The Minkowski's challenge

From message 4

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Note: This chapter includes deep details that need a basic knowledge of evolutionary biology and computer programming. If you are not experienced in those fields please skip to the next chapter. Bypassing this chapter will not prevent you from following the storyline.

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I rather suspect the author of this peice hopes you don't, in fact, have such knowledge. Having it allows you to pick up on the factual inaccuracies in the text that follows and the weakness of the analogies he tries to get you to draw.For example,

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“No!” he said nervously as he boxed the chair arm, “Encryption requires a decryptor to decipher the encrypted body and it also needs a part to encrypt the program before it is copied. Each part consists of a handful of bytes. I didn’t put blank places for any of the two. And even if I filled the appropriate sequences with NOPs it will make no difference. It’s too improbable that either of the two would emerge ”just like that’. And even if any of the two would ”miraculously’ exist it would still be useless, in fact it would even be fatal for the file that holds it.”

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“Why?”

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“If the decryptor evolves alone, it will decrypt bytes that are already unencrypted, thus it will corrupt the main body of the program. And if the encryptor evolves alone, it will produce encrypted offspring that lack a decryptor to decipher them. Thus the offspring will be actually corrupted files.”

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“I see . ”

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“Even if I’d put in the whole encryptor and decryptor and just put the XOR key as zero the resulting program will be practically unencrypted and thus be eliminated by the selector, for the byte sequence will still be visible.”

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Is an absolute doozy. Let me explain why:Encryption only requires an encryptor and decryptor if the two processes aren't the same. It's entirely possible to have an encryption algorithm in which the two are the very same function. One such an example is actually refered to in the text: XOR.But even if it were a valid example, it wouldn't count against biological evolution. There are plenty of things that could never evolve: Kevlar armour, for example, or Catapilar Tracks, or silicon chips. These things, I'm pretty sure, can never evolve as naturally occuring elements of biological organisms; guess what: we don't see them in biological organisms. In fact, there's nothing we can observe in biological organisms that there is any credible reason to believe can't evolve.

Do you have any idea how radically irresponsible that would be?Computer programs that self-replicate already exist, going under the name Computer Viruses - writing them is illegal.

I can't tell whether you merely playing Devil's Advocate, or not. It is; they all without exception run in virtual machines.

Quines are not self-replicating. They produce their own source-code, not their own code.

Firstly, an interpretter is a virtual machine.Secondly, the code is not self-replicating because it requires human intervention to reproduce itself.