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

140 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE
replaceable. Quite simply: if Newton had not written it, then someone else
would—probably within the space of a few years __ Tne Principia was a
glorious monument to human intellect, the Eiffel Tower was a relatively
minor feat of romantic engineering; yet the fact is that while Eiffel did it his
way, Newton merely did it God's way.
Newton and Leibniz famously quarreled over who got to the calculus first,
and one can readily imagine Newton having another quarrel with a
contemporary over who should get priority on discovering the laws of
gravitation. But had Shakespeare never lived, for example, no one else would
ever have written his plays and poems. "C P. Snow, in the Two Cultures,
extolled the great discoveries of science as 'scientific Shakespeare'. But in
one way he was fundamentally mistaken. Shakespeare's plays were
Shakespeare's plays and no one else's. Scientific discoveries, by contrast,
belong—ultimately—to no one in particular" (Humphrey 1987). Intuitively,
the difference is the difference between discovery and creation, but we now
have a better way of seeing it. On the one hand, there is design work that
homes in on a best move or forced move which can be seen (in retrospect, at
least) to be a uniquely favored location in Design Space accessible from
many starting points by many different paths; on the other hand, there is
design work the excellence of which is much more dependent on exploiting (
and amplifying) the many contingencies of history that shape its trajectory, a
trajectory about which the bus company's slogan is an understatement:
getting there is much more than half the fun.
We saw in chapter 2 that even the long-division algorithm can avail itself
of randomness or arbitrary idiosyncrasy—choose a digit at random (or your
favorite digit) and check to see if it's the "right" one. But the actual idiosyncratic
choices made as you go along cancel out, leaving no trace in the
final answer, the right answer. Other algorithms can incorporate the random
choices into the structure of their final products. Think of a poetry-writing
algorithm—or a doggerel-writing algorithm, if you insist—that begins:
"Choose a noun at random from the dictionary ____ " Such a design process
can produce something that is definitely under quality control—selection
pressure—but which nevertheless bears the unmistakable signs of its particular
history of creation.
Humphrey's contrast is sharp, but his vivid way of drawing it might
mislead. Science, unlike the arts, is engaged in journeys—sometimes races—
with definite destinations: solutions to specific problems in Design Space.
But scientists do care just as much as artists do about the routes taken, and
hence would be appalled at the idea of discarding Newton's actual work and
just saving his destination (which someone else would eventually have led us
to in any case). They care about the actual trajectories because the methods
used in them can often be used again, for other journeys; the good
The Unity of Design Space 141
methods are cranes, which can be borrowed, with acknowledgment, and used
to do lifting in other parts of Design Space. In the extreme case, the crane
developed by a scientist may be of much more value than the particular
lifting accomplished by it, the destination reached. For instance, a proof of a
trivial result may nevertheless pioneer a new mathematical method of great
value. Mathematicians put a high value on coming up with a simpler, more
elegant proof of something they have already proved—a more efficient
crane.
In this context, philosophy can be seen to lie about midway between science
and the arts. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stressed that in philosophy the
process—the arguing and analyzing—is more important than the product—the
conclusions reached, the theories defended. Though this is hotly (and
correctly, in my opinion) disputed by many philosophers who aspire to solve
real problems—and not just indulge in a sort of interminable logotherapy—
even they would admit that we would never want to consign Descartes's
famous "cogito ergo sum" thought experiment, for example, to oblivion, even
though none would accept its conclusions; it is just too nifty an intuition
pump, even if all it pumps is falsehoods (Dennett 1984, p. 18). Why can't you
copyright a successful multiplication of two numbers? Because anyone could
do it. It's a forced move. The same is true of any simple fact that a genius isn't
needed to discover. So how do the creators of tables or other routine (but
labor-intensive) masses of printed data protect themselves from unscrupulous
copiers? Sometimes they set traps. I am told, for instance, that the publishers
of Who's Who have dealt with the problem of competitors' simply stealing all
their hard-won facts and publishing their own biographical encyclopedias by
quietly inserting a few entirely bogus entries. You can be sure that if one of
those shows up on a competitor's pages, it was no coincidence!
In the larger perspective of the whole Design Space, the crime of plagiarism
might be defined as theft of crane. Somebody or something has done
some design work, thereby creating something that is useful in further design
work and therefore may have value to anyone or anything embarked on a
design project. In our world of culture, where the transmission of designs
from agent to agent is enabled by many media of communication, the
acquisition of designs developed in other "shops" is a common event, almost
the defining mark of cultural evolution (which will be the topic of chapter
12). It has commonly been assumed by biologists that such transactions were
impossible in the world of genetics ( until the dawn of genetic engineering).
You might say, in fact, that this has been the Official Dogma. Recent
discoveries suggest otherwise—though only time will tell; no Dogma ever
rolled over and died without a fight. For instance, Marilyn Houck (Houck et
al. 1991.) has found evidence that, about forty years ago, in either Florida or
Central America, a tiny mite that feeds on fruit flies happened to