Darwin Among the Machines is not your usual cutting-edge book about self-organizing systems, parallel processing, and artificial life. Author George Dyson covers those topics, and covers them well, but through the eyes of people who have never heard of chaos theory, the Santa Fe Institute, or the MIT Media Lab.
This book's heroes are great thinkers of history like Leibniz, Hooke, and Darwin - not Charles, but his grandfather Erasmus, who wrote in 1794 that "the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles."
Another typical protagonist is Lewis Fry Richardson, who proposed using 64,000 computers concurrently to predict the weather. Richardson made his proposal in 1917, at a time when a "computer" was a person with a pencil. His 0.0000001-megahertz clock was a human conductor with a baton, and his packet-switched communication system involved passing around slips of paper.
Not advanced enough for you? How about the packet-switched digital communications system, based on optical technology, that spanned Europe in the 18th century? You'll have to read the book to get the details, but I'll give you a hint: it worked at the rate of about two signals per minute.
The book is full of historical anecdotes, and Dyson tells them well. But this is much more than a history book. The author weaves his threads together for a purpose. Using voices of the past and present, he describes a fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship between nature and machines. From vignettes about Olaf Stapledon, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Samuel Butler, a larger story develops in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution are inseparably intertwined. As Dyson explains in the preface, "In the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machine. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines."
Darwin Among the Machines, by George Dyson: US$25. Addison Wesley Longman: +1 (617) 944 3700.
