Would any of you drive a car made by Darwin's ideas?

[Ben Davis]

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I build machines, am involved in design, and testing.
We make intensive effort to eliminate all randomness from our products.

Every machine begins with an idea and a bank of historical engineering knowledge, plus thousands of hours of development.
This is the real world.
Not the land of Academia.

Recently, one of the engineers said that a suggestion from the 6Sigma people was to take one of the bearings we are dealing with- walk it around the yard and put it back in the machine.
To test "Randomness". We all laughed at such idiocy.
Then, I thought- where would such a stupid idea come from?
Where else? From school.
Now, who is up for owning a Darwinmobile?

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I have two main problems with your post:

1. As an engineer, you must surely be aware of the staggering improvements in precision and accuracy offered by 'Lean/Sigma'-style methodologies? The lives saved as a result of improvements in both the automotive and aerospace industries alone demonstrate their value. That's about as real-world as you can get. Using a variety of testing including 'random' unit testing is extremely useful because you can't always predict or anticipate real-world pressures. By using randomness in testing, you can remove it from production and you can't improve the part or the process if you don't identify the variation.

2. Evolutionary models are what have led us to our current levels of engineering expertise: we've tried methods/parts/processes, used the ones that worked/gave us advantage and stopped using the ones that didn't work/didn't offer advantage. Irrespective of whether you use specific algorithms, your entire industry is based on a model of 'natural selection' very similar to the Darwinian model.

I think you need to go back to school.