Darwin the Philosopher

Right before Christmas last Year I was asked by the York Philosophy Society whether they can use one of my photos from Flickr for an article in the Spring issue of their philosophical online magazine Dialectic Online. I gave permission and here it is: the article Darwin the Philosopher in issue no 4 (Spring 2009).

Photo by Martin A. Trefzer, Autumn 2008

Originally, I only knew that the topic of this issue would be Life & Death. It is thus a quite funny coincident that the topic of the article, for which my photo has been used, is about Darwin and natural evolution, since in the research area I am working in these principles are applied to the design of novel, unconventional (basically weird) technical systems.

I know it sounds a bit like Terminator to the above 25s and a bit like Transformers to those below. So far, nobody achieved anything even close to scary though, so don't worry ... yet! In this respect it is interesting to read an article about the principles of Natural Evolution, when approached from a philosophical rather than engineering perspective.

For everyone who has ever wondered how the hell (and for what price) a cell turned into a cat at some point, the article in Dialectic is worth a read. If you want to know more evolution background I suggest to start reading about Charles Darwin and Evolution in the Encyclopedia Galactica.