Adaptive Systems in Designing: New Analogies from Genetics and Developmental Biology

This paper introduces the notion that analogies other than Darwinian evolution may be used as the bases for useful designing processes. Two classes of analogies are described: those drawn from genetics and those drawn from developmental biology. Two extensions to the genetic analogy are described. The first utilises concepts from genetic engineering, which is the human intervention in natural genetics, and concepts from reverse engineering. The second utilises concepts from developmental biology which is concerned with how the organism develops in its environment once its genotype has been fixed.