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Technology
“The evolution of technology” is said at two scales, and the word means something different at each. At the scale of artefacts it names descent: every artefact has antecedents, and the question is how much of the Darwinian apparatus the lineage carries. At the scale of civilisation it names, for some authors, the growth of technology as a whole, one system with a history and a direction, while others who framed the same history used other words for it.
Artefacts
George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (1988) took artefacts as the units and built his account on four ideas: diversity, continuity, novelty and selection. Every artefact descends from earlier ones, so that there are no radical breaks in the record, only novelties built on what came before, and the selection among them is made by economic, military, social and cultural choices. Selection on this account is directed by people.
The volume John Ziman edited, Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process (2000), asked how far the analogy holds: whether technological “memes” play the part of genes, in what sense invention is blind, and whether design makes technological change Lamarckian rather than Darwinian. Its contributors answered differently. Joel Mokyr took the technique as his unit, with useful knowledge standing to techniques in a relation “somewhat reminiscent of the relation between the genotype and the phenotype”, and set a limit: “the biological paradigm is too limiting for an explanation of cultural phenomena such as technology: in nature there is no feedback from the manifest entity to the underlying structure.” In technology there is.
W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology (2009) placed the mechanism outside Darwin altogether. “The base mechanism is not Darwinian. Radically novel technologies do not come into existence by the cumulation of small changes in earlier technologies. They spring from combining or integrating earlier technologies”, and he called the result combinatorial evolution. Technologies have ancestors, as in Basalla, but the new arises by combination, not by the variation and selection of small differences.
Technology as a whole
At the larger scale the question is whether the history of technology is shaped by human choice or has a course of its own, and the historians who framed it did not all call that history evolution. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) wrote of phases and revolutions: technics follow the purposes of a culture, in an eotechnic, a paleotechnic and a neotechnic phase, and his later Myth of the Machine (1967–70) described the megamachine, the organisation of people, science and state into a single system of power. The historian Bertrand Gille’s Histoire des techniques (1978) organised the whole history of technics through the technical system, the set of coherences that bind the techniques of an age to one another, with history as the succession of such systems. Jacques Ellul’s La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (1954) does use the word, of “technical evolution” in the past, and argues that modern technique has left behind the slow evolution of traditional techniques “under the pressure of circumstances along with the body social”: it has become autonomous and self-augmenting, subordinating human ends to its own.
Two later authors use the word for the whole and treat it as a system with dynamics of its own. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (2010) described the technium, the whole of technology and its culture, as an extension of biological evolution, a seventh kingdom of life with tendencies of its own, toward complexity, diversity and specialisation, which Kelly read as a direction. The geologist Peter Haff’s “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules” (2014) named the technosphere, the global system of technology, people and institutions, as a component of the Earth system with quasi-autonomous dynamics that the people inside it cannot control, and “a new stage in the geologic evolution of the Earth”. The technosphere also appears in assembly theory, which claims the lineage of complex objects runs from biology into technology without a break; that claim is set out under Assembly theory: extensions.
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · Economic and institutional change · Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characters · Assembly theory · Mumford · Mokyr · Arthur