Most Mystifying Micronesian Magic!

The following tale of the Pacific is, believe it or not, absolutely true...

We (my wife and I ) lived for over seven years on the island of Yap (one of the island states of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), some 1,000 kilometer south of Guam, way out in the Western Pacific Ocean).

We had a car, a Suzuki Samurai vintage 1987, which I bought new early 1988, and had shipped from Morgan Hill, California to Yap with the rest of my household stuff back in 1999, when I first moved to Yap.

After giving my wife driving lessons (never do this: bad idea!) over at the abandoned old airport runway, down in Gilman, she wanted to get her own personal driver’s license, and we had to use our own car for the “test drive.” Unfortun­ately, the odometer cable had gone permanently out of service—rusted through by the fresh and clean but highly corrosive salt-saturated Micronesian air—several months earlier, so the Yapese inspector refused to let us use our car for the examination ride (working speedometer a requirement).

So I start scouting for another cable. I went over to one of Yap’s two car repair shops, and inquired as to the time needed to order an odometer cable for a Suzuki Samurai model -87. Hiroshi-san (the Japanese owner, a good friend of ours) informed me that Suzuki only stock parts for 15 years, but we could give it a try... and if they still had the item in stock, it would take from six to ten weeks to have it shipped.

My wife was so disappointed, having looked forward to finally be able to drive around the island, on her own, for quite some time… What to do?

After scouring Yap for abandoned cars, asking around in many villages, from Gilman (down south) to Gagil (up north), I actually got some promising leads! I managed to hack my way through thick jungle vegetation, to find a few Suzuki Samurai wreck locations, all thoroughly jungleized, and none of which had a usable odometer cable to salvage. Fat chance…

So I went back to Hiroshi-san, to try my luck ordering a cable from Japan. As I stand there negotiating with the girl behind the desk, Martin (young Yapese guy, worked for Hiroshi-san as a mechanic) came in, and told me he had overheard my earlier discussion with Hiroshi-san, and that he seemed to recall that he saw something like what I was looking for in a scrap heap behind the hospital, a few years back... Grasping for this rather fragile-sounding straw, I said, “Hey! Let’s go check it out!”

In a flash, we’re off to the nearby Yap hospital, and enter the jungle behind it. We finally locate this huge scrap heap, a veritable chaos of old engine blocks and radiators and axles and wheels and many thoroughly corroded things of unrecognizable shapes and sizes, and several big piles of mixed scrappy old car-related stuff.

I remember thinking to myself, “Finding a working odometer cable here… Yeah, right!”, and listlessly poked around in the miscellaneous heap, when suddenly my eye happened to fall on a suspicious-looking small piece of white plastic, sticking out from under one huge pile of junk...

Pulling it out, I discover to my total amazement what it was that I had found: a brand new odometer cable for Suzuki Samurai model 1987, packed in factory plastic, with protective grease. Condition: brand factory new! I had my broken cable removed and the new installed (took Martin all of ten minutes), and my wife got her Yap State driver’s license the very next day!

The subject 1987 Samurai, seven years later (photo snapped in March 2009)

What I have ever since been asking myself, time and time again, is: How could this have happened? What were the chances???

The moral of the story: Be very careful what you wish for! It may well—and especially if you’re assisted by ancient Yapese “white magic”—come true!

Henry Norman

PS. I have stored some photographic memories from my seven years on Yap in a Picasaweb photo album: Check it out via goo.gl/reOUz!

Analyzing Dawkins' Weasels

weasel n. [Cambridge] A naive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with loser.

— The New Hacker’s Dictionary (Eric S. Raymond)

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker (TBW), makes a few bold claims about the “evolutionary power of cumulative selection,” backed up by two of his own computer programs (“Biomorph” and “Weasels”), of which he writes:

“In our computer models […] we deliberately built into the computer the basic ingredients of cumulative selection” (emphasis added.)

This statement could lead unsuspecting TBW readers to believe that the output from the two programs really shows how “cumulative natural selection” works, which is not true: Dawkins’ Weasels cheats, as it generates several “mutations” in each “generation,” and protects once matched seed character positions from further “mutations”![1] The above TBW quote should then be evaluated in the light of yet another TBW quote:

“I may not always be right, but I care passionately about what is true and I never say anything that I do not believe to be right.” (emphasis added.)

With no access to the source code for Dr. Dawkins’ version of Weasels, I do not know any details about its inner workings. However, by analyzing its documented output (Table 1, courtesy TBW), a lot can be deduced.

Generation	Evolving Phrase (Within Quotes)	Matches
0 (input)[2]	“WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P”	3
1	“WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P”	4 (+1)
10	“MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P”	11 (+7(!))
20	“MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL”	20 (+9(!))
30	“METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL”	24 (+4)
40	“METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL”	27 (+3)
43	“METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”	28 (+1)

Table 1: Dawkins’ Shakespeare phrase “evolving” in 43 generations

Presumably, the program spawns a number of “offspring” from a “parent” seed, then scans these in search of improvements, and if one is found, that particular seed is used to parent the next generation, and so on. Dawkins does not disclose his number of offspring per generation, but judging from his program’s uncanny success—target phrase reached in a mere 43 generations(!)—it has to be a lot more than 10, maybe close to 100.

Table 1 indicates that once a seed position has matched its target position it becomes fixed, no longer “mutating” (in geneticist lingo: the DNA sequence has become highly conserved). No explanation is offered as to why the matching positions should be protected from further tampering. This “immunizing” trick is equivalent to “divine intervention”: using such programming, and claim that it explains cumulative selection, is borderline cheating, at best.

The probability of randomly typing a given 28-character string, using 27 different symbols, in a single-step event is (as Dawkins points out): (27^-1)²⁸ = 8×10^‑41 = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000008. These are slim odds indeed (read: ain’t gonna happen)! What about Dawkins’ flavor of cumulative selection, wherein already matched positions are protected from further tampering? The probability of getting one match is 27^-1 (0.037). Table 1 shows that the output from generation 20 had nine matches, in ten generations! This is precariously close to “single step” selection: The probability for this to happen is (27^-1)⁹ = 1.31×10^-13 = 0.000000000000131 (about once every 7.6 trillion tries)… a rather strong indication[3] that programmer Dawkins employs yet another creative ploy: more than one “mutation” per offspring per generation. Much more! All of them favorable! Cheat, cheat! Weasel!

To my eyes, Dawkins’ generation 40 (Table 1) looks rather like a Freudian Slip!

I hacked my own version of Dawkins’ “cumulative selection” (“Weasels: The Next Generation”), and made it available for download from my box.net online folders (use URL http://tinyurl.com/Weasels-TNG. My version only spawns one offspring per generation, which is why it needs more generations to reach the desired phrase). The zip archive holds the complete C source, the executable, the “Weasels TNG User’s Guide,” and an Excel “DNA toy.”

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[1] Nature does not guarantee that “once mutated DNA bases will never mutate again.” To paraphrase Dawkins: there is nothing to stop a once burgled house from being burgled again in the future (Unweaving the Rainbow, page 110).

[2] There is a typo (a random mutation? The irony!) in my copy of The Blind Watchmaker (1996 reprint paperback edition 2, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc), resulting in the “sequence of 28 letters” only having 27 letters. Analysis of Table 5 data shows that the third letter from the left had been dropped. I randomly selected and inserted a T.

[3] This is about as likely as finding two unrelated people with identical DNA—and DNA evidence is considered trustworthy enough to sentence criminals to severe penal terms.