Evolution

As the world celebrates Charles Darwin\´s 200th anniversary, E&T explains why \´On The Origin of Species\´ is a useful read for engineers, too. In 1859 Charles Darwin explained why all animals and plants look and behave as they do including, by implication, human beings. His book \´On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection\´ is usually thought of as a primary text for biologists, but these days it might be a good idea for engineers to read it, too. Machines \´evolve\´ because the ambitions of their engineers push them towards higher speeds and better energy efficiency, boosting the fortunes of \´good\´ designs and discarding \´poor\´ ones. Humans are both the inventors and the builders of machines, so they are not yet the products of a genuinely independent history. Even so, the time is fast approaching when we will no longer be in the driving seat. Soon, machines will survive or die out according to their own evolutionary fortunes. As identified by Darwin, the big trick with living things is that they can replicate themselves and pass on specific survival characteristics to the next generation. The other factor, however, is that those offspring aren\´t always perfect copies of their parents. They may exhibit minor mutations that affect their ability to survive, for better or for worse. Only the better mutations get passed on through the generations, as the poor ones don\´t get so many chances to breed. As the modern Darwinian champion Richard Dawkins observes so succinctly: "The secrets of evolution are death and time."