What Do Software Evolution and Biological Evolution Have in Common?
CHRYSTOPHER L. NEHANIV Adaptive Systems Research Group University of Hertfordshire College Lane Hatfield, Herts AL10 9AB, U.K. C.L.Nehaniv@herts.ac.uk We aim to explore the connections between software evolution and evolutionary computation. Both share obvious common features in Darwin’s characterization of evolution as “descent with modification”, but less obvious analogies and parallels also occur. These include notions such as modularity, sensitivity to changing requirements, issues of context and control of and types of variability that have for the most part been studied independently by workers in software engineering, evolutionary computation, and evolutionary biology. There is growing awareness from academia, industry, and research communities of the importance of evolvability, tentatively defined as, the capacity to vary robustly and adaptively over time or generations in digital and natural systems. A dialogue is beginning to emerge between various workers in areas that migh
