Richard Dawkin's big blunder

[Heywood]

This is good criticism that has me thinking. I want to think about this a little bit before I respond to you.

Sure take your time, it's not like we're going anywhere except to bed maybe

First, I would like to ask you if you can demonstrate cumulative selection without utilizing a target? Has this ever been done?

Second, Do you agree that for any selection criterion, there will exist some set of targets which evolution will home in on?

Third, specifying the precise phenotype is just a lazy way of programming a selection criterion. Suppose the target sentence was "I am". He could write a selection criterion that homed in on this sentence just as well as it homed in on his precisely stated phenotype. For example, His program could favor 4 character sentences(I'm including the space character). His program could favor more vowels than consonants. His program could favor the characters "I", " ", "a", "m". His program could favor sentences where vowels proceed consonants. His program could favor sentences in which the vowels are in reverse alphabetical order....so on and so forth. Instead he wrote a selection criterion that favored one specific sentence because it was easier.