WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW (via BookForum:

Evolution 2.0: On the origin of technologies (W. Brian Arthur, 8/19/09, New Scientist)

BARELY four years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler was calling for a theory of evolution for machines. Since then, a few hardy souls have attempted to oblige him, but none has quite hit the mark. Their reasoning, very much à la Darwin, is that any given technology has many designers with different ideas - which produces many variations. Of these variations, some are selected for their superior performance and pass on their small differences to future designs. The steady accumulation of such differences gives rise to novel technologies and the result is evolution.

Sublime.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2009 5:09 PM