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Stephen Wolfram on Natural Selection Excerpts from A New Kind of Science, ©2002, Stephen Wolfram, LLC The basic notion that organisms tend to evolve to achieve a maximum fitness has certainly in the past been very useful in providing a general framework for understanding the historical progression of species, and in yielding specific explanations for various fairly simple properties of particular species. But in present-day thinking about biology the notion has tended to be taken to an extreme, so that especially among those not in daily contact with detailed data on biological systems it has come to be assumed that...

mike carter Analysis of Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" Wed Jul 17 2002 In A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, 2002) Stephen Wolfram develops a series of positions upon which he seeks to build a model for investigating reality by means of computer generated pictures instead of traditional mathematics (pp. 1, 111, 724, 742, 793). He opts for this approach because, he argues, computers are in fact “universal systems with fixed underlying rules that … can perform any possible computation” (p. 5) and that means the pictures generated by computers make it possible to represent reality at...

The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering Barry Commoner is senior scientist at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, City University of New York, where he directs the Critical Genetics Project. Readers can obtain a list of references used as sources for this article by sending a request to cbns@cbns.qc.edu. Biology once was regarded as a languid, largely descriptive discipline, a passive science that was content, for much of its history, merely to observe the natural world rather than change it. No longer. Today biology, armed with the power of genetics, has replaced physics as the...