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

138 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE The Unity of Design Space 139
which century must have been the scene for the creation of this set of
mutations—even though the actual parchment document created then and
there has long since succumbed to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and
turned to dust. 4
Did Darwin ever learn anything from the philologists? Did any philologists
recognize that Darwin had re-invented one of their wheels? Nietzsche
was himself one of these stupendously erudite students of the ancient texts,
and he was one of many German thinkers who were swept up in the Darwin
boom, but, so far as I know, he never noticed a kinship between Darwin's
method and that of his colleagues. Darwin himself was struck in later years
by the curious similarity between his arguments and those of the philologists
studying the genealogy of languages (not, as in the case of the Plato scholars,
the genealogy of specific texts). In The Descent of Man (1871, p. 59) he
pointed explicitly to their shared use of the distinction between homologies
and analogies that could be due to convergent evolution: "We find in distinct
languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies
due to a similar process of formation."
Imperfections or errors are just special cases of the variety of marks that
speak loudly—and intuitively—of a shared history. The role of chance in
twisting the paths taken in a bit of design work can create the same effect
without creating an error. A case in point: In 1988, Otto Neugebauer, the
great historian of astronomy, was sent a photograph of a fragment of Greek
papyrus with a few numbers in a column on it. The sender, a classicist, had
no clue about the meaning of this bit of papyrus, and wondered if Neugebauer
had any ideas. The eighty-nine-year-old scholar recomputed the lineto-line
differences between the numbers, found their maximum and minimum
limits, and determined that this papyrus had to be a translation of part of
"Column G" of a Babylonian cuneiform tablet on which was written a
Babylonian "System B" lunar ephemeris! (An ephemeris is, like the Nautical
Almanac, a tabular system for computing the location of a heavenly body for
every time in a particular period.) How could Neugebauer make this Sherlock
Holmes-ian deduction? Elementary: what was written in Greek (a sequence
of sexagesimal—not decimal—numbers) was recognized by him to be part—
column G!—of a highly accurate calculation of the moon's
4. Scholarship marches on. With the aid of computers, more recent researchers have
shown "that the nineteenth-century model of the constitution and descent of our manu
scripts of Plato was so oversimplified that it must be counted wrong. That model, in its
original form, assumed that all the extant manuscripts were direct or indirect copies of
one or more of the three oldest extant manuscripts, each a literal copy; variants in the
more recent manuscripts were then to be explained either as scribal corruption or arbi
trary emendation, growing cumulatively with each new copy ___ " (Brumbaugh and Wells
1968, p. 2; the introduction provides a vivid picture of the fairly recent state of play.)
location that had been worked out by the Babylonians. There are lots of
different ways of calculating an ephemeris, and Neugebauer knew that anyone
working out their own ephemeris independently, using their own system,
would not have come up with exactly the same numbers as anyone else,
though the numbers might have been close. The Babylonian system B was
excellent, so the design had been gratefully conserved, in translation, with all
its fine-grained particularities. (Neugebauer 1989.) 5
Neugebauer was a great scholar, but you can probably execute a parallel
feat of deduction, following in his footsteps. Suppose you were sent a photocopy
of the text below, and asked the same questions: What does it mean?
Where might this be from?
FIGURE 6.1
Before reading on, try it. You can probably figure it out even if you don't
really know how to read the old German Fraktur typeface—and even if you
don't know German! Look again, closely. Did you get it? Impressive stunt!
Neugebauer may have his Babylonian column G, but you quickly determined,
didn't you, that this fragment must be part of a German translation of
some lines from an Elizabethan tragedy (Julius Caesar, act III, scene ii, lines
79-80, to be exact). Once you think about it, you realize that it could hardly
be anything else! The odds against this particular sequence of German letters'
getting strung together under any other circumstances are Vast. Why? What
is the particularity that marks such a string of symbols?
Nicholas Humphrey (1987) makes the question vivid by posing a more
drastic version, if you were forced to "consign to oblivion" one of the
following masterpieces, which would you choose: Newton's Principia,
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Mozart's Don Giovanni, or Eiffel's Tower? "If
the choice were forced," Humphrey answers,
I'd have litde doubt which it should be: the Principia would have to go.
How so? Because, of all those works, Newton's was the only one that was
5. I am grateful to Noel Swerdlow, who told this story during die discussion following his
talk "The Origin of Ptolemy's Planetary Theory," at the Tufts Philosophy Colloquium,
October 1, 1993, and subsequently provided me with Neugebauer's paper and an explanation
of its fine points.