Towards an Engineering Thermodynamic Understanding of Evolution

George Bugliarello argues that engineers should be taught that engineers and engineering practice are natural extension of biological evolution. The implication is that biological evolution both is and always has been an engineering enterprise.

In Part One, I sketch a further elucidate the modern engineering worldview by reviewing seminal contributions by Vincenti, Florman and Simon. Per hypothesis, the technological structures and functions of reality, and how they came to be as they are, can only be properly understood within an engineering worldview. This theme is not new. In Plato’s dialogue, Timaeus, the emerging design of the universe is guided by the vision of the Architekton, the Master Engineer.

In Part Two, I will argue that ‘engineering practice’, as characterized in Part One, is literally thermodynamics, properly understood. Oxford’s Peter Atkins distinguishes two historical accounts, and two corresponding modern formulations, of thermodynamics: the Carnots’ engineering thermodynamics and the Clausius-Boltzmann ‘rational mechanical’ thermodynamics. Engineering thermodynamics is the narrative basis of the participant engineering worldview of Part One.