Evolution is smarter than we are

"As the biochemist Leslie Orgel famously remarked, ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’, meaning that when an evolutionary process is let loose upon a problem, it will often find solutions that no human designer would have dreamed of. But there is an unhelpful corollary to Orgel’s maxim: if the problem is misstated then evolution is likely to find loopholes few of us could have imagined. In biological evolution, of course, there is no one to misstate the objective. Genes succeed if they are passed down the generations. But with Karl Sims’s virtual evolution, it was Sims who set the criteria for reproductive success and the results were sometimes perverse. There is a revealing moment in the video which displays a creature that evolved to move quickly on land. The creature, a crude slab of a body with two blocks loosely attached, simply rolls around and around in a wide circle, its ‘head’ staying still while its ‘legs’, crossing and uncrossing, mark out the circle’s circumference. The virtual creature looks like one of life’s losers, but it isn’t: it’s a winner, because it is achieving the goal Karl Sims set: move quickly on a flat plane.
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we discovered that the economy is itself an evolutionary environment in which a huge variety of ingenious profit-seeking strategies emerge through a decentralised process of trial and error. As Leslie Orgel’s rule suggests, what emerges is far more brilliant than any single planner could have dreamed up. But as the dark side of Orgel’s rule predicts, if the rules of the economic game are poorly written, economic evolution will find the loopholes. That is why sensible-seeming environmental rules can produce perverse results: rainforest chopped down to produce palm oil; trucks laden with woodchips braving the congestion of central London; the rise and rise of the SUV. Evolution is smarter than we are, and economic evolution tends to outsmart the rules we erect to guide it."
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Trechos retirados do capítulo V do livro "Adapt" de Tim Harford