ABSTRACT
I took seriously the charge this is a pedagogical session, and so what I have done is to suppress my tendency to be assertive and argumentative on substantive issues, and instead try to be pedagogical. That is to say try to outline for you those elements of evolutionary processes that I think are essential to understand if one is going to engage in research on complexity in evolution, on evolution, or to use, for example, genetic algorithms and other so-called evolutionary processes to solve other problems. What is there that is particular to evolutionary processes, what’s really going on? I think I should begin by saying that my prejudice is that biology is like the law; that is to say everything depends on the jurisdiction. There are no absolute general principles that are very interesting, and one really needs to know the specifics of biological organisms or the nexus of a very large number of weakly determining forces. And that’s why biology is interesting: Precisely because, except when one is sick, and indeed the definition of illness is that an organism is dominated by one force, rather than being the nexus of a large number of weakly determined forces, and that’s why complexity is relevant. So I’ve got to make a lot of distinctions.
