This is a guest appearance of Erik Tellgren (it is his first appearance on the Panda’s Thumb). Again, lest it can be misinterpreted by inattentive readers (as this happened before), Erik is the sole author of this essay to which I (MP) did not contribute in any way except for posting it as a courtesy to Erik.

Those readers who are familiar with Talk Reason archive may recall that Erik was the author of a 2002 essay wherein he provided a rigorous mathematical rebuttal of Dembski’s so called law of conservation of information (see here ).

The original NFL theorem and rugged fitness landscapes are briefly reviewed and it is pointed out that the fact the assumptions behind the former leads to the latter type of fitness landscape. Furthermore, it is stressed that for these fitness landscapes, the absolute performance of evolution is not prohibitively bad, that high-fitness regions tend to be well-connected, and that the difficulty of finding high-fitness regions does not increase with the size of the search space.

Continue reading Free Noodle Soup on Talk Reason.