Take two APIs and call me in the morning: How healthcare research can cure cyber crime

Some ideas work better than others. Take DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Launched by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 response to Sputnik, its job is to create and test concepts that may be useful in thwarting enemies. Along the way, it's helped make happen GPS, weather satellites, PC technology, …

[Doctor Syntax]

"Progress is built on failure as evolution is built on death."

Actually, evolution is built on the survivors. The dead are collateral damage.

Evolution works be throwing enough variants against the wall to see what sticks. To do that there needs to be a lot of variants. Will ARPA-H be able to afford enough?

Also it's worth remembering evolution is quite capable of producing sub-optimal solutions. What evolution produces depends on the survivable options that it took to get to wherever it is now. There are a lot of advantages to walking upright but anyone suffering a bad back should be able to tell the Intelligent Design believers they've got it wrong. Don't follow the evolution model too closely.

And why isn't it HARPA rather then ARPA-H?

[b0llchit]

Indeed. It states:

...evolution and survival of the fittest...

There are no exact measures of "fit" in evolution, other than that it survived just a bit better than the competition and/or was able to procreate better than the competition.

We also see that such an environment can be extremely fragile. Take out some boundary condition and the whole house of cards falls apart. We see that in biology when you pull out the "wrong" strings (however, this behaviour and progression can be seen as evolution as well). This is also very well demonstrated in the silicon world by https://xkcd.com/2347/.

There are many parallels between the biological and the digital, but we should not treat the digital as biological. They are two domains where the digital can learn from the other. And lets keep it that way.

[ShortLegs]

"here are a lot of advantages to walking upright but anyone suffering a bad back should be able to tell the Intelligent Design believers they've got it wrong"

Thats conflating a temporary condition with a design condition. Or words to that effect. Whatever.

If one was born with a bad back, thats a defect, and still not an issue with upright walking.

Anyhoo... comparing natural herd immunity to IT systems, with a view to mamking it unattractive to hack them is also flawed.

In the case of natural herd immunity not every animal is immune. And its only immunity to a specific disease/virus/vector

In the case of IT systems, in the same way there will always be a system vulnerable, either to the issue that the others are not; or there will still be [different] vulernabilities across the whole