Continuing on in my look at how looking at the process of Evolution can help in designing an efficient system, then applying it to the world of Internet marketing. Let’s look at control.
The changes in evolution will produce a result and the effects of this result will determine the survival of the particular pattern (or life) that hosted it. Many of these results are failures at any particular point in time depending upon the environment, but given the right circumstances previous failures will flourish. There is no knowledge of this though in the system, if something fails it disappears from the timeline and that is it, no record is kept. Of course the effect that that particular pattern had on its environment may endure, much like the fossils of dinosaurs preserved in shapes within the earth. Or possibly the remains of the instructions lay dormant in the DNA that produced it, never again used and silent, or possibly overwritten by in places by later changes. Evolution carries with it essentially the results of its latest successes and there is no learning ability, it doesn’t appear to have any control over it or any real record detailing its changes.
Of course the paradigm of ‘the documentation is in the source’ comes to mind and certainly something I excused myself with a few times in my programming days but I see now that is not the case at all. Of course if we think of DNA as the source then that can and will create a whole organism with the patterns detailed inside it, so you could think of that as the document. But the documentation is the process by which the DNA is engaged in, what particular part of evolution has enabled the DNA to store the information and what physical and material processes it can accomplish in the environment. The process may be something that can be applied to another kind of object, though maybe in this respect the qualities of the chemicals involved may make that impossible in this universe. However, I would find it an interesting exercise to see if the same kind of information could be stored in another medium. Possibly on a lower quantum level or indeed based on an entirely different set of physical compounds.
So without looking too deeply at the consequences of evolution we can easily see the processes involved could possibly be a quality assurance nightmare – there would be no quality standards, no management at all. Isn’t it wonderful that our most highly regarded methods for handling large scale complex projects are completely thrown out by this more efficient process?