Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

by Peter Morville

This view was shared by Rodney Brooks who in 1987 argued for an evolutionary approach based on perception and action. It is instructive to reflect on the way in which earth-based biological evolution spent its time. Single-cell entities arose out of the primordial soup roughly 3.5 billion years ago. A billion years passed before photosynthetic plants appeared. After almost another billion and a half years, around 550 million years ago, the first fish and vertebrates arrived, and insects 450 million years ago. Then things started moving fast. Reptiles arrived 370 million years ago, followed by dinosaurs at 330 and mammals at 250 million years ago. The first primates appeared 120 million years ago and the immediate predecessors to the great apes 18 million years ago. Man arrived in roughly his present form 2.5 million years ago. He invented agriculture a mere 19,000 years ago, writing less than 5,000 years ago, and “expert” knowledge only over the last few hundred years. This suggests that problem solving behavior, language, expert knowledge and application, and reason are all pretty simple once the essence of being and reacting are available.[24]