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Evolving Clocks

I came upon this simulation when Roger Ebert shared it on his blog. The original video, by one cdk007, is a brilliant but simple counter-argument to the classic watchmaker analogy. It states, quite simply, that if watches could evolve, they would - you could smash up a watch, put it in a bag, and in a million years, your bag would be full of working watches.

Not only did this person make the argument, they ran the simulations to prove it, with excellent illustrations and charts. I wrote a comment on Ebert's blog answering a couple of his questions, and one of the answers stated that if you tweaked the parameters, you could get a whole bunch of systems of seconds, hours, and minutes - not just human-centric ones. That, of course, made me want to fiddle with the code myself even more. So I downloaded the code and, finding MediaFire obnoxious, threw it up here on GitHub. I assume that since it is linked to on a public YouTube video on a publically available download, there aren't license restrictions - I have contacted the author to inquire further.

My intention with this repo is first to get the code up and running in GNU Octave, since I don't have access to MatLab, and then to start fiddling with the parameters to generate varying "seconds" as Ebert alluded to in his follow-up questions. But mostly, I wanted to throw this up in a more accessible format than MediaFire.

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Matlab code that runs a simulation of evolving clocks, illustrating a counter-argument to the classic "blind watchmaker" theory.

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