User talk:Brett Thomas

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Modeling Exponential Growth

I have some experience with python and excel, so the programming part of this asst wasn't very time consuming for me. I'm just going to throw out a few random notes:

• The Model I was actually pretty confused by this model. These functions are some variant of Current Pop * constant factor. Seems like a more appropriate general model is Current pop to the power of constant factor. I just realized this a couple minutes ago, I'm sure I'll reconcile the difference before class.
• Slide Without thinking, I copy/pasted Dr. Church's functions into excel as written. Then when I did the coding, I took it to mean linear growth with A2 representing the independent variable and A3 representing the output. This was dumb...and made the python coding like 10X harder too :)
• Practicality When I actually understood what we were doing, I was able to analyze the biological component. In short: I really don't think exponential growth is a very practical model on either a population or evolutionary scale.
• Population It seems that there have to be thousands of feedback loops when analyzing growth in a population. In the rabbit example, the true growth was probably only exponential for a short time before food enforced a negative feedback. On the other hand, if the first rabbits crowded out competitors, would have caused a positive feedback. The more I think about such examples, the more I think that exponential growth is more a corner case than a model.
• Evolution Exponential growth makes even less sense to me when discussing evolutionary progress, because it seems evolution evolution of a species would "conquer" the lowest hanging fruit first. What I mean by this is that increases in brain size that were most effective probably came first, and then brain evolution would become subject to diminishing returns. If brain size is an indicator of progress, this would contradict the hypothesis from Slide 10: one has to be wrong..
• Evolution vs. Technology Since I'm skeptical of the exponential model of evoluton, the analogy to Moore's Law becomes more interesting. Why should evolutionary vs. technological innovation be different? I wish I had the time to give this more thought, and hope we can in class today. One idea is that the pressures are different: transistor technology is measured absolutely, whereas in evolution a relative advantage is probably more important than an absolute advantage. Another is that it is more difficult for evolution to adjust the fundamental building blocks of a species, while Intel can easily switch from silicon to a graphite transistors if they can be abstracted to the same old x86 standards.

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