Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle (39 page)

53
. A minor difference from my previous notions of phenotype and function is that any one circuit, any one wiring pattern, may be able to display more than one (computational) behavior, depending on the input to the Boolean logic function that it encodes. One can view a circuit that explores the circuit library to preserve an old, optimal computation while improving a newer, still suboptimal computation as walking along the circuit network in which both computations are unchanged, while exploring the neighborhood of this network for circuits that improve the new computation.

EPILOGUE: PLATO’S CAVE

1
. See Darwin (1969), 58.

2
. See proposition 168 in Wittgenstein (1983), 99.

3
. See Wigner (1960).

4
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