Aug 21, 2026 · 42 min · 12 segments
On this bingecast archive episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn welcomes Dr. Winston Ewert to the show to discuss Ewert’s chapter in the volume Minding the Brain. In his contribution…
Winston EwertGuestPat FlynnHostJust not to veer too quickly off of topic, but what was your experience like when you were working with computer simulations of evolutionary theory? Tell us a little bit about that, the sort of work you were engaged in or research you were engaged in and What surprised you about that work or research?
Yeah, so I came into it from a perspective of someone who was already on the intelligent design side of things, and therefore I was skeptical of the claims being made about these computer simulations.
And so as someone who was a computer nerd and did programming and that sort of thing, I was well sort of suited to take it apart and look at the details of these things and find, well, they're never quite what they're presented as because they're not really simulations of a naturalistic process.
They're simulations of a very intelligently guided process that has a lot of you know, intelligent agency involved in the setup of the system to make sure it does what they want it to do.
Yeah, that's an interesting point and something that, you know, a lot of people might not fully appreciate.
So when you say that these are, there's a lot of clearly intelligent input into a lot of these simulations and models.
Can you just give us a few examples to help people understand what you mean by that?
One example, there's a very famous example from Richard Dawkins' book, A Blind Watchmaker, where he evolves the phrase, and he thinks it is like a weasel.
And that might be impressive, except for the fact that what he did is just say, well, phrases that are more similar to me think it's like a weasel no matter how dissimilar they are but if they're a little bit more similar to that you know natural selection would favor that and then very quickly converges on me thinks it is like a weasel but you know that required that sort of idea the target phrase to be pre-programmed into that simulation and to define all sense of selection based on similarity to that which very much you know not really what an evolution would do realistically.
But you can look at other cases, like there's a paper I wrote on a Steiner trees and someone had written this simulation and was very loudly proclaiming that it demonstrated the power of evolutionary processes.
But then when I would look through his code, I'd find things like, They had overridden how many points there were in their Steiner tree to weigh from randomness to something that would better fit what they were trying to accomplish, and they would restrict the locations of points and have all these extra rules in there, which served no purpose but to aid the evolutionary process.
Just not to veer too quickly off of topic, but what was your experience like when you were working with computer simulations of evolutionary theory? Tell us a little bit about that, the sort of work you were engaged in or research you were engaged in and What surprised you about that work or research?
Yeah, so I came into it from a perspective of someone who was already on the intelligent design side of things, and therefore I was skeptical of the claims being made about these computer simulations.
And so as someone who was a computer nerd and did programming and that sort of thing, I was well sort of suited to take it apart and look at the details of these things and find, well, they're never quite what they're presented as because they're not really simulations of a naturalistic process.
They're simulations of a very intelligently guided process that has a lot of you know, intelligent agency involved in the setup of the system to make sure it does what they want it to do.
Yeah, that's an interesting point and something that, you know, a lot of people might not fully appreciate.
So when you say that these are, there's a lot of clearly intelligent input into a lot of these simulations and models.
Can you just give us a few examples to help people understand what you mean by that?
One example, there's a very famous example from Richard Dawkins' book, A Blind Watchmaker, where he evolves the phrase, and he thinks it is like a weasel.
And that might be impressive, except for the fact that what he did is just say, well, phrases that are more similar to me think it's like a weasel no matter how dissimilar they are but if they're a little bit more similar to that you know natural selection would favor that and then very quickly converges on me thinks it is like a weasel but you know that required that sort of idea the target phrase to be pre-programmed into that simulation and to define all sense of selection based on similarity to that which very much you know not really what an evolution would do realistically.
But you can look at other cases, like there's a paper I wrote on a Steiner trees and someone had written this simulation and was very loudly proclaiming that it demonstrated the power of evolutionary processes.
But then when I would look through his code, I'd find things like, They had overridden how many points there were in their Steiner tree to weigh from randomness to something that would better fit what they were trying to accomplish, and they would restrict the locations of points and have all these extra rules in there, which served no purpose but to aid the evolutionary process.
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