I’m afraid I had to miss Artificial Life X this year — the last Alife conference I attended was Alife III, in Santa Fe many many years back. I regret my indisposition not least because I missed an apparent attempt to take this important field of complex systems research and simulation science, and drive it into becoming a talking point for panspermic pseudoscience and what seems a quirky interstellar offspring of Intelligent Design:
The Klyce agenda makes claims such as:
- life can never emerge from non-life
- there was no Big Bang
- genetic innovation comes from space
- there has never been an example of an advantageous mutation (other than a gene becoming disabled)
- open-ended evolution in a so-called closed system is not possible
I have to say, it would’ve been fun to watch. Takes me back to the days when a visiting “researcher” down the hall at SFI was seeking important crucifixes in cellular automata. Or the first time I actually saw Dembski’s No Free Lunch and thought, “Oh, good! Somebody’s popularizing Macready and Wolpert’s important results.” Or the ubiquitous self-aggrandizing marketing of the Gene Expression Programming cabal.
We form dynamic communities with soft boundaries. Look to Tom Ray’s earliest results on parasitism in Tierra for intuitions of how this plays out….
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