Paul Levinson's biological approach to the development of information technology reflects a current social trend to compare machines with natural processes. Recent books such as Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999) all use biological concepts to describe and discuss communication technologies. The notion that there is a relationship between machine processes and evolution is not a new one, however, for this relationship was proposed by computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1948. [End Page 390]