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Codigital's Collaborative Evolution System (CES) harnesses the power of cumulative selection to drive large-scale collaboration. Our patent pending collaborative engine allows thousands of users to collaborate effectively without the need for a moderator.
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Intelligent Design without a Designer The idea of design without a designing mind has always appeared counter-intuitive. This is reflected by the fact that until the 19th Century the existence of sophisticated organisation in nature seemed a compelling argument for a single designing mind that had produced nature. Darwin showed that the existence of design without a designer is not a logical impossibility. The evolutionary model provided an understanding of how cumulative selection could produce extraordinarily complex organisms. It showed how nature developed the structure of living things without any design-like decisions. Instead it relied on an iterative process based on very simple inputs. The Principle of Cumulative Selection In evolution the simple input that drives cumulative selection is survival. If a given organism survives long enough to pass on its genes to the next generation, further iterations of the simple selection process put its genes into renewed competition with other occupants of its environment. The survival of an individual member of a species is not in itself particularly significant. That individual may survive to breed not because it is better adapted to a particular environment but because it happened not to be standing in the way of a falling tree. The iteration of that process of cumulative selection does, however, when continued long enough, filter out redundancies and dead ends. Out of that process comes organisms adapted to specific environments and to the particular problems of survival and reproduction those environments pose. Codigital’s Application of Cumulative Selection In Codigital's collaborative platform, the simple input that drives the process of cumulative selection is a user choosing between two of many versions of the current generation of a design. Any given choice between just two versions, without knowledge of other possible versions, has little in common with a design-like choice. That is what makes the process so effective. The lack of centrally controlled, design-like choices means that each stage of the process has the potential to produce freaks and monsters that no single designer (or organised team of designers) would contemplate. As in evolution, the anomalies will, if ineffective, be filtered out by the selection iterations that follow. Often though, as also in evolution, the process of cumulative selection will develop an anomaly into an unexpected but singularly effective solution to a given problem. Beyond Designers Our existing design tools have been, in some respects, as limited as the pre-Darwinian understanding of the world. Codigital's collaborative evolution, like genetic evolution, uses the process of cumulative selection to create solutions to problems that could never be produced by any single designing intelligence. |
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