 The phenomena of tinkering and contingency in evolution are typically taken to highlight the limitations of engineering approaches in biology (Jacob 1977; Lynch 2007). Interestingly, however, some systems biologists and philosophers emphasize that a non-adaptationist framework can be reached through further cross-fertilization of biology and engineering (Calcott et al. 2015). ESB and synthetic biology can provide a broader perspective on engineering by considering how design often operates through modification of existing systems. For instance, there are interesting similarities between evolvability in biology and a diachronic engineering goal in software engineering, where the aim is to design systems that can be adapted to serve future functional requests, without having to rewrite the code from scratch (Calcott 2014; see also Solé and Valverde 2020).