Recombination, rationality, reductionism and romantic reactions: culture, computers, and the genetic algorithm

The genetic algorithm (GA) is a computational procedure that 'evolves' solutions to optimization problems by generating populations of possible solutions, and then by treating these solutions metaphorically as individuals that can 'mate' and 'compete' to 'survive' and 'reproduce'. In this paper, I explore how culturally specific notions of evolution, population, reproduction, sex/gender, and kinship inflect the ways GAs are assembled and understood. Combining the results of fieldwork among GA workers with analysis of GA texts, I contend that the picture of 'nature' embedded in GAs is resonant with the values of secularized Judeo-Christian white middle-class US-American and European heterosexual culture. I also maintain that GA formulations are accented by languages inherited from sociobiology. I argue that examining GAs can help us track how dominant meanings of 'nature' are being stabilized and refigured in an age in which exchanges of metaphor between biology and computer science are increasingly common.