Natural beings evolution versus object evolution
Posted: January 17th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
An interesting figure that I’ve found in a book by Bruno Jacomy, which depicts two drawings by A.L. Kroeber. They represent the evolution of beings on the left, and man-made artifacts on the right.
Why do I blog this? Working on my notes about the gamepads genealogy projects. More to follow about the use of evolutionary metaphor for artifacts. There is a lot to dig and there’s a considerable amount of problems when using this analogy.
I like this figure very much. I also found it by chance last year in Jacomy’s book as I was writing about the similarities/differences of the evolution of living forms and the evolution of artefacts for this paper:
Kaplan, F. (2009) Integration, incorporation, interface: L’evolution des systèmes techniques, Cahiers de l’Institut de la Methode, 31, p.8-16
on-line version: http://tinyurl.com/ycwaekl
indeed the analogy is problematic.
it is interesting how in many respects the tree on the left looks completely artificial. it is in fact so “2D” that it looks more like a “designed object” than the tree on the right that reminds me of how the vas deferens has evolved to be routed around our ureter instead of going straight from the testes to the penis, or how the laryngeal nerve in giraffe
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[...] of joypads. Given our interest in studying a “lineage” of technical artifacts, I was wary of using the “evolution” metaphor because of the underlying idea of progress that I did not want to [...]