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To: BMCDA
And I don't see why they have to. These bugs represent the individual members of a certain population and their position in the fitness landscape (so of course they don't move around like ordinary bugs): some of them are closer to a local maximum (light bulb) and some are further away. And those that are closer to the "light bulb" are more likely to survive.

Why does the earth orbit the Sun and not go flying off hither and yon? Why did Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter? Hint: One has a stable orbit and the other does not wrt the major planets and the sun.

Plus your analogy with bugs surviving closer to the bulb will result in bugs fried on the light, glued on the light, etc with no other bugs elsewhere. You have provided no mechanism for the bugs to go elsewhere.

1,076 posted on 07/29/2003 7:15:21 PM PDT by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
Of course this analogy is not perfect but it's a nice illustration of a cloud of points scattered around a local maxium. That's why I tried to explain that these bugs in my example do not fly around like real bugs but maintain their position. They only generate new "bugs" or points (if you like that better) in their vicinity.
So this only looks like a swarm of bugs following a light bulb especially if you simulate this scenario with a high number of bugs/points and at a high speed.
1,081 posted on 07/29/2003 7:40:48 PM PDT by BMCDA (If God made man from clay, why is there still clay?)
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To: AndrewC
In regard to insects:

"A fly has, on average 350,000 neurons," he said. "Most of them dedicated to processing sensory information."

Two-thirds to three-quarters of the brain are devoted to the eyes alone. It flies with great dexterity and precision, using only some of the remaining neurons. And yet, packed into this relatively small bunch of brain cells are all the instructions for flight maneuvers. Unlike mammals or birds, the fly doesn't have to learn anything.

"When a fly breaks out of its pupa, it can fly as well as it ever will," he said. Human beings seem to think that being constructed so that people learn complex behaviors is a superior life plan, Dr. Dickinson said. But it was an equally challenging evolutionary problem to make a brain about the size of a poppy seed, in the case of the fruit fly, "that can do everything in the behavioral repertory of a fly."

Source - What Really Happens When Fruit Flies Fly?

1,092 posted on 07/29/2003 8:21:58 PM PDT by Heartlander
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