In 1859 Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The previous year he had been sent an essay by a fellow biologist working in the Indonesian rainforest, Alfred Russel Wallace, entitled, in true Victorian style 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type'. Darwin realised that they had both independently discovered the process of 'mutability' (now called evolution) and arranged for the simultaneous publication of both their findings by the Linnean Society. In his book Darwin wrote "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection".

Whilst both these works relate purely to animal and plant species, their economic and political implications - as well as their theological implications - were immediately obvious to many, as now are their relevance to the digital world. Darwin and Wallace had discovered not merely the process by which living species develop but, by implication, had also discovered the means by which economies, societies, ideas and technologies develop.

Many controversies immediately erupted, but it is primarily the theological controversy that is remembered today. This is odd because of all the controversies it was only the theological one that was resolved beyond reasonable doubt. The fossil record proves that there has been an ongoing process of step by step diversification, variation and advancement of living organisms, beginning with the simplest and smallest ones, that has continued for over 3800 million years. The fact that offspring vary genetically from their parents and that some variations are more advantageous for survival than other variations is not really a matter for dispute. Short of the collapse of the reason in the face of fundamentalist dogma from east or west, this insight will remain a permanent part of our world view.

The controversies that remain with us are the ones concerning the socio-economic implications of the theory. These can be traced back to the first publication of Darwin and Wallace's papers. Whilst they agreed that evolution proceeded by a process of natural variation in the form of individual organisms from the form of their parents, followed by a process of natural selection organisms, they differed somewhat in their interpretation of what traits would be selected.

Darwin's emphasis is implied by the alternative title for his book, 'The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'. The implication is that life is an eternal conflict in which the winners defeat the losers and it is all too easy to read into this the moral message that 'might is right', that the superior species will multiply and subjugate the earth at the expense of the inferior ones. The ideas, coming as they did at the height of the British Empire and of the industrial revolution, appealed both to the advocates of unregulated capitalism and imperialism and to those who believed in the racial superiority of Europeans - despite the fact that Darwin shared few of these prejudices. They gave birth, in England, to the views of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term 'survival of the fittest', and, in the USA, to the more extreme ideology of Social Darwinism.

Wallace, a supporter of the industrialist and social reformer, Robert Owen, who challenged the social harm caused by the unrestrained competition and greed of the factory system, gave more emphasis in his interpretation to the survival value of adaptation to environment and co-operation with other organisms. To Wallace it was the organisms most adapted to their environment and to other species that survived. He describes with particular enthusiasm how the people of Lombok in Indonesia had developed an irrigation system and agroforestry technique so adapted to their environment that it could have lasted for ever. His interpretation was further developed by the biologist and political thinker (and Russian prince), Peter Kropotkin, in his book 'Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution' (1902), which describes, through innumerable examples, how inherited co-operative behaviour has contributed to the evolution of animals and of human society. The book's final sentence, totally contradicting Spencer's view, is "In the practice of mutual aid, which we can trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support - not mutual struggle - has had the leading part".

Spenser's term, 'the survival of the fittest', is a tautology in that it simply means 'the survival of that which survives', it does nothing to define 'fitness' other than implying that it means 'capacity to survive'. Interpreters, depending upon their ideological stance, have interpreted 'fitness' to mean anything from brute strength to intelligence to altruism, and have attempted to derive moral lessons from this.

Natural selection, however, does not have an ideological or moral stance (and, though we can, we should not derive an 'ought' from an 'is'). Most biologists now agree, after a century and a half of field work, that both competition and co-operation are important factors of evolution. For example in many herd species we observe natural selection resulting from the intra-species competition of males for access to females. The strongest win the battle. This has resulted in developments such as the formidable horns of the yak or the antlers of the reindeer. In some species the majority of males die in battles over females. Whilst this competition in the short term benefits the winners, the death toll is harmful to the species as a whole, which risks losing out to a more cooperative species. The cooperative factor of evolution has ensured that in the majority of such species the competition does not involve lethal conflict. The horns of males become a status symbol and a threat that rarely needs to be used or, such as in the case of the male peacock, an entirely non-aggressive status symbol has evolved instead. As the english biologist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out, the future success of an organisms genes depends exclusively upon the survival of direct descendants but upon the survival of relatives who share those same genes - which he called 'kin selection'. Humorously illustrating this point, having done the necessary genetic calculations on the back of an envelope in the pub, Haldane concluded 'I am willing to die for four uncles or eight cousins'.

Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene' developed Haldane's model further, emphasising that if we consider the long-term self-interest of the gene, rather than the organisms that they happen to be in, then a lot of apparently altruistic behaviour can be explained biologically.

Robert Axelrod, in his book 'The Evolution of Cooperation', describes how he used computer simulations to show that a form of cooperation will evolve naturally in competitive systems. Using a sort of academic equivalent of SimWorld, he simulated interactions between organisms that had a range of very diverse behaviour patterns varying from unprovoked aggression through to unconditional non-violence. The strategy that was most conducive to survival was one he called 'tit for tat', in which the most successful organisms were the ones that were normally cooperative but that would only (and always) use force in self-defence. Axelrod's conclusion, complementing those of Haldane and of Dawkins, is that neither pure competition - the survival of the strongest and most aggressive - nor pure unconditional co-operation accurately explain evolution. Instead he sees the emergence of conditional co-operation that relies upon the sanctions provided by the 'tit for tat' policy.

Dawkins and Axelrod's insights re-ignited the controversy about the applicability of concepts derived from evolutionary biology to other kinds of development. The social interpretation of the concept of the selfish gene and the 'tit for tat' strategy is that if we all act in a purely self-interested fashion then society will naturally evolve - a view that echoes the earlier ideas of the Social Darwinists and Adam Smith's concept of the development of the free market. The ideological over-use of such loose analogies was ruthlessly attacked by the philosopher Mary Midgley in her book 'Evolution as a Religion': "To make it look plausible that sociobiology is as epoch-making as it claims.. ..it is necessary to exaggerate the importance of genetic causes by ruling that no genetic variation can ever catch on except by being positively useful, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. ... The imposing neatness of the theory, then, demands that only genetic causes of behaviour should be taken seriously, and it is therefore presented in metaphors which rule out human freedom, presenting people, along with other animals and plants, as machines".

Intriguingly Dawkins also applied the model of the self-interested gene to ideas to the evolution of ideas, habits and language. These he considered to consist of 'memes', basic units of information corresponding to genes, that undergo a process of natural selection, or 'mimetic evolution', similar to the biological process. Memes spread simply because they are capable of surviving, whether or not they help the people who use them. Thus a good scientific idea might survive because it is useful whereas an irrational superstition, such as belief in hell, might survive simply as a result of the fear it creates. The survival of everything from urban myths to nursery rhymes to computer viruses can be explained in accordance with this model - and the relevance to the digital world is obvious.

E.O.Wilson, who spent much of his life studying in the rainforests, whilst retaining Dawkin's model of genetic determinism, interprets the natural selection process from a far more ecological perspective. He points out (in 'The Diversity of Life') that wherever the environment permits, species diverge and co-evolve to create highly diverse ecosystems, pioneer species create niches for secondary and tertiary species and biodiversity multiplies exponentially for the benefit of all.

Wilson's research was reinforced by that of Lynn Margulis, who, in 'The Symbiotic Planet', highlighted the importance of symbiosis in evolution at every level from cells to ecosystems. Every cell in our body contains mitochondria, which were once independent bacteria and which still reproduce in the cell independently from the nucleus. Plant cells also contain these, in addition to chloroplasts, which likewise were once independent cyanobacteria. Thus every single cell in higher life forms is a living example of symbiosis between different organisms for mutual benefit. Lichens actually consist of two species, algae and a fungi. The former creates sugars using sunlight, the latter absorbs minerals from rocks - they have co-evolved to survive in places where neither could live alone.

These ecological explanations of evolution - the co-evolution of genes, the survival value to genes of symbiosis between species, and the survival value to genes of the emergence of stable and diverse ecosystems - do not contradict Dawkins, but attempt to explain the process of evolution from a wider perspective. Whilst Dawkins sought to explain evolution 'from the bottom up' by focussing on the survival of the gene, the ecologists attempt to explain what is happening at the level of complex systems. James Lovelock, a colleague of Margulis, took this process to its ultimate conclusion by observing that the entire planet, as a result of the behaviour and interaction of living organisms, appears to be self-regulating; the Earth's temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and mineral levels in the soil appear to remain uncannily stable as a result of the evolved activity of its inhabitants (other than the recent behaviour of its human inhabitants). This remarkable outcome, which he possibly unwisely called Gaia after the Greek Earth goddess, can ultimately be understood not as a conscious goddess but as the unconscious product of a high level of grassroots co-evolution of species acting to ensure the survival of their own genes.

