NASA had a big – and little – problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight. The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.Design using natural selection is based on a simple but powerful idea with broad applications across the world: When variation in replicable traits exists, and some variants succeed more than do others, those variants will tend to spread to larger and larger percentages of future populations. For instance, early gazelles that happened to be faster were harder for predators to catch, so they were – generation after generation – more likely than slower gazelles to live, reproduce and pass on their capabilities for higher speed.The X-band antenna for a group of satellites was designed by a computer program using the principles of natural selection to refine an idea. NASA via Wikimedia CommonsThe NASA team adapted that idea to work inside a computer. They first created two very rough “parent” programs for designing the antenna. They then bred them together, creating digital “offspring” that shared varying halves of each parent, mimicking sexual recombination. To mimic mutation, some coding elements were randomly switched from 0s to 1s, and vice versa. The better-performing offspring programs were kept to become the parents of the next generation, while the rest were discarded.AdvertisementAdvertisementRepeated over many cycles, this process quickly refined the programs that produced antenna designs until a design outperformed a human-designed version – with stronger signal, greater range and lower energy use – and took less time to develop. It was built, was launched into space in 2006, and performed admirably for the planned 90-day duration of the mission.To me, as a professor of both law and biology, that success points to a broader truth: When people harness the logic of natural selection, they can often find efficient and effective ways to solve complex problems. As I explore in my book, “Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic – And Putting It to Use,” natural selection is the most relentless efficiency-seeking force in the history of life.Deepening understandingIgnoring the power of natural selection can mean missing opportunities – or making things worse.For example, consider fishing: As global demand for fish has grown, industrial fishing has become highly efficient at removing all the individuals above a certain size. Anything small enough to fit through the holes in a net survives; anything larger dies. …
