Spanish Tortilla

This is one of the tastiest foods around. I commend its recipe to your care.

Spanish tortilla is a pie of with only five ingredients: potato and onions and egg and salt and olive oil. They are layered and fried together, then flipped so it has a gorgious brown crust. It's not an omlette, it's much tastier (and a bit bad for you, because of the oil- but oh, so good). It only takes 45 minutes to 1 hr. to make. I was gonna get home early and surprise d. with it last night, but he was there already and he had fried food for lunch, so I will have to make due with daydreaming about it today and cooking it some night this week.

Refuting "Irreducable Complexity"

Here is a writeup of an AAAS session last month which included software that may refute the Intelligent Design folks' main arguement that Darwinian evolution cannot account for complex biological structures such as the eye.

Prof. Adami discussed his most recent research on the Avida software, which simulates Darwinian evolution in silico. The Avida group has managed to show how complex adaptive traits can evolve using only the Darwinian algorithm via the accumulation of mutations.

...

Adami presented an example of the equality operator, evolved from a series of NAND operations, which required the simultaneous activation of some 20 "genes". He then went on to dissect the history of the evolved operator, showing that it was not active until the last (single gene) mutation, but all the intermediate states were, in fact, functional. Several simpler operators (e.g. AND) were evolved and then lost on the way towards EQU. Surprisingly, the evolutionary train of mutations included several mutations which were downright harmful to the program, severely reducing its fitness. These deleterious mutations survived just long enough to pass on their genes to an offspring which was then mutated in a positive manner.


Ha. Take that, Behe.

[Edit: the lecture is apparently available as an .mp3]