220
Roadmap to the e-Factory
Cyber Darwinism
Although the debate about whether evolution is a valid theory for the creation
of mankind has been going on for two centuries, the concept of evolution is
gaining ground as a philosophical approach to the design and development
of new products and technologies. The traditional philosophical approach to
product development has been based more or less on the scientific: hypoth-
esize a concept, develop the concept, test the concept, and if it fails, repeat
the process. The evolutionary approach is based loosely on the theory of
natural selection: that only those random changes in a current design will
survive if those changes create a better or more survivable design. Taken to
its extreme, the evolutionary ...