This is a biological metaphor that has been stretched too far. Natural selection has produced impressive systems and ecosystems that provide some redundancy, but humans are much better at deliberate effort and fast conscious feedback loops, and as long as humans are writing software the way we do it should play to human strengths.
I remember finding this a very interesting read when it first came out. It's clearly colored Sussman's research for the years since, for example his work with Alexey Radul on "propagators".<p>However, I've never found a way to make it actually work in a real system. The cost of redundancy is high, and you absolutely need a way to pass around the chain of configuration choices with the values. Otherwise, if something goes wrong, or even to understand the values you're getting, you're stuck grubbing through log files (if you're lucky) to find out what happened.<p>I suppose his propagator research is a way to make this easier to do, but it's so specialized that it becomes an all-or-nothing approach, not something you can incrementally develop towards.