Evolution in Cyberspace
All these insights, from Darwin to Lovelock, offer us a package of ways of thinking about the evolution of the digital world.

The digital world can be visualised as consisting of a collection of 'species', different kinds of programs, websites and other digital entities, that live and interact in the shared terrain of cyberspace. At first anything introduced into that empty terrain will survive just as any seed that happens to land on a fertile but lifeless volcanic island is likely to grow and multiply. Over time, if they are permitted to do so, these initial entities will be tinkered with repeatedly in many ways and from the few original primitive entities will emerge a diversity of entities - different from the original entity but not necessarily better than it.

Darwin noted this phenomenon when he identified fourteen species of finch scattered across the Galapagos islands. The original pair of finches that made it to the islands must have been free to multiply with minimal competition and on each island some unique feature suitable for the specific location emerged - say a long narrow beak on one island to take advantage of grubs in holes and a short strong beak on another island to crack the local hard seeds. This process is now termed 'adaptive radiation'.

Of course this process relies upon the organisms being mutable, upon diversification being permitted to take place within a range of different environments and upon natural selection being permitted to take its course. This does not necessarily happen in cyberspace. If programs or websites are copyrighted, patented or encrypted then they cannot be repeatedly be altered by thousands of experimenters. Homogenisation and centralisation of control stifles innovation. It is significant that the largest companies involved in the software industry tend to buy up and market the inventions of small innovators rather than make their own inventions. Much of the real innovation in the development of the internet took place prior to the corporate takeover. Variants of this problem can be found in many different arenas. The most important intellectual and cultural breakthroughs made by the ancient Greeks took place when the Greek world was divided into lots of small city states, and it principally took place in the democratic ones such as Athens. One democracy and a diversity of city states was replaced by the empire of Alexander the Great there were virtually no more new ideas in philosophy, politics or the arts. The same problem is recognised in economics - Adam Smith, who saw a free market of small and diverse enterprises as the key to the development of trade and production, also saw the tendency of companies to merge and form vast cartels as the main threat to such development.

Allowing widespread diversification, though, is not enough. If software and websites can be regularly altered in all conceivable ways the result would just be a chaos of mediocre and incompatible products in the absence of a process of natural selection and consequent co-evolution. Evolution depends upon poor products dying out and upon products that work well with other products flourishing. In other words selection through both competition and co-operation is required. In the natural world this process has led to many creative partnerships. Most flowering plants have developed their flowers in order to attract insects to spread their pollen. Many types of insects, especially bees, have evolved to collect pollen and nectar from flowers. This co-evolution, which has taken millions of different forms, has enabled the spread of a vast diversity of both flowering plants and pollinating insects across the planet.

We can see the same process occurring in the digital world. Websites and search engines are co-evolving for their mutual benefit. Search engines are developing ever more refined methods of finding, evaluating and classifying websites. Because there is a range of diverse search engines - robots, spiders, worms, webcrawlers and web ants, niche searchers and mega index searchers - using many different searching, ranking and categorising techniques - users, through their selective use of these features, are imposing a selection process upon their development. Only those engines that find the right sites and that are easy to use will be used repeatedly. Websites, in response to the competition imposed by the various page ranking methods of the search engines, are incorporating more and more refined features, such as keywords and metatags, to ensure that they are identified easily and correctly. The result is an accelerating co-evolution of websites and search engines.

Competition and co-evolution tend only to occur when there is a need for it. On our imaginary volcanic island virtually anything will survive until space to grow runs short and competition for territory, sunlight and water cuts in. At this point both competitive and co-operative strategies for making the most of limited resources start to be a factor of survival. Likewise the volume of data in cyberspace and passing through the internet, which has grown exponentially in recent years, is beginning to hit barriers of carrying capacity. Bandwidth and webspace are now important tradeable commodities and the cost of storing or transmitting a megabyte of data, even though this is low and falling, influences what it stored and transmitted. There is competition to pass data through important channels and to display it in the most viewed locations. In the longer term the most successful competitors are the ones that discover the value of cooperation and symbiosis - as the spontaneous symbiosis between web designers and search engine developers illustrates.

Co-evolution enables the emergence of complex ecosystems that sustain a diversity of mutually adapted species, none of which is 'in charge' of the process. Likewise an emergent order is appearing in the digital world, a complex and mutually beneficial system of interaction of software providers, ISPs, search engines, news outlets, databases and directories, none of which control that world (though some key players do have an unhealthily high degree of influence).

