The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High-End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology

Abstract

The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High-End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology JOSEPH O’CONNELL Some scientific claims are accepted as scientific facts while others are forgotten. Likewise, some artifacts and ideas leave recognizable de­ scendents in the history oftechnology while others are short-lived. The development of science and technology, according to this weeding-out process, suggests an evolutionary model in which theories and artifacts survive if they meet certain constraints of their immediate environ­ ments. Real history, of course, has more complexities than a simple model can capture. Still, the evolutionary model has attractive re­ sources for historians because it permits the complicated social, cul­ tural, and political factors influencing scientific and technological change to be considered components of an environment within which theories or devices compete for survival: “[The natural selection method] guides the careful survey of central environments for the generation and selection of ideas—that is, those environments consti­ tuted by the specific problems of the individual scientist and his com­ munity; but it also directs the exploration of intersecting and neigh­ boring niches formed by other kinds of cultural concerns. That is, the model encourages the historian to attend not only to the logic and particular content of scientific theory development but also to its psy­ chology, sociology, economics, and politics.”1 In this article, an evolutionary model for technological change is suggested and is then used to describe several developments in Mr. O’Connell, a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, is a member of the Science Studies Program—an interdisciplinary group combining historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to science. He holds a B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago Program in the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine and has been an audiophile and amateur designer of audio equipment for several years. 'Robert J. Richards, “Natural Selection and Other Models in the Historiography of Science,” in Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences: A Volume in Honor of Donald T. Campbell, ed. M. Brewer and B. Collins (San Francisco, 1981), p. 71.© 1992 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X792/3301-0001$01.00 1 2 Joseph O’Connell high-end audio technology over the last twenty-five years. This area of technology was chosen for its intrinsic fascination quite apart from any historiographic model and because it has many features that display technological evolution in a pure form, very much like the drosophila (fruit fly), whose ten-day life cycle and large chromosomes illustrate biological evolution so elegantly in the laboratory. The evolutionary model of technological change is an extended analogy to biological evolution by natural selection.2 The knowledge, artifacts, and classes of artifacts that evolve in technological history are roughly analogous to the genotypes, phenotypes, and species of biological evolution. Human agency (as an inventor, designer, or corporation) bears the relationship to technological evolution that a plant or animal breeder bears to biological evolution. Like a breeder who hopes to produce successful phenotypes by mating existing genotypes, the technologist constructs artifacts from existing, modi­ fied, or recombined strands of technological knowledge. These arti­ facts then pass from the technologist’s control to an environment that either accepts or rejects them in a process like natural selection. Successful artifacts are themselves sterile but accomplish the equiva­ lent of replication when the technological knowledge associated with them is used to produce similar artifacts. Many of the constraints that would affect artifacts in the natural selection of the marketplace are vicariously duplicated in the selection from technological knowledge performed by the technologist. Tech­ nological evolution is half artificial and half natural—it resembles animal breeding because important parts of it are performed under the local control of one human will, but on a macroscopic scale it resembles natural selection because the ultimate fate of technological artifacts lies outside the control of any one will. Biological and technological evolution both share variation, selec­ tion, and replication, but the analogy extends to some less obvious parallels that are the consequence of these central concepts. Some of the most influential factors in the environment of an evolving...