No, I am pointing out that evolution follows from imperfect self-replication. As soon as an imperfectly self-replicating system arose, due to "chance" chemical reactions, evolution would start.
Fair enough, but absolutely no relevance to the analogy.
Without self-replication, the selection criteria are arbitary.
I thought we'd addressed this jimbob. You seem to be completely ignoring what I'm writing!
So the system is set up to copy anything that sells.
That's right jimbob - anything that 'survives its environment', just like nature.
This is fine when things do sell.
Thank you.
However, how long do you wait?
As long as they take to sell, or until you get a hunch that they've failed to 'survive their environment', then you may consider them extinct, and try something else, if you like. It's no different from all of the natural species that have either gone extinct or remain. Is there are a dim and distant dodo or Tasmanian devil still waiting to be discovered somewhere? I doubt it, so I'm prepared to wager that they've gone extinct. That doesn't stop us observing continuing evolution in other definitely surviving species though, does it?
Suppose something wasn't going to sell, does the system just wait forever?
See above.
How many copies does the system make?
That's not relevant to the analogy. Only one copy needs to 'survive' for evolution to continue. The only thing that multiple copies achieves is that it leads to more variants and speeds up the evolutionary and speciation process. But the analogy isn't time bound, just like nature isn't.
If something sold after ten years, would that take the resources from something that had sold six minutes earlier/later but which had only been for sale for a short time?
I don't see the relevance of this question to the analogy. In any event, if something took ten years to sell I suspect it would be way behind the evolutionary eight-ball, and given that we're talking about increasing complexity over time we could probably disregard it.
The trigger for a self replicating system is its inception. In a cheetah, it could be considered to be the moment of conception.
What, exactly, is this effect of this so-called 'trigger'? It offers no measure of whether any mutations that the cheetah has acquired are beneficial or otherwise. Only breeding is a measure of that, which must, therefore, be considered to be the 'replication trigger'.
The age of sexual maturity is a trait that is subjected to natural selection, and thus evolves.
You're getting very confused now jimbob. We don't need to discuss how the age of sexual maturity might change over time. All we need concern ourselves with is whether it's reached and acted upon for each generation.
In Sam's case the trigger has been defined as the receipt of sales money.
That's right, which is analogous to replication. It signals that the device has survived its environment to sexual maturity, so Sam may go ahead and facilitate the replication process.
So am I, the moment at which the system will start the process of producing a copy. That is what self-replicating systems do. That is not what the system that you have described does.
Ugh?
It is not an irrelevance, because that organism posessed a trait which (by definition) ensured that it was an evolutionary dead-end.
And how, exactly, do evolutionary 'dead-ends' help us to study evolution viz increasing complexity over time?!
In nature, the timeframe is a trait that is subject to evolution. There are long-lived, slow-breeding organisms, and short-lived fast-breeding organisms. In the system you proposed, a timescale is one of the many criteria that have to be defined for the evolutionary algorithm to work.
No it isn't, as explained above. Sam can sit and wait forever if he wishes to see if any proceeds are forthcoming, or he could assume extinction and start a different species. Each species is mutually exclusive, so we need only observe those that show the best progress, just like those vast minority of natural species that happen to have survived to today!
The analogy is fine as a description of a system that produces working solutions, and increases complexity, what it fails to do, is the final step, which is the removal of intelligence form the selection process. Self-replication removes this need, as there is no longer any need for any arbitary selection criteria, the variants that produce more "breeding" copies of themselves will be those that evolve.
You just don't pay attention do you jimbob. What are the 'arbitrary selection criteria' that apply to Sam's devices when he introduces them into their environment? How do such 'arbitrary selection criteria' differ in principle from those that apply to the cheetah?
