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"'You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories
and your ambitions, your sense of personal
identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
and their associated molecules."
-Francis Crick
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"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific
knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one
sentence passed on to the next generations of
creatures, what statement would contain the most
information in the fewest words? I believe it is
the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact or
whatever you wish to call it) that all things are
made of atoms little particles that move around
in perpetual motion, attracting each other when
they are a little distance apart, but repelling
upon being squeezed into one another. In that one
sentence, you will see, there is an enormous
amount of information about the world, if just a
little imagination and thinking are applied"
-Richard P. Feynman
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"For the real amazement, if you wish to be
amazed, is this process. You start out as a
single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm
and egg this divides in two, then four, then
eight and so on, and at a certain stage there
emerges a single cell which has as all its
progeny the human brain. The mere existence of
such a cell should be one of the great
astonishments of the earth. People ought to be
walking around all day, all through their waking
hours calling to each other in endless
wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell."
-Lewis Thomas
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If you can't explain it to a high school student
you probably don't understand it."
-Richard P. Feynman
"If I could explain it to you, it wouldn't have
been worthy of a Nobel Prize."
-Richard P. Feynman
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The best thing you can do for the environment is
kill yourself
-Fred Loucks
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"I say that everything bar nothing, being a
possibility, we are placing our bets right now on
the wrong tables, exploring regions of reality
where our senses are not reliably sensitive, when
there are obvious things needing our attention
right now, where our senses are reliable. Let's
look our for long-term comets and straying
asteroids. Let's go to Mars. Let's do
biochemistry. Let's think about what kinds of
senses people have and how they can use them to
their advantage. Let's not spend our time and
resources thinking about things that are so
little or so large that all they really do for us
is puff us up and make us feel like gods. We are
mammals, and we have not exhausted the annoying
little problems of being mammals. "
-Kary Mullis
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"When you can measure what you are speaking
about, and express it in numbers, you know
something about it but when you cannot measure
it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your
knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind it
may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have
scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage
of science."
-Lord Kelvin
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"Light, strong, cheap...
-Pick two."
-Keith Bontrager
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MechanoEvolution
Bradley Layton Assistant Professor Mechanical
Engineering and Mechanics Drexel
University Philadelphia, PA USA
February April 27, 2007
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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• FEEDING OURSELVES w/ ENERGY AND INFORMATION
• THREE WAYS OUT

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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• - Indiana
• - MIT
• Michigan
• Drexel MechanoEvolution Class 2005, 2006

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SEYMOUR INDIANA, SLIM CALLIS, RICK SCHULEY, GARY
CHRISTOPHER, RICHARD SCHULEY

The word of the day
Why dont you comb your hair
Michigan Institute of Trucking...
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MIT Elzbieta Ettinger (ELIZABETH CHODAKOWSKA, The
T)

Delbrück, M. (1986), Mind From Matter? An Essay
on Evolutionary Epistemology Nobel Laureate-led
course
Elzbieta Ettinger
Head of the Charles 1993
Hunger
On the T Regardless of what you do youll
always have to write...
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University of Michigan Pulling Nerves
smax
3
Fmax

Force (N)
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E
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Frelax
1
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5
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0
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100
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200
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300
time(s)
strained sciatic nerve
unstrained sciatic nerve
Figure 3
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MECHANOEVOLUTION

• Simple weekly take-home quizzes on the upcoming
  weeks lecture will be given and will count for
  50 of your grade.
• A final report summarizing a topic of your
  choice from the syllabus will count for 30 of
  your grade. The length of the paper should be
  between 3,000 and 10,000 words. The paper will be
  graded on the basis of clarity, organization and
  originality. This course is writing intensive and
  you are required to meet with WITS at least twice
  during the term for writing support. If you have
  any questions about the role of writing in
  learning, please see our web page
  (www.drexel.edu/provost/writing) or contact Pol
  Montgomery, witmanager_at_gmail.com. A mid-term
  version of your project is due in the sixth class
  meeting, on May 12th and the final project is due
  June 12th, or earlier if you are graduating. You
  should meet with the writing advisor between the
  fourth and fifth weeks and again between the
  seventh and eighth weeks. Additional critical
  notes about your writing assignment Your writing
  should include at least the following
• You must include some type of mathematical model
  of the artifact, phenomena, trait, or idea you
  are discussing.
• You must have at least ten valid citations from
  either journal literature or textbooks. Web
  references are allowed, but will not be included
  in the list of ten.
• You must extrapolate your discussion into the
  distant past and into the distant future.
• You must include comparisons to biology if your
  paper is primarily technological and comparisons
  to technology if your paper is primarily
  biological.
• A final 10-20 minute oral presentation where you
  present your work will count for 20 of your
  grade.

