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

228 BIOLOGY IS ENGINEERING
stand why it should be so, because we see what mouths—or locks and keys—
are for, and why certain ways are the best ways of accomplishing those ends.
CHAPTER 8: Biology is not fust like engineering; it is engineering. It is the
study of functional mechanisms, their design, construction, and operation.
From this vantage point, we can explain the gradual birth of function, and the
concomitant birth of meaning or intentionality. Achievements that at first
seem either literally miraculous (e.g., the creation of recipe-readers where
none were before) or at least intrinsically Mind-dependent (learning to play
winning checkers) can be broken down into die ever smaller achievements of
ever smaller and stupider mechanisms. We have now begun to pay close
attention to the design process itself, not just its products, and this new
research direction is deepening Darwin's dangerous idea, not overthrowing
it.
CHAPTER 9: The task of reverse engineering in biology is an exercise in
figuring out "what Mother Nature had in mind." This strategy, known as
adaptationism, has been an amazingly powerful method, generating many
spectacular leaps of inference that have been confirmed—along with some
that have not, of course. The famous critique of adaptationism by Stephen Jay
Gould and Richard Lewontin focuses attention on the suspicions people have
harbored about adaptationism, but is largely misdirected. The applications of
game theory in adaptationism have been particularly fruitful, but one must be
cautious: there may be more hidden constraints than theorists often assume.
CHAPTER NINE
Searching for Quality
1. THE POWER OF ADAPTATIONIST THINKING
'Naked as Nature intended' was a persuasive slogan of the early Naturist
movement. But Nature's original intention was that the skin of all
primates should be un-naked.
—ELAINE MORGAN 1990, p. 66
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands
that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the
intention of an artificer.
—W. WIMSATT and M. BEARDSLEY 1954, p. 4
If you know something about the design of an artifact, you can predict its
behavior without worrying yourself about the underlying physics of its parts.
Even small children can readily learn to manipulate such complicated objects
as VCRs without having a clue as to how they work; they know just what will
happen when they press a sequence of buttons, because they know what is
designed to happen. They are operating from what I call the design stance.
The VCR repairer knows a great deal more about the design of the VCR, and
knows, roughly, how all the interior parts interact to produce both proper
functioning and pathological functioning, but may also be quite oblivious of
the underlying physics of the processes. Only the designers of the VCR had to
understand the physics; they are the ones who must descend to what I call the
physical stance in order to figure out what sorts of design revisions might
enhance picture quality, or diminish wear and tear on the tape, or reduce the
electricity consumption of the product. But when they engage in reverse
engineering—of some other manufacturer's VCR, for instance—they avail
themselves not only of the physical stance, but also of what I call the
intentional stance—they try to figure out what the designers