Evolution and Optimum Seeking

Chapter 1
Introduction
There is scarcely a modern journal, whether of engineering, economics, management,
mathematics, physics or the social sciences, in which the concept optimization is missing
from the subject index. If one abstracts from all specialist points of view, the recurring
problem is to select a better or best (Leibniz, 1710 eventually, heintroduced the term
optimal ) alternative fromamonganumber of possible states of a airs. However, if one
were to follow thehypothesis of Leibniz, as presented in his Theodicee, that our world
is the best of all possible worlds, one could justi ably sink into passive fatalism. There
would be nothing to improve or to optimize.
Biology, especially since Darwin, has replaced the static world picture of Leibniz' time
by a dynamic one, that of the more or less gradual development of the species culminating
in the appearance of man. Paleontology is providing an increasingly complete picture
of organic evolution. So-called missing links repeatedly turn out to be not missing, but
rather hitherto undiscovered stages of this process. Very much older than the recognition
that man is the result (or better, intermediate state) of a meliorization process is
the seldom-questioned assumption that he is a perfect end product, the \pinnacle of creation."
Furthermore, long before man conceived of himself as an active participant in
the development of things, he had unconsciously in uenced this evolution. There can be
no doubt that his ability and e orts to make the environment meet his needs raised him
above other forms of life and have enabled him, despite physical inferiority, to nd,to
hold, and to extend his place in the world{so far at least. As long as mankind has existed
on our planet, spaceship earth, we, together with other species have mutually in uenced
and changed our environment. Has this always been done in the sense of meliorization?
In 1759, the French philosopher Voltaire (1759), dissatis ed with the conditions of his
age, was already taking up arms against Leibniz' philosophical optimism and calling for
conscious e ort to change the state of a airs. In the same way today, whenwe optimize
we nd that we are both the subject and object of the history of development. In the
desire to improve an object, a process, or a system, Wilde and Beightler (1967) see an
expression of the human striving for perfection. Whether such alofty goal can be attained
depends on many conditions.
It is not possible to optimize when there is only one way to carry out a task{then one
has no alternative. If it is not even known whether the problem at hand is soluble, the
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