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MECHANOEVOLUTION
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MECHANOEVOLUTION Spring 2006 Student topics
Evolution of love Evolution of information Evoluti
on of human intelligence The evolution of warfare
and weaponry The evolution of flight Innovations
of the piano Nitrogen and human
interaction Intelligence outside the
brain Evolution of fuel delivery to internal
combustion engines Evolution of
computing Evolutionary aspects of germline
engineering The evolution of sonar navigation The
heart and its replacement
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MECHANOEVOLUTION
TERM PROJECT THE EVOLUTIONOF WEAPONRY Abstract
Evolution is based on natural selection. Nowhere
is natural selection more apparent and dominant
than on a battlefield. Weapons are objects
designed by human beings to overcome their innate
physical weaknesses in the realm of combat with
other species and groups of human beings. Since
the dawn of mankind, humans have been using
weapons to carve out their ascendancy on other
humans and animals. This paper aims at examining
the role played by certain key weapons through
the history of human civilization and how they
proved to be the deciding factor for survival of
certain cultures and civilization in various
cases. In this paper, I aim to quantify and
evaluate the evolution in design conception and
manufacturing process for certain key weapons. I
will try to analyze the ascendancy of various
designs for individual weapons and how one design
dominated and ultimately became the pre-eminent
weapons of their era. Given the huge variety of
weapons developed by man since the Stone Age, I
will confine my study to certain key weapons and
eras. I aim to study the evolution of hand held
weapons such as the bow, the lance, the axe and
the sword etc and how they dictated the way wars
were fought and won. I will also try to analyze
certain platforms on which these weapons were
employed such as the chariot, Armor, heavy
cavalry and the phalanx and so on. The scope of
this paper covers the evolution of weaponry from
the Stone Age to the dawn of the gunpowder era.
The evolution of gunpowder based weapons is not
covered since that would require a separate study
on its own.
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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• FEEDING OURSELVES w/ ENERGY AND INFORMATION
• THREE WAYS OUT

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MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS

• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• EVOLUTION Successful passage of information
  from the past to the future
• SPECIES A discrete unit capable of sharing
  information with the sole purpose of persisting
  into the future (not necessarily in the same
  form, but in an uninterrupted lineage)
• TECHNOLOGY REPLICATION Machine selection is
  driven by human utility
• MACHINES AS PROSTHETICS Machines that improve
  the likelihood of human DNA persistence survive
  as well
• MATERIAL CONTINUITY Biology passes actual
  physical materials (DNA) in an unbroken lineage.
  Machines do not do this yet without human
  intervention.

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OUTLINE

• EVOLUTION
• Successful passage of information from the past
  to the future
• Favors simplicity (virus), but also occasionally
  rewards complexity (human)
• Seems to favor efficiency (high reproduction
  rate / energy throughput ratio) but also rewards
  inefficiency (high casualty cost to protect
  species members)
• Seems to encourage modeling (navigation systems,
  sensory systems, decision systems, alternative
  genetic pathways, Newtonian mechanics) but also
  rewards ignorance
• Becomes increasingly energetically expensive to
  maintain low entropy locally, the higher on the
  information food chain one becomes, making many
  members vulnerable (humans only)

Shrodinger
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BIO VS. TECHNO
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MOOREs LAW of MechanoEvolution
organism complexity
10y parts in a machine
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10x years ago
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MACHINE TYPES
TYPE I low energy, entropy limited, slow
evolution hammer, microscope, telescope,
wheelbarrow, eyeglasses, bicycle, table TYPE II
high energy, entropy spewing, rapid
evolution computer, car, airplane, MRI machine,
air filter, lawnmower, dishwasher, cell phone,
brain implants, PDA TYPE III high energy,
entropy spewing, self replicating artificial
plasmids??, self-reproducing robots, TYPE IV
high energy, entropy dogpile, bio techno
integration Kreyszigs GNR, nanorobots,
Terminator
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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• FEEDING OURSELVES w/ ENERGY AND INFORMATION
• THREE WAYS OUT

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OUTLINE

• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• Richard Feynman (1918-1988) Plenty of Room at
  the Bottom
• Arthur C. Clark (1917-), Futurist, predicts
  space elevator
• Richard Dawkins (1941-) Evolutionary Biologist
• Jared Diamond (1937-) Anthropologist
• Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832)
  Thermodynamacist
• Claude Shannon (1916-2001) Information Theory
• Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) Life Eats
  Chemical Information
• John Avery Information Theory and Biology
• Hubert Yockey Information Theory and Evolution
• Antonella Vannini Syntropy, Info from Future
• Bradley Edwards Space Elevator
• Rusty Schweickart Gravity Tractor
• Ray Kurzweil The Singularity, silicon
  immortality

