Evolution as creation

I’m not a biologist. I’m a programmer, so I tend to look for algorithms behind behavior. My goal in this section is to explain human behavior from first principles: to reduce it to a simple, testable pattern. I will use little biological terminology. You could think of this as philosophy built around algorithms.

Usually, creation and evolution are treated as opposite ideas.

Creation sounds like something intentional.

Evolution sounds like blind selection.

Matter As Machine is based on the assumption that everything is execution and therefore suggests another view:

Evolution is creation, but not instant creation.

It is slow construction of the world by simple machines.

Those machines do not need a global plan. They do not need to know what they are building. They only need to follow their rules, combine, fail, survive, and combine again.

That is enough for complexity to grow.

That is enough for life to appear.

That is enough for human civilization to appear.

So the question is not whether the world was created or evolved.

The question is whether evolution itself is the mechanism of creation.

How do humans create? Through trial and error: ideas and competition.

How does evolution create? Through trial and error: mutations and survival — competition.

So what is the principal difference?

Those are just different types of the same global evolution of algorithms, which consists of spontaneous changes and competition. It is just that useful ideas are copied much faster than useful genes.