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I'm really grateful to Paul, both for creating "Evolution as Reproduction with Variability, and for inviting our class section to join his today, to watch a demonstration of the model. There were a couple of points in the explication, though, where I got hung up. I'm wondering if others of you were similarly stuck in those same places (or in others), or if you might have explanations that could help me better understand what was being demonstrated.

So here's where I got confused:
* the demonstration began with the explanation that we were looking @ a model of organisms that would reproduce offspring, which were "sort of like them, but not identical." This was my initial--and so deepest--confusion: I thought we were there to see a demonstration of "why change occurs over time," and of what motivates that change. But change was built into the starting conditions of this demonstration.  Where from these initial variations? Where from the "changes" that distinguish parents from offspring?

* The real point of the demonstration seemed to be not "why change occurs," but rather where increasing diversity comes from: i.e., that diverse initial conditions lead to increased diversity. To make this point, Paul repeatedly said that the "space was getting bigger," but this explanation seemed to me to slide from a particular idea (that diversity increases with time: more hair colors, say, or more body types) and its VISUAL representation. But it isn't necessarily the case that more space is needed (or used) in that process of diversification. The idea and its representation were confusingly collapsed.

(Actually, now that I've started in questioning, I'm starting to doubt the claim that diversity always increases --though I'm also remembering, along these lines, the "disappearing blonde gene" hoax, based, evidently, on a misinterpretation of how recessive genes work....)

* I thought Paul ended his talk very effectively, by juxtaposing some excerpts from student papers, all of which showed creation as being motivated by  "desire" or aspiration. He said that, in sharp contrast, the changes in the population in the computer model were not "driven"--and he passed over the suggestion, made by several of you, that the "drive for reproduction" might be relevant here.

So I'd like to understand this distinction better: if we say that evolution has no "driver" (=no "architect," no "motivation," no "plan"), what then is the role of the sexual drive? Freud wrote compellingly of unconscious drives--but in his dismissal of such "drives," was Paul just emphasizing the fact that, in the process of evolution, no conscious intention is @ work? Was he denying the role of any biological imperative?