At 01:38 PM 7/21/98 -0500, John E. Rylander wrote:
>Here's an interesting article from US News & World Report on the use of
>directed evolution in industry. These approaches will be routine in many
>fields soon.
>
>--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.
>
>....
>
>