ABSTRACT
A few researchers and creationists stated that evolution is not useful as a scientific theory since it produces no practical advantages and that it has no significance to daily life. But with the evidence of biology this statement can be claimed false. Various developments in the natural phenomena through evolution give sound theoretical knowledge about several practical applications. For instance, the observed development of resistance — to insecticides in crop pests, to antibiotics in bacteria, to chemotherapy in cancer cells, and to anti-retroviral drugs in viruses such as HIV — these instances are consequences of the laws of mutation and selection. Having a thorough knowledge of evolution has lead researchers to design and develop strategies for dealing with these harmful organisms. The evolutionary postulate of common descent has aided the development of new medical drugs and techniques by giving researchers a good idea of which organisms they should experiment on to obtain results that are most likely to be relevant to humans. Based on the principle of selective breeding, people were able to create customized organisms found in nature for their own benefit. The canonical example, of course, is the many varieties of domesticated dogs, but less well-known examples include cultivated maize (very different from its wild relatives, none of which have the familiar “ears” of human-grown corn), goldfish (like dogs, we have bred varieties that look dramatically different from the wild type), and dairy cows (with immense udders far larger than would be required just for nourishing offspring). A few critics might charge that creationists can work on these things
without recourse to evolution. For instance, creationists often explain the development of resistance to antibiotic agents in bacteria, or the changes wrought in domesticated animals by artificial selection, by presuming that God decided to create organisms in fixed groups, called “kinds”
ent varieties within the originally created groups such as “dog-kind,” or “cow-kind,” or “bacteria-kind”. In the last few decades, the continuing advance of modern technol-
ogy has brought about something new. Evolution is capable of producing practical benefits in almost every field, and at the same time, the creationists cannot claim that their explanation fits the facts just as well. The major field of evolution is computer science, and the benefits come from a programming methodology called genetic algorithms. In this chapter, a detailed description of genetic algorithm, its operators and parameters are discussed. Further, the schema theorem and technical background along with the different types of GA are also elaborated in detail. Finally MATLAB codes are given for applications such as maximization of a given function, traveling sales man problem, and GA based PID parameter tuning.
