--John
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980727/27evol.htm
Excerpt:
Science 7/27/98
Touched by nature
Putting evolution to work on the assembly line
BY CHARLES W. PETIT
A new kind of evolution is on the loose, and to hear its practitioners talk,
the prospects are surreal. "Mom and dad jet engine can get together and have
baby jet engines. You find the ones that work better, mate them, and just
keep going," says David Goldberg, a professor of engineering at the
University of Illinois. He is a leader among researchers who, with little
fanfare, have hijacked evolution from the world of the living. Stripped down
and souped up, this new evolution is ready, after 30 years of gestation, to
go to work as an industrial, invention-spewing tool.
Evolution as in Charles Darwin, blind chance, survival of the fittest, and
all that? Yes. This is the same descent-with-modification evolution, right
down to the lingo--sex, parents, offspring, selection, mutations, genes, and
chromosomes--that biologists use to explain the emergence of new species.
Except in this case, the product is not living tissue but complex hardware,
solutions to maddeningly difficult scheduling problems, or novel molecules
that evolve out of computer code, or even DNA.
....