial Life Lectures) is
Worden, RP (1995), "A Speed Limit For Evolution", J. Theor. Biol., 176, 137-152.
A version is available online at
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/jcollie/sle/
It seems to me this covers very similar territory to Chris Adami's paper. I discussed this paper with Chris at Alife VII in 2000, and he knew of it and did not like it -- I could not gather what his objections were. The Worden paper has undeniably got lots of loose ends flying around (and we agreed on this), but the underlying intuitions have always seemed important and sound to me. The speculative bits of Worden's paper are provocative -- " the human brain differs from the chimpanzee brain by at most 5 KBytes of useful design information".
I would be very happy if someone explained to me just where and how Worden's and Adami's ideas diverge, in terms of the underlying intuitions.
Inman
A PDF of the Kimura paper Inman referred to can be found on David Waxman's website here:
www.lifesci.susx.ac.uk/home/David_Waxman/Kimura.pdf
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