harles Darwin's two hundredth birthday and one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, is February 12th. Matt Ridley of The Spectator observes the forthcoming occasion in an intriguing piece in which he argues that complexity in other facets of our lives, namely technology, is a function not of human design but rather a sort of Darwinian selection.
Upon reflection, I find Ridley's analogy strained and myself disagreeing with him (hopefully not just because I have delusions of self-importance). Ridley touts Darwin's "philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a 'bottom-up' place." He contends that in the realm of technology, "Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before," making technologies "far more complex than a conscious, deliberate designer ever could."
Who are the masters of each universe?This is all well and good, and admittedly there exists an initially pleasing parallel between the concepts of Darwinian natural selection and the competitive spirit of divided labor in Adam Smith's free market economy. And yet, I see a fundamental difference between the playing fields, if you will, of evolutionary progress designed on surviving in the physical world and technological innovation in a world heretofore nonexistent: who are the masters of each universe?
The beaks of the finches on the Galapagos Islands, for example, adapt to the variability of available food, of types of seeds to be crushed and eaten. Tools we use like pipe wrenches and needle-nosed pliers vary for a similar reason. The finches obviously have no control over weather patterns and other components of their physical environment, but can only respond to the environment's end result of which type of food is most plentiful. They need to adapt to survive.
A few generations ago, the following non-exhaustive list would have made no sense to nobody: DOS, Linux, Unix, VBA, SQL, C++, ADO, even Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. Homo sapiens' survival outlook looked and looks good. With the very basic needs of our survival long having been met and social contracts subsequently entered into, we humans found ourselves with time on our hands. As much as technology is viewed as a necessity today, it is predicated upon the cognizant creation of an environment. From software to hardware, humans had to dream up and create these technologies from thin air. We made these Galapagos islands. With running water secured and pipe wrenches forged to ensure its availability in the future, we then developed needle-nosed pliers to swap out hard drives and video cards from our gaming rigs.
We made these Galapagos islands.Is the distinction of who has control over a physical environment or technological platform even important? I think so, because while competition and adaptation are components shared by evolution and technological innovation, their differing geneses implies different explanatory causes to similar effects. This difference is most obvious in Ridley's piece when he discusses software development: "Software inventors have learnt to recognize the power of trial and error rather than deliberate design. Beginning with ‘genetic algorithms' in the 1980s, they designed programs that would experiment with changes in their sequence till they solved the problem set for them."
I have designed my fair share of optimization models. Attempting to solve a problem via a trial-and-error approach only makes sense when we know we do not know enough about the problem, or environment, that we are dealing with in order to set some parameters. Once a sliver of more information is gleaned, however, parameters are defined. A metaphorical island gradually takes shape; someone had to design its bedrock.
