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Alife Digest Number 047
ALIFE LIST: Artificial Life Research List Number 47 Sunday, November 4th 1990
ARTIFICIAL LIFE RESEARCH ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST
Maintained by the Indiana University Artificial Life Research Group
Contents:
request for comments : _homo_trans_sapiens
preprint available
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 90 20:04:29 pst
From: ames!claris!apple!well!moritz (Elan Moritz)
Subject: request for comments : _homo_trans_sapiens
TRANS_SAPIENS and TRANS_CULTURE
***
REQUEST FOR COMMENTS
-------------------------------------
In an earlier paper [Memetic Science: I - General
Introduction; Journal of Ideas, Vol. 1, #1, 3-22, 1990] I
postulated the emergence of a descendent of homo sapiens.
This descendent will be primarily differentiated from h.
sapiens by having * substantially greater cognitive
abilities *.
[the relevant section of the paper is included below].
>>>>> I plan to write a more substantive paper on the topic
and would appreciate comments, speculation, arguments for &
against this hypothesis. Relevant comments / arguments will
be addressed in the paper and be properly
acknowledged/referenced <<<<<.
Elan Moritz <<<<
-- text of h. trans sapiens section follows --
We also introduce here the concepts of trans-culture
and Homo trans-sapiens (or simply trans-sapiens). While
being topics of a future paper, trans-culture can be
described as the next step of culture dominated by deep
connections, interactions, and relationships between
objects created by large human/machine teams. A manifest
property of trans-culture is the extreme and transcendent
complexity of interactions and relations between humans and
the cultural objects involved, with the additional property
of being non-accessible to Homo sapiens. Examples of
trans-cultural objects already exist; for example, there is
no individual who (at any given temporal instance) is an
expert in all aspects of medicine, or who is familiar with
all biological species and their relationships, or is an
expert in all aspects of physics, or who is totally
familiar with all aspects of even a single cultural
artifact (e.g. Hubble space telescope, Space Shuttle
design, or the total design of a nuclear power plant). In
fact, we are approaching the point that certain proofs of
mathematical theorems are becoming too long and difficult
for any one individual to keep in conscious awareness. In
a way, these transcendent and extended complexity
relationships are examples of more complicated
'meta-memes', which is one of the reasons it is interesting
to study the evolution of ideas.
Homo trans-sapiens is the [postulated] next step in
evolution of homo sapiens. There is no reason to expect or
require that Homo sapiens will not undergo further
evolution. The bio-historical trend indicates that the
major evolutionary development in Homo is in the
cortico-neural arena (i.e. increasingly more complex
organization of the nervous system and the brain).
Specifically it is the higher level cognitive - Knowledge
Information Processing functions that set H. Sapiens apart.
It is asserted here (and to be discussed in a future paper)
that H. trans-sapiens is a logical consequence of
evolution, and that the milieu and adaptive epigenetic
landscape for H. trans-sapiens is already present in the
form of trans-culture. It is indeed possible that the basic
mutations are in place and trans-sapiens already exists or
will appear in the biologically-near time frame.
[ Please pass to other relevant news groups/ e-lists]
Elan Moritz,
snail mail:
Elan Moritz
The Institute for Memetic Research
PO Box 16327, Panama City, Florida 32406
e mail:
moritz@well.sf.ca.us , [internet]
moritz@well.bitnet [bitnet]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 90 02:58:48 MST
From: Ray Wentian Li <wli@sfi.santafe.edu>
Subject: preprint available
The following preprint is available for distribution:
===================================================================
TITLE: GENERATING NON-TRIVIAL LONG-RANGE CORRELATIONS AND
1/f SPECTRA BY REPLICATION AND MUTATION
AUTHOR: WENTIAN LI, SANTA FE INSTITUTE
ABSTRACT: This paper contains three parts. In the first part,
I review some known results on the relationship between the
correlation function of the sequence and the dynamical system
which generates the sequence. In the second part, two specific
sequence manipulation rules with only replication and mutation
are studied. The first model, a probabilistic Lindenmayer system,
is able to generate sequences with power law decaying correlation
functions, and equivalently, 1/f spectra. The second model contains
segment repeats and mutations, which generates periodic sequences
if the mutation probability is zero, but the periodicity is easily
destroyed by small amount of mutations. In the third part, the mutual
information functions for several human nucleotide sequences are
calculated. The results show that the intron segments of the sequence
typically have longer correlation lengths than the exon segments.
One intron sequence in particular has extremely long correlation
length and a partial 1/f spectrum. The extensions from the single
sequence manipulations with replications and mutations to other more
complicated systems are also briefly discussed.
===================================================================
Basically, I ask the question of how the statistical properties,
especially the correlation function and its symbolic counterpart
mutual information function, of some sequences are related to the
dynamical rule (or sequence manipulation rules, grammars, etc.)
which generates them. Of course, the parameter values will also
be important (sometimes, it can be even more crucial than the rules).
The answer to this question is difficult, but in some simple cases,
there are definite results. For example, the regular languages and Markov
chains will generate sequences with exponentially decaying correlation
functions; context-free Lindenmayer systems generate sequences
with power-law decaying correlation functions. As for the latter,
a particular context-free Lindenmayer system (I call it "expansion-
modification system") leads to the Corr(d) ~ 1/d^beta, (d for distance)
where beta is very close to zero, and the sequences with this type of
correlation function are also called 1/f noise (1/f spectra), because the
power spectrum is P(f)~ 1/f^(1-beta) (f for frequency).
Now, consider the evolution of the nucleotide sequences is
a dynamical process with some fixed dynamical rules (certainly it
cannot be exactly true). Can we infer the statistical properties
of the current nucleotide sequence from the knowledge we know
about the evolution? I don't know the answer, but it is the motivation
for my paper. Before any comparisons being made, one first has to
know what the typical correlation function (or mutual information
function) is like for the current nucleotide sequences. I have
some results included in the paper, but not complete (I plan to
put more results in future publications). It looks like one has
to be careful about which sequence he is talking about: virus
DNA sequences tend to have much stronger period-3 oscillations
in the correlation function than the human sequences; and intron
segments tend to have longer correlation length (defined as the
distance beyond which the correlation function is almost zero) than
the exon segments. The very definition of the correlation function
requires the sequence to be "stationary", which may not be a correct
assumption for nucleotide sequences. So, if I have a long genome
sequence with some intron segments, exon segments and other segments,
by changing the window length, the statistics might lead to different
types of correlation functions.
I will be happy to hear any comments on this idea. And I'm willing
to clarify any details which may not be clearly stated in the abstract.
Send email to me at
wli@sfi.santafe.edu
Wentian Li
Santa Fe Institute
1120 Canyon Road
Santa Fe, NM 87501
------------------------------
End of ALife Digest
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