Axe recognized immediately the role that Dawkins’s own intelligence had played. Not only did Dawkins provide the program with the information that he wanted it to generate (“Me thinks it is like a weasel”), he imbued the computer with a kind of foresight by directing it to compare the variant sequences of letters with the desired target. Axe realized that Dawkins’s program did not simulate natural selection, which by definition is neither guided toward nor given information about a desired outcome generations in the future.
