Word Mutagenation! Zachriel's Word Mutation and Evolution Experiment

Word Mutagenation! Zachriel's Word Mutation and Evolution Experiment

A Creationist, Sean Pitman, had suggested an analogy between the evolution of genes and the evolution of words. His contention was that evolving words by simple mutation would be impossible for words more than a few letters in length. This is his basic claim:

"The problem here is that there simply is not enough time this side of zillions of years to get the limited number of phrases to "bump together" enough times to make anything beyond the lowest levels of functional complexity without the input of a higher intelligence or pre-established information system. It just won't happen. Try it and see." ...

This argument is representative of Creationist thinking, and improperly equates random chance with evolution through mutation and selection. This newsgroup post can be found here. ...

Using these simple mutational rules, I derived a big of doggerel in iambic verse, "Beware a war of words ere you err." You can read the entire poem, its derivation, and then click to the entire newsgroup exchange from here.

Of course, the Creationist then moved the goalposts. He claimed I had failed to account for snips, that is, recombinations of pieces between different words, that if I would count all the possible mutations plus all the possible recombinations, that the number would be so big that random chance would not be able to navigate through all the possibilities.

... But no matter. I accepted the challenge anyway. We know that a path exists between the single-letter word "O" and "Beware a war of words ere you err", so it is only a matter of determining how many mutations are required to discover that path. If it is "zillions", then we will cede the argument to our Creationist friend. But in fact, we will demonstrate that it is significantly less than "zillions", indeed, is less than "trillions and trillions".

The results are discussed later in this essay under the title "A Pond of Doggerel".

... In any case, the programs are quite interesting to watch, and clearly demonstrate that our Creationist friend is not only wrong, but completely, absolutely, utterly wrong.