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

134 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE The Unity of Design Space 135
There is no single summit in Design Space, nor a single staircase or ladder
with calibrated steps, so we cannot expect to find a scale for comparing
amounts of design work across distant developing branches. Thanks to the
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,
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
choose the one that best makes the point I am pursuing.) One day a colleague
approached him with a puzzle that had two paths to solution, a laborious,
complicated calculation and an elegant, Aha!-type solution. This colleague
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
solution. Which solution would von Neumann find? You know the sort of
puzzle: Two trains, 100 miles apart, are approaching each other on the same
track, one going 30 miles per hour, the other going 20 miles per hour. A bird
flying 120 miles per hour starts at train A (when they are 100 miles apart),
flies to train B, turns around and flies back to the approaching train A, and so
forth, until the trains collide. How far has the bird flown when the collision
occurs? "Two hundred forty miles," Von Neumann answered almost
instantly. "Darn," replied his colleague, "I predicted you'd do it the hard
way." "Ay!" von Neumann cried in embarrassment, smiting his forehead.
"There's an easy way!" (Hint: how long till the trains collide?)
Eyes are the standard example of a problem that has been solved many
times, but eyes that may look just the same (and see just the same) may have
been achieved by R-and-D projects that involved different amounts of work,
thanks to the historical peculiarities of the difficulties encountered along the
way. And the creatures that don't have eyes at all are neither better nor worse
on any absolute scale of design; their lineage has just never been given this
problem to solve. It is this same variability in luck in the various lineages that
makes it impossible to define a single Archimedean point from which global
progress could be measured. Is it progress when you have to work an extra
job to pay for the high-priced mechanic you have to hire to fix your car when
it breaks because it is too complex for you to fix in the way you used to fix
your old clunker? Who is to say? Some lineages get trapped in (or are lucky
enough to wander into—take your pick) a path in Design Space in which
complexity begets complexity, in an arms race of competitive design. Others
are fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough-take your pick) to have hit upon
a relatively simple solution to life's problems at the outset and, having nailed
it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work
ever since. We human beings,
complicated creatures that we are, tend to appreciate complexity, but that
may well be just an aesthetic preference that goes with our sort of lineage;
other lineages may be as happy as clams with their ration of simplicity.
3. THE UNITY OF DESIGN SPACE
The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the
proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are
curiously the same.
—CHARLES DARWIN 1871, p. 59
It will not have gone unnoticed that my examples in this chapter have
wandered back and forth between the domain of organisms or biological
design, on the one hand, and the domain of human artifacts—books, problems
solved, and engineering triumphs on the other. This was by design, not
accident, of course. It was to help set the stage for, and provide lots of
ammunition for, a Central Salvo: there is only one Design Space, and everything
actual in it is united with everything else. And I hardly need add that
it was Darwin who taught us this, whether he quite realized it or not.
Now I want to go back over the ground we have covered, highlighting the
evidence for this claim, and drawing out a few more implications of it and
grounds for believing it. The similarities and continuities are of tremendous
importance, I think, but in later chapters I will also point to some important
dissimilarities between the human-made portions of the designed world and
the portions that were created without benefit of the sort of locally concentrated,
foresighted intelligence we human artificers bring to a problem.
We noted at the outset that the Library of Mendel (in the form of printed
volumes of the letters A, C, G, T ) is contained within the Library of Babel, but
we should also note that at least a very large portion of the Library of Babel
(What portion? See chapter 15) is in turn "contained" in the Library of Mendel,
because we are in the Library of Mendel ( our genomes are, and so are the
genomes of all the life forms our lives depend on). The Library of Babel describes
one aspect of our "extended phenotype" (Dawkins 1982 ). That is, in
the same way that spiders make webs and beavers make dams, we make
(among many other things) books. You can't assess the spider's genome for
viability without a consideration of the web that is part of the normal equipment
of the spider, and you can't assess the viability of our genomes (not any
longer, you can't) without recognizing that we are a species with culture, a
representative part of which is in the form of books. We are not just designed,
we are designers, and all our talents as designers, and our products, must
emerge non-miraculously from the blind, mechanical processes of Darwinian