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It’s Raining Algorithms: How Evolution Acquires an Inbuilt Occam’s Razor
In a celebrated passage of The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins writes: “It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining … algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.” This picture can be formalised through an algorithmic reworking of the infinite monkey theorem: replace monkeys at typewriters with monkeys at universal computers. The result is a clear: random mutation does not sample phenotypic space uniformly but instead generates an exponential bias toward simple outcomes describable by short algorithms.
Date:
17 February 2026, 14:30
Venue:
Seminar Rooms 7&8
Speaker:
Prof. Ard Louis (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Department of Biology
Organiser contact email address:
eb@biology.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Tim Barraclough (University of Oxford)
Booking required?:
Not required
Booking email:
eb@biology.ox.ac.uk
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Aisha Campbell
