Well-Informed: Dr. Robert Marks and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab

In today's episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin interviews Dr. Robert Marks about his work in evolutionary informatics at Baylor University. Marks explains that evolutionary informatics seeks to emulate evolution on a computer, allowing for new engineering designs to be developed. Unlike Darwinian evolution, this process does not advance gradually, and requires a certain amount of external information to be fed into the computer before the process can begin; in other words, the systems must be designed before the evolution can begin. This contrast fueled Marks' interest in intelligent design, and has led him to critically analyze a number of evolutionary computer programs that claim to prove Darwin's theories.

About Dr. Marks

Dr. Marks is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is also one of the founders of Baylor's Evolutionary Informatics Lab. His research and teaching focuses on computational intelligence, including fuzzy systems and neural networks. Dr. Marks' upcoming Handbook of Fourier Analysis will be released through the Oxford Press. Marks also co-wrote Neural Smithing: Supervised Learning in Feedforward Artificial Neural Networks with Russell Reed. For more information on evolutionary computing and Dr. Marks' work, please visit the Evolutionary Informatics Lab homepage.