Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

224 BIOLOGY IS ENGINEERING Stuart Kauffman as MetaEngineer 225
a principle that governs human engineering. Pyramids are always built from
the bottom up, of course, but the organization of the building process, since
the days of the pharaohs, has been top-down, under the control of a single
autocrat who had a clear and literally commanding vision of the whole, but
probably was a bit vague about how the local details would be accomplished.
"Global" direction from on high puts in motion a hierarchical cascade of
"local" projects. This is such a common feature of large-scale human projects
that we have a hard time imagining alternatives (Papert 1993, Dennett
1993a). Since we don't recognize the principle Kauffman discerns as one that
is familiar from human engineering, we are not apt to see it as a principle of
engineering at all, but I suggest that it is. Reformulated slightly, we could put
it as follows. Until you manage to evolve communicating organisms that can
form large engineering organizations, you are bound by the following
Preliminary Design Principle: all global order must be generated by local
rules. So all the early products of design, up to the creation of something with
some of the organizational talents of Homo sapiens, must obey whatever
constraints follow from the "management decision" that all order must be
accomplished by local rules. Any "attempts" to create living forms that
violate this precept will end in immediate failure—or, more accurately, will
not even get started sufficiently to be discernible as attempts.
If no bell rings, as I have said, to mark the moment when the R-and-D
process ends and the life of the "finished product" begins, it should at least
sometimes be hard to tell whether a design principle in question is a principle
of engineering or of meta-engineering. A case in point is Kauffman's (1993,
pp. 75ff.) proposed rederivation of "von Baer's laws" of embryology. One of
the most striking patterns in the embryos of animals is the fact that they all
start out so much the same.
Thus early fish, frog, chick and human embryos are remarkably similar __
The familiar explanation for these laws is that mutants [I think he means
"mutations"] affecting early ontogeny are more disruptive than mutants
affecting late ontogeny. Thus mutants altering early development are less
likely to accumulate, and early embryos remain more similar from one
order of organisms to another than do late embryos. Is this plausible argument
actually so plausible? [Kauffman 1993, p. 75]
The traditional Darwinian, on Kauffman's reading, places the responsibility
for von Baer's laws in a "special mechanism," built right into organisms.
Why don't we see many finished products with strikingly different early
embryos? Well, since change-orders that affect early parts of the process tend
to be more disastrous in their effect on the finished product than changeorders
that affect later parts of die process, Mother Nature has de-
signed a special developmental mechanism to protect against such experimentation.
(This would be analogous to IBM's forbidding its computer
scientists to investigate alternative architectures for its CPU or centralprocessing-unit
chip—designed resistance to change.)
And what is Kauffman's contrasting explanation? It starts with the same
point and takes it in a rather different direction:
... a locking-in of early development, and hence von Baer's laws, do not
represent a special mechanism of developmental canalization, the usual
sense of which is a buffering of the phenotype against genetic alteration ___
Instead, locking-in of early development is a direct reflection of the fact
that the number of ways to improve organisms by altering early ontogeny
has dwindled faster than the number of ways to improve by altering late
development. [Kauffman 1993, p. 77. See also Wimsatt 1986.]
Think of the issue from the point of view of human engineering for a
moment. Why is it that the foundations of churches are more alike than their
upper stories? Well, says the traditional Darwinian, they have to be built first,
and any wise contractor will tell you that if you must tinker with design
elements, work on the steeple ornament first, or the windows. You are less
apt to have a disastrous crash than if you try to come up with a new way of
preparing the foundation. So it is not so surprising that churches all start out
looking more or less alike, with the big differences emerging in the later
elaborations of the building process. Actually, says Kauffman, there really
just aren't as many different possible solutions to the foundation problem as
there are to later building problems. Even stupid contractors who butted their
heads against this fact for eons would not come up with a wide variety of
foundation designs. This difference of emphasis may look small, but it has
some important implications. Kauffman says we don't need to look for a
canalization mechanism to explain this fact; it will take care of itself. But
there is also an underlying agreement between Kauffman and the tradition he
wants to supplant: there are only so many good ways of building things,
given the starting constraints, and evolution finds them again and again.
It is the non-optionality of these "choices" that Kauffman wants to stress,
and so he and his colleague Brian Goodwin (e.g., 1986) are particularly eager
to discredit the powerful image, first made popular by the great French
biologists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob, of Mother Nature as a
"tinker," engaging in the sort of tinkering the French call bricolage. The term
was first made salient by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1966). A
tinker or bricoleur is an opportunistic maker of gadgets, a "sat-isficer"
(Simon 1957) who is always ready to settle for mediocrity if it is cheap
enough. A tinker is not a deep thinker. The two elements of classical