Darwinian Design: The Memetic Evolution of Design Ideas

Abstract

There seems to have been a recent slight increase in the number of design papers with the word, evolution in their titles. Unfortunately, these papers are either vague about what is meant by this word, or they use the word in a non-Darwinian sense which owes more to Spencers version of progressive evolution than to the process of natural selection. One interesting example is a paper by A. Can Ozcan, who writes: Lets assume that the one we know as Darwin is born in our times and he is very curious not about species but designed objects and artifacts. Instead of looking at birds he is looking at refrigerators, cars, kettles, microphones, bicycles. Our number one question is whether he would come up with similar principles of evolution like selection of the fittest or progression from simplicity to complexity for designed objects.1 My short answer to that question is an emphatic No. ...