Evolutionary Informatics
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— Yu-Chi Ho and D.L. Pepyne "Simple explanation of the No Free Lunch Theorem", Proc. 40th IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control, Orlando, Florida, 2001.Unless you can make prior assumptions about the ... [problems] you are working on, then no search strategy, no matter how sophisticated, can be expected to perform better than any other
Evidence for the Design of Life: Part 1 — Genetic Redundancy
Email: peterborger [at] hotmail [dot] comAbstract
Knockout strategies have demonstrated that the function of many genes cannot be studied by disrupting them in model organisms because the inactivation of these genes does not lead to a phenotypic effect. For living systems, this peculiar phenomenon of genetic redundancy seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Genetic redundancy is now defined as the situation in which the disruption of a gene is selectively neutral. Biology shows us that 1) two or more genes in an organism can often substitute for each other, 2) some genes are just there in a silent state. Inactivation of such redundant genes does not jeopardize the individual's reproductive success and has no effect on survival of the species. Genetic redundancy is the big surprise of modern biology. Because there is no association between redundant genes and genetic duplications, and because redundant genes do not mutate faster than essential genes, redundancy therefore brings down more than one pillar of contemporary evolutionary thinking.
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