"Survival of the fittest" originally referred to natural selection in biological systems, but new research from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University scientists shows that this evolutionary theory also applies to technological systems.
Computational biologist Sergei Maslov, a research staff member in Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), holding appointments with Stony Brook University's Department of Physics and Astronomy and Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, worked with Tin Yau Pang, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook, to compare the frequency with which components "survive" in two complex systems: bacterial genomes and operating systems on Linux computers. Their work, "Universal distribution of component frequencies in biological and technological systems," was published in the April 9 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Maslov, who received his PhD in Physics from Stony Brook in 1996, discussed the discovery on NPR's Marketplace Tech.
Maslov and Pang set out to determine not only why some specialized genes or computer programs are very common while others are fairly rare, but to see how many components in any system are so important that they can't be eliminated.
"If a bacteria genome doesn't have a particular gene, it will be dead on arrival," Maslov said. "How many of those genes are there? The same goes for large software systems. They have multiple components that work together and the systems require just the right components working together to thrive.'"
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