The history and science of the artificial

Abstract This is the concluding chapter from a new book, The Evolution of Designs; Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, recently published by Cambridge University Press©. The book reviews the history of analogies made between the design of artefacts and the ‘design’ of organisms, since the beginnings of biology as a scientific subject around 1800. The analogies are shown to be conducive to a functionalist fallacy — the idea that the utilitarian functions of artefacts serve to define their forms in a deterministic way — and conducive to a historicist fallacy — that the ‘evolution’ of artefacts follows some necessary historical sequence of development, which is not under the control of men. The book ends by asking ‘What remains that is useful and true, in biological analogies with design?’