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

Some scientific claims are accepted as scientific facts while others are forgotten. Likewise, some artifacts and ideas leave recognizable descendents in the history of technology 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 environments. Real history, of course, has more complexities than a simple model can capture. Still, the evolutionary model has attractive resources for historians because it permits the complicated social, cultural, 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 constituted by the specific problems of the individual scientist and his community; but it also directs the exploration of intersecting and neighboring 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 psychology, sociology, economics, and politics.' In this article, an evolutionary model for technological change is suggested and is then used to describe several developments in