Game-theory models have shed light on the evolution of things like human cooperation and the deadly relationship of parasites and their hosts.
A particularly powerful type of selection that Darwin emphasized was sexual selection, as when females choose showy mates and male suitors violently combat one another, which can lead to the evolution of things like peacock tails or massive deer antlers.
I've seen the evolution of things, of music, of cinema, of how these things are used," he says, speaking of the digital revolution that has built and destroyed industries.
Petroski, a professor of both engineering and history at Duke and the author of such books as "The Pencil" and "The Evolution of Useful Things," brings an eye for the little things: what kinds of guardrails are best, how roads can be made safer through better signage, which paving materials last longest.
As the engineering historian Henry Petroski suggested in his 1992 book The Evolution of Useful Things, continual refinement is the usual rule in technology.
In fact, almost a quarter of adults believe that a "supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today".
Over the last year, to give you an idea of the riches for the taking, I've spent a penny each on Roth's The Anatomy Lesson and Deception, Renata Adler's Pitch Dark in hardcover, a first-edition copy of Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, and one of Henry Petroski's The Evolution of Useful Things – among others.
By John Updike The New Yorker, October 4, 1999 P. 106 BOOKS lead about "The Book on the Bookshelf" (Knopf; $26) by Henry Petroski... Mentions his earlier "The Pencil" and "The Evolution of Useful Things"... His newest excursion into the commonplace, "The Book on the Bookshelf" (Knopf; $26), arrives at rather thin and overworked terrain.
The light follows and preys upon them, breaking them apart, splintering them into shards or reducing them to shadows as the technology creates its own heedless world, in which the evolution of organic things seems to have only a marginal place.
BOOKS lead about "The Book on the Bookshelf" (Knopf; $26) by Henry Petroski... Mentions his earlier "The Pencil" and "The Evolution of Useful Things"... His newest excursion into the commonplace, "The Book on the Bookshelf" (Knopf; $26), arrives at rather thin and overworked terrain.
He is author of the books The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance and The Evolution of Useful Things.
