The essence of generated structures

Generating (complex) structures

(c)2008 Ben Brink 

Software developers commonly reinforce the following principles in software development:

• 1. software is developed using lots of small, incremental steps
• 2. software-generated code helps keep code small and manageable
  
• most any process that does not fit the paradigm of item 1 or 2 is a sign of poor development practices, implying wastefulness or foolhardiness etc.

Solutions in software development that take a holistic approach (consider the problem in context of a greater wholeness of the system) and that suggest significant structural changes are often met with blind skepticism and criticism. Significant innovations are subsequently ignored or overlooked.  Christopher Alexander provides useful argument in support of holistic problem solving in his books "The Nature of Order".

In "book 2: The process of creating life" (page 198), Alexander refers to incremental changes as "gradualism":

"It [gradualism] says 'Yes of course, in the case of a complex structure, we cannot hope to get it right first time around, so we build it, run it, test it, fix it, change it . . . and keep on doing this so that it gets better.'  What has become known as Extreme Programming is a way of doing this for software development, with a very short cycle of evolution and adaption, repeated many times.

..I am in favor of small steps, of adaptation through trial and error, and of what we may call evolutionary adaptation..  [However]

The real essence [of all generated structures] lies in the structure-preserving transformations which move the structure forward through time, and which are primarily responsible for the success of the generating process. The needed transformations are not merely trial-and-error steps, or some neat way of continually checking and making things better...

To assume that the point of generated structures is merely slow, step-by-step evolutionary adaptation, is to make the same mistake that early adherents of Darwinism made in biology -- to assume that small steps alone, modification coupled with selective pressure, would be sufficient to get a genotype to a new state, hence to create entirely new organisms... and so on."

The work needed to progress the evolving organism (or system) becomes much much more difficult when limiting manipulations to the periphery of the system, especially when considered in context of the Principle of least action.  Fundamental, structural changes to existing systems can be necessary to the progress of an evolving system when the evolution of the existing structure has reached its maximum potential.