Darwin's Dangerous Idea (25 page)

impose themselves on all life forms anywhere. We can argue about particular Whenever we find a problem solved, we can ask: Who or what did the work?

cases, but not about the applicability in general of the principles. Are such Where and when? Has a solution been worked out locally, or long ago, or design features as bilateral symmetry in locomotors, or mouth-at-the-bow-was it somehow borrowed (or stolen) from some other branch of the tree? If it end, to be explained as largely a matter of historical contingency, or largely a exhibits peculiarities that could only have arisen in the course of solving the matter of practical wisdom? The only issues to debate or investigate are their subproblems in some apparently remote branch of the Tree that grows in relative contributions, and the historical order in which the contributions Design Space, then barring a miracle or a coincidence too Cosmic to credit, were made. (Recall that in the actual QWERTY phenomenon, there must be a copying event of some kind that moved that completed design work to its new location.

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There is no single summit in Design Space, nor a single staircase or ladder complicated creatures that we are, tend to appreciate complexity, but that with calibrated steps, so we cannot expect to find a scale for comparing may well be just an aesthetic preference that goes with our sort of lineage; amounts of design work across distant developing branches. Thanks to the other lineages may be as happy as clams with their ration of simplicity.

vagaries and digressions of different "methods adopted," something that is in some sense just one problem can have both hard and easy solutions, requiring more or less work. There is a famous story about the mathematician and physicist (and coinventor of the computer) John von Neumann, 3. THE UNITY OF DESIGN SPACE

who was legendary for his lightning capacity to do prodigious calculations in his head. (Like most famous stories, this one has many versions, of which I
The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the
choose the one that best makes the point I am pursuing.) One day a colleague
proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are
approached him with a puzzle that had two paths to solution, a laborious,
curiously the same.

complicated calculation and an elegant, Aha!-type solution. This colleague

—CHARLES DARWIN 1871, p. 59

had a theory: in such a case, mathematicians work out the laborious solution while the (lazier, but smarter) physicists pause and find the quick and easy It will not have gone unnoticed that my examples in this chapter have solution. Which solution would von Neumann find? You know the sort of wandered back and forth between the domain of organisms or biological puzzle: Two trains, 100 miles apart, are approaching each other on the same design, on the one hand, and the domain of human artifacts—books, prob-track, one going 30 miles per hour, the other going 20 miles per hour. A bird lems solved, and engineering triumphs on the other. This was by design, not flying 120 miles per hour starts at train A (when they are 100 miles apart), accident, of course. It was to help set the stage for, and provide lots of flies to train B, turns around and flies back to the approaching train A, and so ammunition for, a Central Salvo:
there is only one Design Space, and ev-forth, until the trains collide. How far has the bird flown when the collision
erything actual in it is united with everything else.
And I hardly need add that occurs? "Two hundred forty miles," Von Neumann answered almost it was Darwin who taught us this, whether he quite realized it or not.

instantly. "Darn," replied his colleague, "I predicted you'd do it the hard Now I want to go back over the ground we have covered, highlighting the way." "Ay!" von Neumann cried in embarrassment, smiting his forehead.

evidence for this claim, and drawing out a few more implications of it and

"There's an easy way!" (Hint: how long till the trains collide?) grounds for believing it. The similarities and continuities are of tremendous Eyes are the standard example of a problem that has been solved many importance, I think, but in later chapters I will also point to some important times, but eyes that may look just the same (and see just the same) may have dissimilarities between the human-made portions of the designed world and been achieved by R-and-D projects that involved different amounts of work, the portions that were created without benefit of the sort of locally con-thanks to the historical peculiarities of the difficulties encountered along the centrated, foresighted intelligence we human artificers bring to a problem.

way. And the creatures that don't have eyes at all are neither better nor worse We noted at the outset that the Library of Mendel (in the form of printed on any absolute scale of design; their lineage has just never been given this volumes of the letters A, C, G, T ) is contained within the Library of Babel, but problem to solve. It is this same variability in
luck
in the various lineages that we should also note that at least a very large portion of the Library of Babel makes it impossible to define a single Archimedean point from which global (What portion? See chapter 15) is in turn "contained" in the Library of Men-progress could be measured. Is it progress when you have to work an extra del, because
we
are in the Library of Mendel ( our genomes are, and so are the job to pay for the high-priced mechanic you have to hire to fix your car when genomes of all the life forms our lives depend on). The Library of Babel de-it breaks because it is too complex for you to fix in the way you used to fix scribes one aspect of our "extended phenotype" (Dawkins 1982 ). That is, in your old clunker? Who is to say? Some lineages get trapped in (or are lucky the same way that spiders make webs and beavers make dams, we make enough to wander into—take your pick) a path in Design Space in which (among many other things) books. You can't assess the spider's genome for complexity begets complexity, in an arms race of competitive design. Others viability without a consideration of the web that is part of the normal equip-are fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough-take your pick) to have hit upon ment of the spider, and you can't assess the viability of our genomes (not any a relatively simple solution to life's problems at the outset and, having nailed longer, you can't) without recognizing that we are a species with culture, a it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work representative part of which is in the form of books. We are not just designed, ever since. We human beings,

