Almost as a counterpoint to yesterday’s topic, and in response to Ferdy’s comment, I wanted to point out that while evolution can produce mutations, it can also breed the fittest of the species. The idea is that you want to force evolution to happen quickly but in an environment conducive to improvement and not just compromise.
From the software creation point of view, Coding Horror provided Jeff Atwood’s take on this with a recent post about Boyd’s Law of Iteration. His conclusion: iterate faster. But he first lays out the requirement that a development shop have the support of management and the proper infrastructure in place. That is what I am talking about when I say that only the fittest will survive.