ABSTRACT
Design is directed evolution. It is the manifest presence and intention of the designer that differentiates technical evolution from evolution in the rest of nature. As a consequence of this difference, evolution in technology can appear to proceed with great rapidity while evolution in nature is in comparison, most often represented as imperceptibly slow. However different these respective processes might at first appear, as I have argued in the foregoing chapter, the processes of natural and technical evolution have a great deal in common. In each circumstance, the entities that are created must adapt to the environmental demands which they encounter while trying to pass on the advantages with which they may have been conferred. What is passed on and how it is passed on remains a topic of extensive investigation in the study of natural evolution. In technology, of course, designers often specifically seek to incorporate improvements that have been shown to be useful, although in an information-overloaded age this is not always feasible. In general though, we see change in technology taking place now on almost a daily basis. In contrast, most individuals rarely see natural ‘evolution’ occurring. Although we may recognize evolution as a logical inference from assembled remnants and remains reflecting vast epochs of development, we do not have the ‘direct’ experience of human evolution happening at first hand. It is the recognition of this vast time scale of change which arguably engendered Darwin’s original insight on evolution in the first place (Hancock, 2007) and it is this fundamentally ‘personal’ time scale of experience that encourages us to separate out technical from natural evolution.
