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Spaghetti Towers | Eukaryote Writes Blog

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Basically all of biology works like this. Absolutely all of evolution is made by throwing spaghetti against walls and seeing what sticks.

Here’s a pattern I’d like to be able to talk about. It might be known under a certain name somewhere, but if it is, I don’t know it. I call it a Spaghetti Tower. It shows up in large complex systems that are built haphazardly. Someone or something builds the first Part A. Later, someone wants to put a second Part B on top of Part A, either out of convenience (a common function, just somewhere to put it) or as a refinement to Part A. Now, suppose you want to tweak Part A. If you do that, you might break Part B, since it interacts with bits of Part A. So you might instead build

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