Should be obvious
Pre-note: Title is hypocrisy. I'm saying that the following point should have been obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me until today, so I'm bashing myself along with my usual bashees.

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A standard argument for "random" mutations and natural selection is that a designer gets it right the first time. Nature doesn't, so Nature isn't designed.

Annie Dillard put it memorably. When humans want to build a locomotive, they design it, assemble it, and put it on the rails. When Nature wants to build a locomotive, she builds a billion locomotives of various types, sets them all on the rails, and waits for all but one to crash or fail. Hell of a way to run a railroad!

Sounds good, and until today I didn't stop to question it.

WHY NOT? Even within my own miniature supersimple work, I run through HUNDREDS of failures before I get each graphic or software product right. On the animations in current courseware job, I typically form and try about 50 versions of each piece, then about 10 versions of the animation. On 'artsy' stuff like this 1930 neighborhood, each house and terrain went through 80 or 90 versions, and the whole assembly went through 20 versions.

Just for fun, here's the old Evolution cartoon using a few versions of the 'flagship' house in the 1930 Neighborhood scene. From the primordial rectangle to the sophisticated Cape.



Designers of bigger and more serious products can easily run through millions of versions before the final item is fully tested and ready to sell.

It's a simple and OBVIOUS fact, and it's not even secret. Stories about Edison's long series of tries while developing the tungsten filament were part of every science lesson in elementary school.

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So the correct analogy should be: A human invention takes a tremendous number of failures to reach success. Nature does the same. This argues FOR design in Nature, not AGAINST.


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Later thought: Human design involves a lot of amortizing. Reusing components or tooling or assembly setups that were designed earlier. A piece of software generally includes a pile of 'dead code' that is switched off at compile time. Again Nature does the same. Each type of animal takes the universal basics in the Grand Blueprint and selects what it needs. The unneeded parts are either switched off in epigenes or allowed to disappear from permanent genes.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 5:04 PM