"It’s a common nightmare for programmers to come in late to a project or organization and then have to make sense of a complex “spaghetti mess” of code created over the previous 10 years — a technical debt that takes huge resources in time and money to clean up. Ten years of technical debt is an all-too common headache: Decades of debt were at the root of the Y2K COBOL nightmare. MySpace struggled famously for years with a crippling tower of technical debt. And today, both fast-growing startups and long-standing companies have to deal with legacy code on an ongoing basis in their engineering organizations and beyond.

But none of this compares to the billions of years of “technical debt” in biology. Over the last few billion years, evolution has been creating its own version of an MVP...

"It’s a common nightmare for programmers to come in late to a project or organization and then have to make sense of a complex “spaghetti mess” of code created over the previous 10 years — a technical debt that takes huge resources in time and money to clean up. Ten years of technical debt is an all-too common headache: Decades of debt were at the root of the Y2K COBOL nightmare. MySpace struggled famously for years with a crippling tower of technical debt. And today, both fast-growing startups and long-standing companies have to deal with legacy code on an ongoing basis in their engineering organizations and beyond.

But none of this compares to the billions of years of “technical debt” in biology. Over the last few billion years, evolution has been creating its own version of an MVP — a minimal viable product that’s shipped year after year, and works in practice, but that also never gets refactored. Somehow, it all works, because biology — at all scales, from molecular to nano to macro — takes advantage of some antifragility, the property where “the resilient resists shocks and stays the same [but] the antifragile gets better”; in spite of its complexity, it just works...