Technological Evolution and Adaptive Organizations

Biological change is largely a story of adaptive evolution. Adapting organisms confront conflicting constraints both in their internal organization and in their interactions with their environments. These conflicting constraints typically imply that finding the “optimal solution” is very difficult, and that many alternative locally optimal compromise solutions exist in the space of possibilities. For some six decades, biologists have pictured such adaptive evolution as a search across a space of genotypes for “fitness peaks” on rugged, multipeaked, mountainous “fitness landscapes.”