[UndauntedR]

Ah man, you started out so strong and got me all excited.

Evolutionary algorithms are surprisingly strong... if made correctly. I have alot of experience with them. Of course they've made new things. They've redesigned computer chips by manipulating everything from the layout to the number, type, and sequence of logic gates. I've used them in simplier hypercubic minterm applications as well as condensed matter optimizations. I even worked with a guy who wanted to apply them to make new quantum computing algorithms.

I'm well aware of the problems stochastic algorithms have with local minima in the fitness landscape of the search space. I have two problems with your interpretation:

(1) The search space doesn't have to be bounded. In many applications the actual search space is so buried in abstract mathematics (A fun little section called Matroid Theory) that its unreasonable to describe changes as simply changing parameters within a space.

(1) As many have said, "New" or "New genetic information" is subjective and, as far as I can tell from the rather ambiguous and ever-changing definitions put forward by Creationists, is environment dependent.

Think of the fitness landscape (environment/time dependent) of the genetic search space (which potentially has infinite dimension, but in practice only has a couple of billion dimensions - 750B base pairs in an amoeba is the highest found). First of all, note that all known life is contained (approximately) in this search space. All evolution is doing is changing parameters... there's no "information" involved.

and then you did the turn to "But the results are impossible to construct randomly even though we're talking about a stochastic process (very different)." which was disappointing.

[FreedomProtector]

"are surprisingly strong... if made correctly"

if made correctly...if designed correctly...that was the point.

"The search space doesn't have to be bounded."

That is True.


"First of all, note that all known life is contained (approximately) in this search space. All evolution is doing is changing parameters... there's no "information" involved."

Of coarse DNA is not an example of information theory. There is no information involved. (Pardon the sarcasm)