Why a Versatile Sequencer?
This should be beginning to sound familiar. What other process has lots of serially-coded individuals, the sequence judged by the environment, and some individuals correspondingly more successful at reproducing themselves (albeit with a little shuffling of the code)? Actually, there are now two good examples: 1) DNA strings called genes being shaped up by an environment of prey-predators-pathogens, and 2) amino acid strings called antibodies, shaped up during the immune response by the differential reproduction associated with finding a foreign protein to destroy. Shuffling the code a little seems to be far more important than inducing errors, e.g., the permutations of crossing-over during meiosis is the common source of new variants, not mutations per se. As I have recently argued (Calvin, 1987, 1989), many neural sequencers to select among gives a very interesting property: brain processes can, in effect, simulate the process used by Darwinian evolution. They can shape up new seriall
