In the The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur explores some fundamental questions about technology, a subject about which we know at once a lot and very little.

For instance, while we have experts who can tell you exactly how every piece of technology in our life works, we still have little understanding of how technology develops and evolves as a whole. The analogy of biological evolution does not work. Engineers do not make longer lasting batteries by randomly varying the composition of existing batteries and letting the market pick a winner, and the invention of accurate mechanical clocks was not the result of a group of clepsydra makers getting stuck in Switzerland, thereby producing isolated timepieces that are incompatible with other specimens outside the Alps.

Indeed, Arthur’s answer to the question of how technology evolves turns conventional wisdom upside down. While we often speak of technology as the practical application of basic scientific research, Arthur’s analysis shows the evolution of technology to be rather independent of basic science. New technologies arise as fresh combinations of primitive technologies (what Arthur calls “combinatorial evolution”), and as new technologies mature, they, in turn, become components for yet more elaborate combinations. And as technology progresses, practitioners at the edge are also constantly capturing new natural phenomena and harnessing them for particular purposes—thereby creating new components to feed into combinatorial evolution. Basic science can provide new phenomena for technologists to capture, but after that, the evolution of technology follows its own course.

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