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

188 BIOLOGY IS ENGINEERING The Sciences of the Artificial 189
isms, and his analysis of teleology, the fourth of his causes, but only since
Darwin has the idea begun to come into focus. It is quite explicit, of course,
in the Argument from Design, which invites the observer to marvel at the
cunning interplay of parts, the elegant planning and exquisite workmanship
of the Artificer. But engineering has always had second-class status in the
intellectual world. From Leonardo da Vinci to Charles Babbage to Thomas
Edison, the engineering genius has always been acclaimed but nevertheless
regarded with a certain measure of condescension by the mandarin elite of
science and the arts. Aristotle did not help matters by proposing a distinction,
adopted by the medievals, between what was secundum naturam, according
to nature, and what was contra naturam, against nature, artificial.
Mechanisms—but not organisms—were contra naturam. Then there were
the things that were praeter naturam, or wnnatural (monsters and mutants),
and die things that were super naturam—miracles (Gabbey 1993). How
could the study of what was against nature shed much light on the glories—
yea, even the monsters and miracles—of nature?
The fossil traces of this negative attitude are everywhere in our culture.
For instance, in my own home discipline of philosophy, the subdiscipline
known as philosophy of science has a long and respected history; many of
the most eminent and influential philosophers these days are philosophers of
science. There are excellent philosophers of physics, philosophers of biology,
philosophers of mathematics, and even of social science. I have never even
heard anybody in the field described as a philosopher of engineering—as if
there couldn't possibly be enough conceptual material of interest in
engineering for a philosopher to specialize in. But this is changing, as more
and more philosophers come to recognize that engineering harbors some of
the deepest, most beautiful, most important thinking ever done. (The title of
this section is taken from Herbert Simon's seminal book [1969] on these
topics.)
Darwin's great insight was that all the designs in the biosphere could be the
products of a process that was as patient as it was mindless, an "automatic"
and gradual lifter in Design Space. In retrospect, we can see that Darwin
himself could hardly have imagined, let alone supported with evidence, the
refinements and extensions of his idea that have permitted later Darwinians
to go beyond his own cautious agnosticism about the origins of life itself, and
even the "design" of the physical Order his idea presupposed. He was in no
better position to characterize that Order than he was to describe the
constraints and powers of the hereditary mechanism; he just knew there had
to be such a mechanism, and it had to exploit the Order, whatever it was, that
made "descent with modification" not only possible but fruitful.
The century-plus of subsequent focusing and extending of Darwin's great
idea has been punctuated by controversy, amply illustrating, by the way, the
reflexive extension of his idea to itself: the evolution of the Darwinian
memes about evolution has been not just accompanied, but positively sped
along, by competition between ideas. And as he hypothesized with regard to
organisms, "competition will generally be most severe between those forms
which are most nearly related to each other" (Origin, p. 121). Biologists
themselves have not been immune to the heritage of negative attitudes
towards engineering, of course. What is the hankering after skyhooks, after
all, but the fond hope that a miracle will somehow come along to lift us
above the cranes? Continued subliminal resistance to this feature of Darwin's
fundamental idea has heightened controversy, impeded comprehension, and
distorted expression—while at the same time propelling some of the most
important challenges to Darwinism.
In response to these challenges, Darwin's idea has grown stronger. Today
we can see that not only Aristotle's divisions but also other cherished compartmentalizations
of science are threatened by its territorial expansion. The
Germans divide learning into Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences, and
Geistesiwissenschaften, the sciences of mind, meaning, and culture, but this
sharp divide—cousin to C. P. Snow's Two Cultures (1963)—is threatened by
the prospect that an engineering perspective will spread from biology up
through the human sciences and arts. If there is just one Design Space, after
all, in which the offspring of both our bodies and our minds are united under
one commodious set of R-and-D processes, then these traditional walls may
tumble.
Before proceeding, I want to confront a suspicion. Since I have just
granted that Darwin himself didn't appreciate many of the issues that have to
be dealt with if the theory of evolution by natural selection is to survive, isn't
there something trivial or tautological about my claim that Darwin's idea
survives all these challenges? No wonder it can keep on spreading, since it
keeps on changing in response to new challenges! If my point were to crown
Darwin as author and hero, there would be merit to this suspicion, but of
course this is not primarily such an exercise of intellectual history. It doesn't
really matter to my main thesis whether Darwin himself even existed! He
could be, like the Average Taxpayer, a sort of mythical Virtual Author, for
all I care. (Some authorities place Homer in that category.) The actual
historical man does fascinate me; his curiosity, integrity, and stamina inspire
me; his personal fears and flaws make him lovable. But he is, in a way, beside
the point. He had the good fortune to be the midwife for an idea that has a
life of its own, precisely because it does grow and change. Most ideas can't
do that.
In fact, a great deal of rhetoric has been expended by partisans on both
sides of the controversies about whether Darwin himself—St. Charles, you
might call him—was a gradualist, an adaptationist, a catastrophist, a capitalist,
a feminist. The answers to these questions are of considerable historical