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

142 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE The Unity of Design Space 143
puncture the egg of a fly of the Drosophila willistoni species, and in the
process picked up some of that species' characteristic DNA, which it then
inadvertently transmitted to the egg of a (wild) Drosophila melanogaster fly!
This could explain the sudden explosion in the wild of a particular DNA
element common in D. willistoni but previously unheard of in D. melanogaster
populations. She might add: What else could explain it? It sure looks
like species plagiarism.
Other researchers are looking at other possible vehicles for speedy design
travel in the world of natural (as opposed to artificial) genetics. If they find
them, they will be fascinating—but no doubt rare—exceptions to the
orthodox pattern: genetic transmission of design by chains of direct descent
only. 6 We are inclined, as just noted, to contrast this feature sharply with
what we find in the freewheeling world of cultural evolution, but even there
we can detect a powerful dependence on the combination of luck and
copying.
Consider all the wonderful books in the Library of Babel that will never be
written, even though the process that could create each of them involves no
violation or abridgment of the laws of nature. Consider some book in the
Library of Babel that you yourself might love to write—and that only you
could write—for instance, the poetically expressed autobiographical tale of
your childhood that would bring tears and laughter to all readers. We know
that there are Vast numbers of books with just these features in the Library of
Babel, and each is composable in only a million keystrokes. At the daw-dling
rate of five hundred strokes a day, the whole project shouldn't take you much
longer than six years, with generous vacations. Well, what's stopping you?
You have fingers that work, and all the keys on your word-processor can be
depressed independently.
Nothing is stopping you. That is, there needn't be any identifiable forces,
or laws of physics or biology or psychology, or salient disabilities brought on
by identifiable circumstances (such as an ax embedded in your brain, or a
gun pointed at you by a credible threatener). There are Vastly many books
that you are never going to write "for no reason at all." Thanks to the myriad
particular twists and turns of your life to date, you just don't happen to be
well disposed to compose those sequences of keystrokes.
If we want to get some perspective—limited, to be sure—on what patterns
go into creating your own authorial dispositions, we will have to consider the
transmission of Design to you from the books you have read. The books that
actually come to exist in the world's libraries are deeply
dependent not just on their authors' biological inheritance, but on the books
that have come before them. This dependence is conditioned by coincidences
or accidents at every turning. Just look at my bibliography to discover the
main lines of genealogy of this book. 1 have been reading and writing about
evolution since I was an undergraduate, but if I had not been encouraged by
Doug Hofstadter in 1980 to read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I probably
would not have begun coalescing some of the interests and reading habits
that have been major shapers of this book. And if Hofstadter had not been
asked by The New York Review of Books to review my book Brainstorms
(1978), he probably would never have hit upon the bright idea of proposing
that we collaborate on a book, The Mind's I (1981), and then we would not
have had the opportunity for mutual book-recommending that led me to
Dawkins, and so forth. Even if I had read the same books and articles by
following other paths, in a different order, I would not be conditioned in
exactly the same way by that reading, and hence would have been unlikely to
have composed (and edited, and re-edited) just the string of symbols you are
now reading.
Can we measure this transmission of Design in culture? Are there units of
cultural transmission analogous to the genes of biological evolution? Dawkins
(1976 ) has proposed that there are, and has given them a name: memes.
Like genes, memes are supposed to be replicators, in a different medium, but
subject to much the same principles of evolution as genes. The idea that there
might be a scientific theory, memetics, strongly parallel to genetics, strikes
many thinkers as absurd, but at least a large part of their skepticism is based
on misunderstanding. This is a controversial idea, which will get careful
consideration in chapter 12, but in the meantime we can set aside the
controversies and just use the term as a handy word for a salient ( memorable)
cultural item, something with enough Design to be worth saving—or
stealing or replicating.
The Library of Mendel (or its twin, the Library of Babel—they
are contained in each other, after all) is as good an approximate model of
Universal Design Space as we could ever need to think about. For the last
four billion years or so, the Tree of Life has been zigzagging through this
Vast multidimensional space, branching and blooming with virtually unimaginable
fecundity, but nevertheless managing to fill only a Vanishingly
small portion of that space of the Possible with Actual designs. 7 According
6. The genetic elements transferred in Drosophila are "intragenomic parasites" and
probably have a negative effect on the adaptedness of their host organisms, so we
shouldn't get our hopes up unduly. See Engels 1992.
7. "I confess that I believe the emptiness of phenotypic space is filled with red herrings.
... Under the null hypothesis that no constraints at all exist, the branching pathways
through space taken by this process constitute a random-branching walk in a