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mechanisms
of one sort or another.
How many cranes-on-top-of-cranes does many, had already perfected the same bold, ingenious strategy of historical it take to get from the early design explorations of prokaryotic lineages to die inference in the domain of
paleography
or
philology.
I have several times mathematical investigations of Oxford dons? That is the question posed by alluded to the works of Plato in this book, but it is "a miracle" that Plato's Darwinian thinking. The resistance comes from those who think there must work survives for us to read today in any version at all. All the texts of his be some discontinuities somewhere, some skyhooks, or moments of Special
Dialogues
were essentially lost for over a thousand years. When they reCreation, or some other sort of miracles, between the prokaryotes and the emerged at the dawn of the Renaissance in the form of various tattered, finest treasures in our libraries.

dubious, partial copies of copies of copies from who knows where, this set in There may be—that will be a question we will look at in many different motion five hundred years of painstaking scholarship, intended to "purify the ways in the rest of the book. But we have already seen a variety of deep text" and establish a proper informational link with the original sources, parallels, instances in which the very same principles, the very same strat-which of course would have been in Plato's own hand, or the hand of the egies of analysis or inference, apply in both domains. There are many more scribe to whom he dictated. The originals had presumably long since turned where they came from.

to dust. (Today there are some fragments of papyrus with Platonic text on Consider, for instance, Darwin's pioneering use of a certain sort of his-them, and these bits of text may be roughly contemporaneous with Plato torical inference. As Stephen Jay Gould has stressed (e.g., 1977a, 1980a), it himself, but they have played no important role in the scholarship, having is the imperfections, the curious fallings short of what would seem to be been uncovered quite recently.)

perfect design, that are the best evidence for a historical process of descent The task that faced the scholars was daunting. There were obviously many with modification; they are the best evidence of copying, instead of inde-

"corruptions" in the various nonextinct copies (called "witnesses"), and these pendent re-inventing, of the design in question. We can now see better why corruptions or errors had to be fixed, but there were also many puzzling—or this is such good evidence. The odds against two independent processes'

exciting—passages of dubious authenticity, and no way of asking the author arriving at the same region of Design Space are Vast unless the design which were which. How could they be properly distinguished? The element in question is obviously right, a forced move in Design Space.

corruptions could be more or less rank-ordered in obviousness: (1) Perfection will be independently hit upon again and again, especially if it is typographical errors, (2) grammatical errors, (3) stupid or otherwise baffling obvious. It is the idiosyncratic
versions
of near-perfection that are a dead expressions, or ( 4 ) bits that were just not stylistically or doctrinally like the giveaway of copying. In evolutionary theory, such traits are called
homol-rest of Plato. By Darwin's day, the philologists who devoted their entire
ogies:
traits that are similar not because they have to be for functional professional lives to re-creating the genealogy of their witnesses had not only reasons, but because of copying. The biologist Mark Ridley observes, "Many developed elaborate and—for their day—rigorous methods of comparison, of what are often presented as separate arguments for evolution reduce to the but had succeeded in extrapolating whole lineages of copies of copies, and general form of the argument from homology," and he boils the argument deduced many curious facts about the historical circumstances of their birth, down to its essence:

reproduction, and eventual death. By an analysis of the patterns of shared and unshared errors in the existing documents (the carefully preserved parchment treasures in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in Paris, in the Vienna The ear-bones of mammals are an example of a homology. They are ho-Nationalbibliothek, in the Vatican, and elsewhere), they were able to deduce mologous with some of the jaw-bones of reptiles. The ear-bones of mam-hypotheses about how many different copyings there had to have been, mals did not have to be formed from the same bones as form the jaw of roughly when and where some of these must have been made, and which reptiles; but in fact they are __ The fact that species share homologies is an argument for evolution, for if they had been created separately
there
witnesses had relatively recent shared ancestors and which did not.

would be no reason why
[emphasis added] they should show homologous Sometimes the deductive boldness of their work is the equal of anything in similarities. [Mark Ridley 1985, p. 9]

Darwin: a particular group of manuscript errors, uncorrected and re-copied in all the descendants in a particular lineage, was almost certainly due to the fact that the scribe who took the dictation did not pronounce Greek the same This is how it is in the biosphere, and also how it is in the cultural sphere of way the reader did, and consequently misheard a particular phoneme on plagiarism, industrial espionage, and the honest work of
recension of texts.

many occasions! Such clues, together with evidence from other sources on Here is a curious historical coincidence: while Darwin was fighting his the history of the Greek language, might even suggest to the scholars which way clear to an understanding of this characteristically Darwinian mode of monastery, on which Greek island or mountaintop, in inference, some of his fellow Victorians, in England and especially in Ger-138 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE

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which century must have been the scene for the creation of this set of location that had been worked out by the Babylonians. There are lots of mutations—even though the actual parchment document created then and different ways of calculating an ephemeris, and Neugebauer knew that any-there has long since succumbed to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and one working out their own ephemeris independently, using their own system, turned to dust.4

would not have come up with exactly the same numbers as anyone else, Did Darwin ever learn anything from the philologists? Did any philolo-though the numbers might have been close. The Babylonian system B was gists recognize that Darwin had re-invented one of their wheels? Nietzsche excellent, so the design had been gratefully conserved, in translation, with all was himself one of these stupendously erudite students of the ancient texts, its fine-grained particularities. (Neugebauer 1989.)5

and he was one of many German thinkers who were swept up in the Darwin Neugebauer was a great scholar, but you can probably execute a parallel boom, but, so far as I know, he never noticed a kinship between Darwin's feat of deduction, following in his footsteps. Suppose you were sent a pho-method and that of his colleagues. Darwin himself was struck in later years tocopy of the text below, and asked the same questions: What does it mean?