As with energy conservation or the inexorable increase in entropy, efforts to violate the robustness principle will fail. Especially in biological evolution or in engineering, this means that a system might obtain robustness against common and designed-for uncertainties and yet be hypersensitive to design flaws or rare events. For example, organisms and ecosystems exhibit remarkable robustness to large variations in temperature, moisture, nutrients, and predation, but can be catastrophically sensitive to tiny perturbations, such as a genetic mutation, an exotic species, or a novel virus.
Engineers deliberately design systems to be robust to common uncertainties.
Doyle and Carlson have been exploring the application of their theory to a number of biological and engineering problems with the help of experts in those fields.