Darwin Among the Machines by George B. Dyson Read Free Book Online Page A

out on the street and meet up with friends who had suffered through a day at school. I was left with a love of libraries, and a fear of librarians, that has lasted ever since.
    Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College granted me research associate status, with library privileges, to write this book. The Mabel Zoe Wilson Library is a small, comfortable facility, and to its resources I owe most of the citations appearing here. Special thanks go to Frank Haulgren and colleagues at interlibrary loan, who successfully pursued obscure requests. Bob Christensen, who enjoys confronting librarians as avidly as I shy away from them, helped excavate many things. Robert Keller, Marie Eaton, and others at Fairhaven College managed to bend the university’s rules around my absence of credentials. Without such support this book would not exist.
    The engines of evolution are driven by the recombination of genes; human creativity is driven by the recombination of ideas; literature is driven by the recombination of books. This book owes its elements to many others, cited elsewhere, and to two books that deserve special mention here. My father’s Origins of Life 1 and my mother’s Gödel’s Theorems 2 contributed substantially to whatever limited understanding of the foundations of biology and of the foundations of mathematics is represented in this book. Both critiqued the manuscript as it took form, but any remaining errors or misinterpretations are my own.
    In 1982 my sister, Esther Dyson, became editor of the Rosen Electronics Letter , a Wall Street investment newsletter that sensed wider implications as the personal-computer revolution began. Esther observed the new industry, and I observed Esther. All my perspectiveson computational ecology can be traced to the Rosen Electronics Letter (which became RELease 1.0 in 1983). This does not imply that Esther agrees with any of my interpretations of her work.
    Thanks to Esther, I met literary agent John “No Wasted Motion” Brockman in 1984, who, nine years later, with Katinka Matson, helped precipitate this book. William Patrick at Addison-Wesley accepted an ambiguous proposal, and Jeff Robbins had the patience to await a manuscript, followed by the efficiency as editor to produce a book without additional delay. Others, including Danny Hillis, William S. Laughlin, James Noyes, Patrick Ong, and Ann Yow, offered encouragement at different stages along the way. The builders of my boat designs kept me afloat. I owe the last sentence in this book, and more, to David Brower—archdruid, mountaineer, and editor of landmarks from In Wildness . . . to On the Loose .
    My daughter Lauren had just turned five, in 1994, when we watched a videotape describing Thomas Ray’s digital organisms, self-reproducing numbers that had enraptured their creator by evolving new species and new patterns of behavior overnight. Ray was speaking at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where forty years earlier the first experiments at evolving numerical organisms were performed. Ray’s Tierran creatures inhabit a landscape entirely foreign to our own. Their expanding digital universe was first wrested into existence, out of the realm of pure mathematics, by the glow of twenty-six hundred vacuum tubes that flickered briefly at the dawn of digital programming in a low brick building at the foot of Olden Lane. Tom Ray and his portable universe now stood on ancestral ground.
    â€œThis is Tom Ray and his imaginary creatures,” I said, explaining what we were watching partway through the tape. “But Dad,” my daughter corrected, “they’re not imaginary!”
    She’s right.