The word coevolving as the domain name for this blog is based mostly on the idea that business organizations and information technologies continually develop in inter-related ways. From a systems perspective, it’s worth checking the how the term is used more formally. To check on alignment, I obtained a copy of News That Stayed News 1974-1984: Ten Year of Coevolution Quarterly1. In the introduction to the first article of the volume, Stewart Brand wrote:
CoEvolution got its title and its bent partly because I was bit early on by a series of biologists — Ed Ricketts (via John Steinbeck’s Monterey books), Aldous Huxley (in print and in person), Paul Ehrlich, and last and deepest, Gregory Bateson. Assistant Professor Ehrlich supervised my tarantula “research” at Stanford in 1959, when the Stanford Biology Department was still mostly molecular biology and an ecologist was hard to find. (In truth, they’re still hard to find, amid the proliferation of “ecologists.”) [….]
This latest paper of Ehrlich’s* is still one of the best scans of coevolution as idea and as natural history that I’ve seen, and it sounds like Paul talking, that is, like Walter Winchell. How better to start this book than with its founding metaphor, from Issue 1 (Spring 1974) 2
The program is freeware, and is relatively straightforward. I turned off checking for various features that I want to retain (e.g. history in my browsers), and selected the “analyze” button. Less than 10 minutes later, Ccleaner had found 2GB of files to delete. Selecting the “delete” button did the job in a few minutes.