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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Richard Feynman
The only two engineers who contributed anything
to science were Carnot and Shannon
Quiet, we are observing something holy when he
first saw the images from an early atomic force
microscope
Theres plenty of room at the bottom, 1957
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Arthur C. Clarke
Over thirty Sci-fi novels between 1951 and present
A space elevator 1960s 2001 1964 2010 1982
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Richard Dawkins
Also by Dawkins The Selfish Gene, (1976) The God
Delusion, (2007)
Continuous web between all currently living
organisms. Cousins all are we.
The Ancestors Tale (2004) Richard Dawkins
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Jared Diamond
Also by Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel
(1997) Collapse (2005)
Metabolic budgeting for reproductive organs,
muscles, etc.
The Third Chimpanzee, 1992 Jared Diamond
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Carnot
Maximum mechanical work accomplishable is a
function of the gradient or discrepancy between
two thermal states
kB Boltzmann's constant S entropy W number of
microstates
http//andromeda.rutgers.edu/huskey/images/carnot
_cycle.jpg
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Claude Shannon
what is the total number of states available to a
system?
Information may only be passed from one entity to
another if a sufficient energy gradient exists.
if the energy gradients available to transmit
information are depleted, how do we persist into
the future? My argument is that aw we feed our
machines energy, we are increasing entropy and
noise in Shannons equation
B bandwidth C channels information carrying
capacity N noise S signal
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Erwin Schrödinger
What is Life? is a non-fiction book on science
for the lay reader written by physicist Erwin
Schrödinger (ISBN 0521427088). Francis Crick
cited What is Life? as the best theoretical
description, before the actual discovery of DNA,
of how genetic storage would work. In the book,
Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic
crystal" that contained genetic information in
its configuration of covalent chemical bonds.
This idea both stimulated enthusiasm for
discovering the genetic molecule and could be
seen (in retrospect) as having been a
well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what
biologists should have been looking for during
their search for the genetic material.
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS John Avery
"The phenomenon of life, including its origin and
evolution, against the background of
thermodynamics, has its paradox of resolution in
the information content of the Gibbs free energy
that enters the biosphere from outside sources."
Avery
Information Theory and Biology, 2003
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Hubert Yockey
DNA contains information that is responsible for
maintaining life in its entropically unlikely
state
Hubert Yockey
Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of
LIfe
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Antonella Vannini
all physical and chemical phenomena, which are
determined by causes placed in the past, are
governed by the principle of entropy, while all
those phenomena which are attracted towards
causes which are placed in the future
(attractors), are governed by a principle which
is symmetrical to entropy and which Fantappiè
named syntropy.
Antonella Vannini
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS ???
Why keep a Nobel laureate around? (e.g. MRI
inventor, etc) Who cares about quarks and
quasars? What is the value of human
intelligence, if not a self-fulfilling prophecy
of actual immortality? Machines, information,
and the information stored on machines has
allowed us to live longer than we already might
have. Will this trend continue?
Could it be that what a laureate knows will hold
the key to human immortality in one of the Three
Ways Out? Syntropic information from the future,
aside, could the ability to model and thus
predict the future be a weak form of what Vannini
proposes?
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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• FEEDING OURSELVES w/ ENERGY AND INFORMATION
• THREE WAYS OUT

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics
The entropy of an isolated system not in
equilibrium will tend to increase over time,
approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Rudolf Clausius
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The Big Picture of MechanoEvolution
S
We know from the second law that dS/dt is
positive, but what about the acceleration of
entropy?
nature with life, including humans
nature with life
entropy
nature without life
living systems
Non-life, machines, human prosthetics
living systems, humans included
Life
As we humans attempt to
make ourselves increasingly anomalous
(or entropically unlikely to exist), we do so at
the expense of accelerating the second law by
sending more entropy into the environment than
would happen in a world where we did not exist.
time
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OUTLINE

• BRADLEY LAYTON HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• MECHANOEVOLUTION WHAT IT IS
• MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS
• FEEDING OURSELVES w/ ENERGY AND INFORMATION
• THREE WAYS OUT

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Three Ways out of living at the top of the

• Maintenance of Status Quo
• NIH Info and techno will kill cancer (safest
  bet?)
• BRADLEY EDWARDS Space Elevator (long shot?)
• RUSTY SCHWEICKART Gravity Tractor (long shot?)
• Transcendence of Biology
• RAY KURZWEIL Silicon immortality (difficult to
  predict)
• Spirituality? Prayer will take you to
  immortality You will live in heaven forever.
• Jerry Falwell (longest shot?)
• Pope Benedict (longest shot?)
• Dahli Lamma (long, but more practical?)

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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Bradley Edwards
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Rusty Schweickart
My current primary interest is the subject of
Near Earth Asteroids, or NEAs. Theyre actually
part of a more general group, the NEOs or Near
Earth Objects, which also includes comets. My
initial interest in NEOs was the role that they
played, over geologic time, in defining the
Earths environment and in shaping the evolution
and development of life. The history of
asteroidal and cometary impacts on the Earth, and
indeed all solar system bodies, is most evident
when looking at the pockmarked surface of the
moon. However, it is generally understood that
the cratering evident there is no different from
what it would be on other inner solar system
bodies, but for the mitigating effects of
atmospheres, weather and erosion.
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MECHANOEVOLUTIONISTS Ray Kurzweil
Human transcendence of biology
many technologists speak of what a great time it
is to be alive. I disagree. We are on a bubble
between certain death and possible immortality.
But what will be the quality of this immortality?
Corporeal? Extracorporeal? Digital? -BEL
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In the meantime What do we do as engineers?
syntropic engineering? green rockets? brain-mach
ine interface? personal genome
sequencing? GATTACA future? towards full
machine integration? away from full machine
integration?