Essay 6 Artificial Darwinism : The Very Idea ! ∗

The realisation of artificial Darwinian evolution is one conceivable—indeed, more or less obvious— route toward the realisation of a growth of knowledge (or “complexity”) in artificial systems. This paper explores the current state of the art in achieving Artificial Darwinism, and the prospects for further progress. In particular, I reassess the seminal work of von Neumann on evolution in cellular automata (von Neumann 1951; 1966a; 1966b). I also review the Genetic Algorithm (Holland 1975), and the VENUS (Rasmussen et al. 1990) and Tierra (Ray 1992) systems. I attempt to relate this to the work of Varela, and others, on the realisation of autopoiesis in related (discrete, 2-dimensional, homogenous) spaces (Varela et al. 1974; Zeleny 1977; Zelany & Pierre 1976), and I also revisit the Holland α-universes (Holland 1976; McMullin 1992d). I suggest that while both open-ended heredity (von Neumann style “self-reproduction”) and spontaneous autopoiesis have been separately demonstrated in such systems, the combination of the two remains a difficult outstanding problem. I conclude by outlining an avenue for further investigation.