"Without these steppingstones, which are simply not close enough very far beyond the lowest levels of functional complexity, evolution stalls out completely this side of zillions of years."

Sean Pitman steps on "steppingstones".
http://tinyurl.com/39t9o

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MALTHUS' CATASTROPHE

You may have seen this little puzzle earlier in the essay. Using our original rules of point-mutation and concatenation, we can derive this line of verse from Hamlet. (Each line in the puzzle is arbitrary. We are not formally distinguishing each generation.)

----- O or, to, no, not i, bi, be to be or not to be or not to be or not to be ------

Counting every single word and phrase, the puzzle takes up only 50 characters, and yet exhibits intense meaning in the English language.

M = L^3 = 50^3 = 125,000

Malthus, in case you don't remember, wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population" that pointed out that a population will increase geometrically until it exceeds its available resources. We have always assumed that once a word is evolved, it remains in the population. But what if the Pond is limited in size? Perhaps less meaningful words are culled or go extinct. So can we use Malthusian Catastrophe to be even more parsimonious in our population size? In other words, will extinction allow our little game to occur in a much smaller pond? (This time, each line is now a distinct generation along with its population. Some strings go extinct and are not carried forward, including "o" and "or not".)

This time, each line represents a distinct generation. As you can see, we have evolved the phrase "to be or not to be" in a space of less than 20 letters, just enough for the final phrase, and did it in just 6 generations. And this phrase certainly fits the definition of "meaningful"!

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MASS EXTINCTION!!

Now for fun, here is the evolution of the next phrase in Hamlet's immortal soliloquy. We again start with the single-letter word, "O", the last surviving word from our previous population (after a recent lexiconic catastrophe).

The reader can easily see where extinction of unneeded words and phrases could reduce the size of the puzzle. For instance, once we have the word "the", we no longer need "his", "him", "hem", "he". Some words, like "quiz", aren't needed at all. Think of them as evolutionary byways. Even without optimization, the puzzle is not much more than 100 letters.

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OUR P's and Q's

The "q"-word was rather tricky, but I found two ways to evolve it, one from "guest", the other through "qid". But as with biological evolution, once we have a "qu", we can use it all sorts of way.

And this is without considering any of Pitman's Patented Slicing-and-Dicing, but only point- mutations and concatenation. In language-arts, these kinds of word-games can be very helpful. Consider that we might use the word "equid" rather than "horse" just because of the happenstance of word-evolution or mental association. Biological evolution exhibits an analogous process of opportunism.

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A ZILLION ROADS DIVERGED

So at an intersection of roads, there are, let's say, just two possible directions we can go, and each of these roads diverge into another two others, and each of these roads continue to diverge a hundred times over. To explore each and every possibility would mean taking every possible choice, and every possible road, at every single intersection. Counting just one mile of walking between each intersection (and not including the distance we must travel to retrace our steps as we back up to each and every node), we would have to travel 2^100 = 10^30 miles. But how far would we have to walk to reach the end of just one possible journey at the far end of the road system? Just a hundred miles, a hundred choices, and a week's journey.

We may have zillions of choices, but we choose just one. Whether the selection is that of a breeder, a traveler, or of natural selection, the choice is made. Some travelers may choose the low road, others the high road. Some looking for company may choose the well-traveled road, others looking for adventure may choose the lonely road. And some may peer ahead as far as they can, and see which has the greener grass. We make a choice. We discard the rest. And all those zillions of other possibilities are left behind. And to the traveler, this makes all the difference.