M
oshe Sipper [1] presented a collection of quotations from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species that he thinks are of interest in the context of evolutionary computation. He considers Darwin's theory as a kind of high-level account of principles that can be implemented either in vivo, leading to molecular biology, or in silico, resulting in evolutionary computation. The amazing actuality of Darwin's text is certainly due to the fact that his genius referred correctly to one principle or recipe of nature, namely, to natural selection. Of course, one might argue at the same time that Darwin's view on the mechanism of inheritance was completely off the point and that the incorporation of Gregor Mendel's results was required in order to arrive at an appropriate theory of evolution or at a basis of evolutionary computation. Correct mechanisms of mutation and recombination are, after all, indispensible in both disciplines.
Ted Lumley in his comment "Is Evolutionary Computing Evolving?" [2] brings up an entirely different point of crtiticism. He argues that relativity theory cannot be reconciled with the Darwinian view of evolution because the latter is based on an evaluation of individual fitness in Euclidean space and sequential time and, thus, is said to be in conflict with Einstein's space-time concept. Independence of the individual in its own right, Lumley writes, is an illusion since it is always intimately embedded in an environment or context with which it stands in reciprocal interaction. Accordingly, evolutionary computation is built on a chimera. He goes further and invokes the often-quoted distinction between the Western European and the Native-American cultures, the former addressed as being "Euclidean," or "Cartesian" as I would prefer to say, whereas the latter is built on the holistic imagination of an integrated and inseparable world in which an individual cannot be taken out unambiguously from its context.