Wayne Tyson asks:
> I would like to know how many (what percentage of?) ecologists think
> competition drives evolution or whether it's adaptation.
The question isn't either-or. Competition for resources within a bounded arena
results in adaptation.
Darwinian evolutionary theory is composed of only five components:
(i) a bounded arena,
(ii) a replicating population which must eventually expand beyond
the bounds of the arena,
(iii) thermodynamically inescapable replicative error,
(iv) competition for space in that arena among the inevitable
variants, and
(v) consequential competitive exclusion of the lesser fit.
Darwinian evolutionary theory is an optimization algorithm. The most overt
attribute of the process is the accumulation of increasingly appropriate
behaviors within the evolving lineage of trials.
"Adaptation" is simply the overt response to that evolution of increasingly
appropriate behaviors. The agent of evolution is natural selection, which is
mediated by the constant culling of the least appropriate phenotypes from the
inevitable excess population locked within that finitely bounded arena at every
generation.
If you want to read a ponderously technical description of this process, written
for engineers, you might look at:
http://aics-research.com/research/notes.html
When a process is understood well enough, and we do understand the Darwinian
algorithm very well now, it can be exploited for engineering purposes. Indeed,
that may be the ultimate test for how well we understand a process.
I mentioned the other day that all sciences eventually become predictive, and
that prediction is the only way we have of measuring how well we understand a
subject, but engineering exploitation of a scientific discipline represents yet
a higher level of understanding.
There are now hundreds of engineering organizations employing Darwinian
evolutionary methods to design structures and processes now. One of them is a
group at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, headed by Jason Lohn. One
of the more interesting things that Jason's group has done recently is design
the first spacecraft-flyable antennas using evolutionary methods:
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm
The results of their design work appears at the bottom of the page. As Jason has
said, "no matter how drunk you got an antenna engineer, he never would have
designed anything that looks like this," but the evolved antennas have a higher
gain and better angular coverage than do the best of all of the previously
human-designed antennas.
Leslie Orgel's Second Law, "evolution is cleverer than you are," now appears on
more engineering PowerPoint slides than it does on those of biochemists, the
audience for whom he originally meant the comment.
Wirt Atmar
