Artifacts and natural selection

Before the appearance of human language, the Earth was inhabited by two kinds of objects the creatures of the living world, and the inanimate objects of the physical world such as stones, clouds, rivers, lightning and volcanoes. With language, a third kind of object came into being, and our planet started to be populated by human artifacts such as knives, wheels, clocks, books and windmills. 

Artifacts are inanimate objects, and one could expect that their diffusion in nature is described by equations such as those that apply to stones and clouds, but things turned out to be very different. From a mathematical point of view, it has been discovered that artifacts behave exactly as living organisms. 

From the 1970s onwards, Cesare Marchetti and other system analysts have studied thousands of artifacts, and have discovered that their behaviour is described by the same equations that Lotka and Volterra found for the behaviour of predators and prey. The growth pattern of cars, for example, is a logistic curve. Cars spread in a market exactly as bacteria in a broth or rabbits in a prairie. Cultural novelties diffuse into a society as mutant genes in a population, and markets behave as their ecological niches. But why  

The answer is that artifacts originate in the human mind as mental objects, and afterwards are turned by man into physical objects (this is true even for a poem which must become ink on paper or soundwaves in air). Artifacts have therefore a genotype and a phenotype. The genotype of the pen that I am writing with is the idea that was born in its inventor s mind, and which was replicated countless times in the blueprints of its mass production. The real pen that my hand is holding is an inanimate object because it is a pure phenotype, a phenotype which is physically separated from its genotype, but I could never understand its existence if I didn t keep in mind that this physical object came from a mental object. 

Human artifacts, in short, have a genotype and a phenotype, and this qualifies them as organisms , but they are organisms of a very peculiar breed, because their phenotypes are totally dissociated from their genotypes. They truly are a new form of life, and their appearance 

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