The development of wikipedia articles are a good illustration of evolution through natural selection and co-evolution. The articles are mutable because anyone out of thousands of readers can alter them. They are subject to natural selection because they are evaluated and altered by readers who believe them to be inadequate. They co-evolve because increasingly they are interconnected through hyperlinks to the most closely related articles. What is missing is a clear equivalent of natural competition - ideally users should be able to give entries a star rating or be able to indicate their preference between recent variants of the same article.

The development of the range of Linux software mimics the natural evolution of an ecosystem. A rainforest, primarily through the selection of the genes of individual species that have developed beneficial symbiotic behaviour, has developed as a sustainable whole. Trees obtain the energy to run the ecosystem through photosynthesis; they store the essential chemicals and minerals of the ecosystem in their bodies. Insects live on them and spread their pollen. Birds and animals live on them and distribute their seeds. Fungi and micro-organisms recycle the minerals in dead plants and animals. This has all emerged without central planning. Likewise on my computer I have a word processor that can produce documents that can be sent by any one of a range of email programs and that can be read by other people using different word processors. The documents can be posted on the internet, other people can find them using search engines or through a network of hyperlinks created by thousands of other webmasters. The documents can incorporate spreadsheets produced by other programs and digital images processed by other programs from cameras made by yet another organisation. There is no single designer who planned all of this or a single managing director overseeing its development. The digital world grows and integrates through voluntary and mutually beneficial agreements and protocols. There is no single coordinating committee bringing together all the independent contributors; there is instead a loose network of cooperating and competing committees each looking after different areas. In short it's a digital jungle.

The whole process is a Soviet commissar's nightmare - yet it evolves rapidly and works to the general benefit of its diverse users in ways that are impossible under a centrally planned regime. There is infinitely more creativity and co-evolution in a rainforest than there is in a factory farm.

We probably have yet to see whether the digital equivalent of Gaia is emerging - a worldwide network of grassroots participation and feedback that ensures the long term stability and sustainability of the entire system. The problems of spam, viruses, undesirable websites, corporate megalomania, intrusive state monitoring and so on all potentially threaten the very survival of the system in a desirable form.

It's a jungle out there
A similarly wide range of threats to the system is, of course, found in the natural world - which has its own viruses, diseases, parasites and invasive species as well as the threats of natural disasters and megalomaniac corporations that seek to 'conquer nature', reducing natural diversity to a manageable and monotonous order. Many of these threats, though, have themselves become additional driving forces of evolution. Some of the most advanced innovations in our bodies are the immune systems that have evolved to protect us from disease - our lymphatic system, thymus gland, tonsils, liver, bone marrow, spleen, skin, antibodies and several kinds of white blood cells interact to protect our bodies from a wide range of assaults. Plants have evolved thick bark or protected seeds to protect themselves from forest fires or abundant spines to protect themselves from grazing animals. Whilst these features are not in themselves productive they do prove that systems can protect themselves from a wide range of threats without any need for centralised control.

Similar pressures should lead to the natural selection of the software that is most stable and most resistant to viruses and other assaults, and indeed Linux programs have been widely adopted in part because of this strength. However the continued survival of Outlook Express, for example, suggests that virtual monopoly control of the market will allow a piece of software to survive even if it is susceptible to attack by virtually every form of virus known.

If there is any lesson that developers can learn from evolution - and, as we have seen, deriving lessons from nature is a process fraught with controversy - one would seem to be that evolution requires decentralisation, freedom and diversity and another is that the benefits of such freedom and openness ultimately outweigh the possibilities for abuse that are permitted. If the digital revolution had been in the hands of a single corporation we would probably not have any viruses, spam, dubious websites or unreliable data that plague our digital world today - but we probably would not have that digital world either. Centralised planning replaces a billion brains by a single one, and a single brain is unlikely to achieve in millennia what a participatory system can achieve in months.

Robert Vint

Books on Evolution
The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin. ISBN 019283438X
Natural Selection and Tropical Nature. Alfred Russel Wallace. ISBN 1402181434
Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution. Peter Kropotkin. ISBN 0900384360
The Selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins. ISBN 0199291144
Evolution as a Religion. Mary Midgley. ISBN 0415278333
The Diversity of Life. E.O.Wilson. ISBN 014029161X
The Symbiotic Planet. Lynn Margulis. ISBN 0753807858
Gaia:A New Look at Life on Earth. James Lovelock. ISBN 0192862189
The Evolution of Cooperation. Robert Axelrod. ISBN 0140124950