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Engineering and evolvability

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Abstract

Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can make sense of these universal principles without making any adaptationism claims. Furthermore, evolvability highlights important aspects of engineering that are ignored in the adaptationist debates. I introduce some novel engineering examples that incorporate these key neglected aspects, and use these examples to challenge some commonly cited contrasts between engineering and evolution, and to highlight some novel resemblances that have gone unnoticed.

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Notes

  1. Work on evolutionary search algorithms is largely done in computer science, rather than software engineering. For some discussion on the difference between the two, see Connell (2009).

  2. The notion of “mechanism” has become a hotly debated term recently (Dupré 2013; Woodward 2013). I use the term loosely here to mean a collection of parts that act in concert to reliably produce some effect.

  3. Bill Wimsatt’s work is one exception to this claim. His work on generative entrenchment is meant to span both evolved and engineered systems, and clearly has a connection to how systems change over time.

  4. Much (perhaps all) of what follows may apply to other engineering disciplines. I take it this would count as more evidence of the link, rather than an objection to the core ideas in the paper. I focus on software engineering as it is a particularly powerful example, and one that I have some background in.

  5. For an interesting discussion of just how ubiquitous this is, see http://www.laputan.org/mud/.

  6. Car manufacturing is a better example. I say more about this in the next section.

  7. I sometimes talk of properties rather than principles. Here is the connection: Design principles describe the properties needed to make a system evolvable. But the principles might say more, such as the environmental conditions required for the properties to confer evolvability.

  8. I suspect the change in terminology was made to avoid confusion over the different uses of the term “evolvability”.

  9. For a discussion of the connection between development and the genotype-phenotype map, see Pigliucci (2010).

  10. The fact that neutrality can be realised in many different ways is a positive feature of the theory, as it enables Wagner to apply these ideas across many different levels of organisation.

  11. Programmers might note that this simple example could describe a “function”, rather than a module. True, but I am trying to keep things simple here. Just imagine it is a module with a single function.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has a long history. Early formulations benefited from feedback at the Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach conference, at ISHPSSB, and at the “Progress by Design” conference in Bielefeld. A draft paper by Ian Wills, and a long café discussion with Dan Nicholson prompted me to think more deeply about the connection between engineering and evolved systems. Arnon Levy, Michael Weisberg, Maureen O’Malley, Emily Parke, Kim Sterelny and two anonymous reviewers provided useful comments (and words of encouragement) on later versions. This work was supported by a Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Visiting Fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

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  1. Center for Advanced Modeling, Emergency Medicine Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Brett Calcott

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Calcott, B. Engineering and evolvability. Biol Philos 29, 293–313 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9425-3

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