NASA had a big – and little – problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight. The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.
Design using natural selection is based on a simple but powerful idea with broad applications across the world: When variation in replicable traits exists, and some variants succeed more than do others, those variants will tend to spread to larger and larger percentages of future populations. For instance, early gazelles that happened to be faster were harder for predators to catch, so they were – generation after generation – more likely than slower gazelles to live, reproduce and pass on their capabilities for higher speed.
