  Today at www.genobyte.com I discovered an intriguing idea which is a radical new approach to traditional circuit design called evolvable hardware. Usually if there is a change in a complex circuit it needs to be redesigned, but designers are now working on hardware that reconfigures itself; "this process is guided by a genetic algorithm which operates on a population of circuit chromosomes (bitstreams defining the logical functions and wiring of the circuit)".
It's pretty amazing: a population of competing circuits are run over generations, and each new generation inherits the characteristics of the fitter parents via mutation and recombination of chromosomes. Evolvable hardware can be adaptive at different levels as well (changing requirements, environment, hardware failure, etc). [microphotograph of a human chromosome enlarged 30,000 times ] 
