This year I am starting a new blog series here in “BioImplement” with examples of human design and how they inform us, by analogy, about the origin of complexity by evolution. I will also plug our new Mechanobiology content resource (http://manual.blueprint.org) to be released on Jan 15th at www.mechanobiology.info . Today’s posting is a preview of what you can expect to be reading here about my thoughts on human design and evolution in the coming weeks and months.
As a mid-career scientist I spend
my time teaching, building software, and researching topics on molecular
assembly and evolution. My world of software gets more complex each year. I
struggle to keep up with the latest methods, as does everyone, but I know that software grows in complexity one line of code at a time. So while I chase
how complexity emerges in biology and software, I have a fascination
with complex mechanical things created by the human design process. I will be posting articles and
pictures here showing some of my collection of examples of human design at
work. I hope to capture your interest with some better-known examples like the
early stages of the Eiffel tower, and the earliest Harley-Davidson motorcycle which is still a functioning bicycle in every respect.
But
I have many other strange examples you will not find on Wikipedia, including the
first electronic keyboard, and a wealth of information from glass bottles and
the early glass industry. Some of these examples pose
contradictions about tools that seem to be essential but missing. For instance,
it is easy to see that the Eiffel tower was built without a crane, but it is unexpected
that the first Egyptian glass bottles were made without blowpipes.
The thread connecting these examples
of human design is that each one is an analogy to biological evolution, from
which evolution may be better understood by laypersons. Now by posting new
examples like this, I realize that they may all be stolen by the “intelligent
design” (ID) creationists to argue against evolution. My view on ID follows
that most clearly expressed in the 2005 court judgment from the Pennsylvania
Kitzmiller v. Dover case: “The overwhelming evidence at trial established that
ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific
theory.” Of course a few scientists have written in defense of evolution and against ID
nonsense in the classroom, the most strident of whom is Richard Dawkins. I now add
my voice in support, as in his final interview with Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens lamented “It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks
and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and
obfuscating elements.’”
So into the breach, I add my voice
with some new arguments, after this small bit of throat-clearing. I will try to
avoid being derivative as I come armed with my own capacity for inquiry, insight,
and argument. My examples will show how ID concepts force the gerrymandering of
human design history, and surround it with mystical borders to make their
claims. The individual steps in human design are small, slow and absolutely
require the intellectual imprinting of lessons by trial and error. Students who
are led to think falsely about human design, or any complexity as having
mystical origins are harmed by the diminishment of their own aspirations of
creativity. We all need to understand how small steps and tools lead to human
creativity and any object of complexity. I will reveal these small steps and show, where I can, the failures
that led to success.
Human creativity is always applied
in small increments, as has been well stated by Thomas Edison and more recently
by vacuum designer James Dyson. Complexity never gushes forth in a single
setting. It accumulates, incrementally over time, and can be copied as a meme
and reapplied. It is always more evolutionary than revolutionary. And when it
appears revolutionary, there are piles of failed, discarded or recycled prototypes
behind the curtain.
Tiny incremental changes can be
seen in the history of the bottle cap as it moved away from cork. Some
inventions copy and mutate other designs, as was the case for Mr. Harley and
Mr. Davidson. Others come from the reductive process, like the atypical case of
the Vespa scooter and its last common mechanical ancestor, which was an Italian
airplane. And punctuated periods in human design can be seen in glass bottles
unearthed like the Burgess shale from old privy sites. We can recover the
reasons why one bottle cap survived this period of strangeness, and see both
lethality and efficiency as contributors to the process of its selection and
success.
Evolutionary processes have
wonderful analogies in human design and I will go over many cases to show that complexity
does in fact always arise from small steps. And when we take human design and shrink
it down to the molecular level, as I myself have done, the human design process
is indistinguishable from evolution. With an incomplete theoretical understanding
of protein folding we lack the knowledge for de-novo design. So we apply our
intelligence to choose the tool of evolution, and apply the force of selection
accordingly.
I hope to keep it interesting.
Enjoy the series.
