Computers Are Not Darwin Machines

Most people think computers are built by intelligent design. How on earth can you say their development follows Darwin's mechanism of "survival of the fittest"? Yet an article at Science Daily announces, "'Survival of the Fittest' Now Applies to Computers: Surprising Similarities Found Between Genetic and Computer Codes." (Emphasis added.) Certain similarities between Linux code and bacterial genomes may obtain, but one thing should be clear: they are not Darwinian.

Sergei Maslov, a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, holds appointments in physics and quantitative biology. His grad student, Tin Yau Pang, assisted with the mathematical model. Their idea was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What were the peer reviewers thinking?

Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" originally referred to natural selection in biological systems, but new research from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University scientists shows that this evolutionary theory also applies to technological systems.

But the essence of Darwinian evolution is aimless, purposeless churning via unguided natural processes, with no design or intelligence. If Linux code behaved that way, woe unto users of Linux!

What the authors found, instead, was irreducible complexity -- marks of intelligent design:

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