Richard Dawkins first published The Selfish Gene back in 1976, and so this year celebrates its 50th year of continuous publication. I first read The Selfish Gene in the early 1980s while developing the very beginnings of softwarephysics. I found the idea that the Gene was the fundamental element of Darwinian theory to be very profound. I also found the idea that I was simply a temporary, disposable human DNA survival machine with a shelf life of less than 100 years to be rather unsettling, too. All this while, the genes in my body, which may be hundreds of millions or even billions of years old, merrily skipped down through the generations, largely unscathed by time. Even today, I have found The Selfish Gene to be the most significant book that I have ever read because it explains so much.
Figure 1 - Since my very first reading, I have found that The Selfish Gene explains nearly all of the natural biological world and also nearly all of the real world of human affairs too.
At the same time, I was working through the early fundamentals of softwarephysics in a desperate attempt to make my life as an IT professional easier. That's when it hit me. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins expounded upon genes and memes as forms of self-replicating Information, and all the implications of what that entailed in the biosphere and in the real world of human affairs. But, at the time, I was simply trying to cope with the daily mayhem of life in IT. That's when I realized that software was also just another form of self-replicating Information, similar to the genes and memes of Richard Dawkins. The software that I was developing and maintaining was also struggling with the same issues of desperately trying to survive in a Universe governed by the second law of thermodynamics and which was largely nonlinear in nature. For more on this, see: The Fundamental Problem of Software. For more about the history of self-replicating Information on our planet, see: A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Understanding the nature of these challenges explained all of my IT battles with developing and maintaining software, but understanding them did not help me to overcome them.
Then, in 1985, I began work on BSDE. BSDE was an early IDE (Integrated Development Environment) at a time when commercial IDEs did not even exist. At the time, I knew that living things were very complex systems that were also very successful at overcoming both the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity, so I wrote BSDE as a tool that took a biological approach to developing and maintaining software. New Applications were grown inside of BSDE in a maternal sense as a growing embryo by turning on and off a series of "genes" that were specific to each new Application. All new embryos were generated by BSDE as a 10,000-line-of-code generic Application. But each new Application had a unique set of "genes", and as these "genes" were turned on and off by a programmer, the new Application slowly differentiated into a unique Application of its own. For more on that, see: Agile vs. Waterfall Programming and the Value of Having a Theoretical Framework.
Figure 2 - Embryos were grown within BSDE in a split-screen mode by transcribing and translating the information stored in the genes in the Control File for the embryo. Each embryo started out very much the same, but then differentiated into a unique application based upon its unique set of genes.
Figure 3 - BSDE appeared as the cover story of the October 1991 issue of the Enterprise Systems Journal
By the way, as I began working on this post celebrating the 50th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, I came across this very short YouTube:
If AI Isn't Conscious... Why are we?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/As2Htwxreo8
Here is the full interview:
Richard Dawkins: AI, Memes, And Why I’m Angry About The Gender Debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFe5bWKFPY&t=0s
In the above interview, Richard Dawkins takes the position of a pure positivist. If Claude is observed to behave exactly as a Conscious Intelligence, then it must be a Conscious Intelligence because that is the only way you can discern a Conscious Intelligence.
Comments are welcome at scj33345@gmail.com.
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/.
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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