Evolutionary Design Quotes

The brain was designed by evolution, so each part of it is optimized for what it does, and it's incredibly, incredibly complex.

Humans were built to look back; that's why we have that swivel joint in our necks

My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

The leg system of the beach animals works because of a combination of certain lengths of tubes. Because of the proportion of lengths, the animals walk smoothly. You could say that this range of numbers is their genetic code.

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

It's hard to reach [the age of] 100. We're not programmed for longevity. We are programmed for something called procreative success.

When you do men's wear, it's less about thinking outside the box than about pushing the walls of the box outward. Men want to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

Code wants to be simple... I had to give up the idea that I had the perfect vision of the system to which the system had to conform. Instead, I had to accept that I was only the vehicle for the system expressing its own desire for simplicity. My vision could shape initial direction, and my attention to the desires of the code could affect how quickly and how well the system found its desired shape, but the system is riding me much more than I am riding the system.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again.

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce.

Since an early age, I've been intrigued by the idea of design evolution.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive.... But let’s take that one step forward... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present.

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.

… biologists are now going to be directing evolution.