Aunger holds that a theory of technological change should focus on memes and artifacts. He holds, like Basalla, that artifacts evolve. However, he claims they evolve through interaction with mental artifacts, or memes. Aunger hypothesizes a process of coevolution between memes and artifacts. He claims that this process of coevolution involves “two lines of inheritance working together, feeding off each other in a positive fashion,” and that it is responsible for the “incredible dynamicism of cultural modification in modern Western societies” (2002, 277). Aunger emphasizes that artifacts do not have a single role in meme-artifact coevolution. Artifacts sometimes function as phenotypes, that are the focus of selective pressures. But they may also function as vehicles or interactors for memes, as signal templates, or even as replicators, as in computer viruses and nanites (self-replicating pieces of nanotechnology). Different relations with memes are established in these different roles of artifacts. In all cases, however, there is coevolution: memes give rise to artifacts, and artifacts may feed back to memes and alter them or generate new ones. Both memes and artifacts are subjected to their own selective pressures.
Aunger sums up his theory of technological change as follows: “New artifact types are created through invention, or random mutations in form. This starts a new evolutionary lineage. Innovations, on the other hand, are modifications of these inventions through the recombination of parts. ... Such single-step recombinations between artifact lineages (“combinatorial chemistry”) can rapidly produce complexity. Over time, an artifact lineage can therefore show evidence of cumulative selection (variation with descent) and manifest an adaptive design with greater and greater power to transform the environment. Simultaneously there is a process of mental evolution in know-how that can be described as Darwinian.” (2002, 299). Aunger holds that the production of artifacts is first simulated in the mind, in which different varieties of artifacts are “tried out” for their competitive advantage. This process of mental trial and error may recur at the level of research and development within a firm, and then again in the marketplace. So it is the interaction of two Darwinian processes, “of descent with modification in the body of knowledge available to a society relevant to the production of some artifact, as well as the embodied modifications in the artifact itself - that must be modeled for a complete understanding of technological evolution.” (2002, 299-300). Aunger notes that precise models of the interaction between memes and artifacts will still have to be developed.
Aunger’s theory incorporates an analogue of most principles of biological evolution, and he therefore conceives of technological change as strongly analogous to biological evolution. Auger adopts principles of variation, inheritance, and differential fitness for memes and artifacts that strongly mirror those in biology. He holds that the relation between memes and artifacts sometimes resembles the genotype-phenotype relation, but claims that memes and artifacts may also have a different relation to each other. When this relation occurs, the principle of genetic reproduction seems to apply. Aunger moreover assumes that the invention of new memes and artifacts may be described as mutation, and that some process of recombination also occurs, when a combination of memes gives rise to new artifacts.
Unlike Basalla’s and Mokyr’s theories, Aunger adheres to the blindness principle: he holds that the basic processes of meme and artifact variation and selection are not properly understood as conscious and goal-driven, even if conscious decisions and goals play a role in them. This is, indeed, a basic tenet of memetics: the evolution of memes, or ideas, is not explained as the result of conscious cognitive processes and actions by human agents, but rather as a process of blind variation and selection of memes in human beings who function as passive hosts to this process. Memetics therefore takes Darwinism significantly farther than Darwin ever did: even the watch found by William Paley turns out to be not the result of conscious design but rather the result of blind variation and selection. Just like biological organisms, memeticists hold, human-made artifacts are the result of processes of evolution by natural selection.
6 Designers and Technological Evolution
What, according to these three evolutionary theories of technology, is the nature of engineering design? I will start with answering this question for Basalla’s and Mokyr’s theories, which, unlike Aunger’s, construe technological change as dependent on the conscious deliberation and foresight of human agents. On their view, then, evolutionary processes are not necessarily blind, and the design of technology is part of an evolutionary process while simultaneously involving foresight by designers. Their view seems to run counter to the blindness principle outlined in section 2. However, as I will now argue, this principle is too strong in its current form even for biological evolution and therefore needs to be modified. Evolutionary processes of variation and selection sometimes do involve foresight and conscious choice.
Natural selection is often contrasted with artificial selection, which is the selection by humans of animal and plant phenotypes, which creates new breeds within a species, and may even yield a species. The dog is a domesticated species upon which artificial selection has been worked for thousands of years, resulting in hundreds of different breeds. Clearly, these breeds are the result of processes of variation and selection that resemble natural selection in every way, except that they involve human foresight and choice working in conjunction with “natural” processes of variation and selection. Yet, does the dependency of the evolution of dogs on human foresight really differentiate it from ordinary, natural evolution?
Closer consideration shows that in natural selection, foresight and choice also frequently play a major role, because natural selection often depends on intentional, forward-looking actions by animals and humans. Animals select their mate, predators select their prey, and animals choose the immediate environment in which they live and the things and animals with which they interact, and parents choose which offspring they give the most food or are most protective of. These choices are generally guided by expectations about the future. They are a large factor in the processes of selection, variation, and reproduction that occur in natural selection.
It may be objected that there still is a major difference between artificial and natural selection: artificial selection is selection with the explicit aim to grow or breed certain species with predefined properties (phenotypic traits), whereas the foresight in natural selection is not similarly aimed at designing the traits of offspring. A rabbit breeder may successfully breed a rabbit with a white body, black head and red eyes, but it would seem that two rabbits in the wild do not mate because they aim to realize offspring with certain phenotypic properties. Rather, they mate because they lust for each other and desire to copulate.40
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It may occur that humans consciously or unconsciously select a certain mate to generate offspring with certain phenotypic properties, but this does not seem to be a major factor in mate selection. Possibly, such considerations also play a role in mate selection by animals.