Evolution 2.0 Perry Marshall

I haven't heard of Evolution 2.0 or Perry Marshall before but I really should have done. I couldn't find anything on this site either - but that may be because I never can find anything here.Anyway, Perry is a Christian from a yec ultraconservative upbringing but is now a fairly modern one, accepting of old earth and evolution.The video below tells his story and explains his ideas of evolution which I find interesting. It's unnecessarily long winded; what he has to say could be done in 10 minutes but that's the way of these things.He's a scientist/entrepreneur/electronic engineer and decided to examine evolution with an engineering approach and I think has come up with a pretty smart - albeit religious - twist. The twist being that DNA is a code and he says, the only code not made by an intelligence if biologists are to be believed. But he found that that argument just becomes a definitional problem and got nowhere.So he launched a prize fund for the first person to create a self-creating code - which he says DNA is. (Though his sub-text is that it required an intelligence to kick it off). Ultimately the prize is worth $5m.Anyhoo, here it is. Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Thread copied here from the Evolution 2.0 Perry Marshall thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

According to what I’ve read the prize fund has conditions attached which should be sufficient that he never has to pay out.Anyway, that’s not even an unusual Creationist argument. The real answer is more likely in the chemistry of very early (RNA) life.The obvious counter-argument is that where we know the origins It’s because humans developed the codes, and rather obviously the DNA code came about before there were any humans.So really it’s a difficult scientific problem, but creation doesn’t really offer much in the way of an alternative when we consider the big picture.P Z Myers has more to say Pharyngula

Is this getting closer? An AI can now write its own code
-It's about how AI is progressing to the point where it's going to be writing it's own code to improve itself.
-This is the next logical progression
-If current AI, acting within current AI algorithms, is able to identify solutions for problems that humans couldn't think of...
...how much better can the solutions be if the "AI solutions" aren't limited to the AI programmers' "AI algorithms" in the first place?We're almost at the singularity for SkyNet!! Will AI prove that God exists?

Yes, when it announces a 6-sigma level of confidence in its own superiority.

Many years ago, I was told of a sci-fi short story in which the most power computer ever designed was built -- kind of a pre-cursor to Deep Thought. When it became operational, the first question they asked it was "Is there a God?" The answer: "Now there is."

The Final Question if I remember right.

No, it’s not the Asimov story. The Asimov story (The Last Question) ends with the computer saying LET THERE BE LIGHT and recreating the universe,The story you’re looking for is Answer by Fredric Brown.