It has long been observed that human cultural evolution is in some ways analogous to biological evolution, having reproduction with variation and a form of selection, but the fact that both technology and biology are physical brings them much closer than culture in general. Many have observed that they share universal traits that pervade their long-term trends, yet they seem so different. What is at the root of this? This paper considers a number of properties that would seem essential to any evolutionary system which produces real artefacts – construction, search, selection and various aspects of structure and organisation – and explains briefly how each operate in technological and biological evolution. This provides an initial attempt at a basic unified framework which can then be extended. Such a framework would help progress bio-inspired design, and suggest features to study on the way to meet the grand challenge of Open Ended Evolution.

Issue Section:
General Conference
This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2022
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Issue Section:
General Conference