Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – April 3, 2006.

A New Blog Theme—Intelligently Designed…The Evolution of Everyday Objects.
Intelligently Designed Blog #1: Three components to my new obsession.

Today we embark in a new direction—one that combines different passions that I have pursued for most of my life. My fascination for biological evolution is already apparent in past blogs—and everything else posted on this website. Time now to fold in my more recent work in material cultural evolution: the history of human-made objects. The Big Question here is: Do things like cars, tv sets—or, my favorite—musical instruments, "evolve" over time according more or less to the same rules that govern the evolution of trilobites, dinosaurs—and humans?

Three separate lines of thought and experience in my own lifetime have converged to lead me in this new direction of research and theory. Taking them in reverse order, we have:

(1) The Intelligent Design movement. Intelligent design, often touted as a new, valid scientific principle to account for the look of life on our planet, is nothing but William Paley's 1802 naturalistic theology recycled in more modern sounding terms. In his Dec. 20, 2005 decision, Judge John E. Jones III recently dealt a severe body blow to the attempt by members of the Discovery Institute and other supporters of intelligent design to inject this form of creationism into the science curriculum of public schools in the United States (and, increasingly, elsewhere). Like all other creationist movements, intelligent design is nothing more than a crude form of biblical literalism masquerading as modern science. Intelligent design proponents make no "predictions" of what we should observe if intelligent design—the idea that organisms, or parts of organisms, are inherently so complex that they MUST have been created by a clever designer—is true. No way, then, that intelligent design is science.

Though they seldom admit it, the Intelligent Designer is of course the Christian God. And it is notorious that there is no way to "test" any proposition about the nature or existence of supernatural entities—most certainly including God. But I began thinking a few years back, isn't there some way we can come at the problem of intelligent design scientifically—by thinking laterally? And there is: Paley made the analogy with a watch: just as a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, so too does the complexity of biological systems (the vertebrate eye being the favorite example) imply the existence of an eyemaker, an Intelligent Designer—in other words (Paley was forthright about it—not sneaking around like his intellectual descendants in today's intelligent design movement) God.

So why not take a look at what watchmakers do—not just assembling a single watch from a confusing array of bits and pieces—but looking at how the internal and external "anatomy" of watches—clearly designed by intelligent designers—has changed over the years. Which brings me back to an earlier phase of my life: archeology and the world of material cultural anthropology.

(2) As I briefly recount in my "Confessions of a Darwinist" recently added as a .pdf file to this site (see The Niles Eldredge Library of Evolution page on this website), my interest in evolution goes back at least to my early college days. After a brief fling with classical languages as a potential major, I switched over to anthropology—and even spent three months on the northeast coast of Brazil in the summer of 1963 learning the basics of ethnographic field work.

My Brazilian project was to test the proposition that the most successful fishermen in the little seaside village of Arembepe owed their higher catches to a better knowledge of the sea bottom and where the fish were—coupled with superior navigational skills—or, alternatively, owed their success simply to a harder work ethic: getting up earlier and staying out longer, going out on stormy days when others stayed home—that sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, the most successful captains seemed to answer to BOTH descriptions.

Though my attention soon strayed to the fossils embedded in the sandstone "reef" that formed the protective harbor for the fishing boats at Arembepe, when I eventually returned to school in the Fall I took lots more anthropology courses—including some in archeology. There I learned about the sequence of stone tools in the Old World—a series of types of tools that seemed to show some sort of progression from crude choppers, up through more sophisticated, sometimes elegantly shaped delicate scrapers, knives and other tools.

Some years later, my friend and colleague Ian Tattersall (Ian is a physical anthropologist with tremendous depth of knowledge and experience on fossil and living lemurs—and on human evolution) and I wrote a book called The Myths of Human Evolution. Among many other things, we discussed the periods of stability as well as of evolutionary change in the human lineage (back then still usually depicted as a single lineage slowly changing through time) and in human artifacts in the archeological record. We pointed out that, in the earliest human cultures, the stone tools tended to be associated with distinct species of early hominid—but that as time wore on, cultural change (as reflected in the shapes and modes of production of the stone tools) seemed to become "decoupled" from human biological evolution: in general, cultural evolution seemed to speed up and proceed at increasingly faster rates than human biological evolution.

So I have long been accustomed to seeing similar patterns in the history of life and the history of human artifacts. Which leads to the question: What similarities are there between biological and human-designed systems? Answer: both are based on information—information that can be transmitted from generation to generation.

Which leads to a simple thought: We can define evolution as the fate of transmissible information in an economic context. The design of watches changes as new technologies and materials become available—and at the whim of the marketplace: economics shaping the fate of transmissible information, producing patterns of stability (this year's model is hardly different from last year's—and the persistence of "classic" designs—like the Movado watch I am wearing right now) and change (the Swatch comes in and sweeps the market!). The shape and musculature of bird wings reflect adaptations to different modes of flight: the blur of a hummingbird's rapidly beating wings for hovering at a nectar-laden flower, the vulture's broad and hardly-beating-at-all wings as it soars and glides on the hunt for carrion: economics once again underlying patterns of stability and change—this time in biological evolution.

(3) But I am no watchmaker—and yet, as in my trilobite work, the way to go is always to assemble a mass of empirical data the better to test hypotheses of how the system works, and to get new ideas about the dynamics of the evolutionary process. Darwin, writing on p. 20 of the Origin of Species (1859), said "Believing it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons."

As usual, Darwin is right on the money—and, after some deliberations, I picked up MY "special group" of humanly designed artifacts—not watches, nor cars, TVs, but cornets.

This is a cornet:

File written by Adobe Photoshop® 4.0

Cornets are brass musical instruments, played by lip vibrations into a mouthpiece (not shown here) as the player blows into the instrument. Cornets are close relatives of trumpets—though their histories have been largely separate. Other brasswind instruments include trombones, alto horns, baritones and tubas. Most cornets are pitched (like modern trumpets) in the key of Bb and have approximately 4.5' of tubing. The one in the picture above was made by the Gautrot firm in Paris in the 1850s. Piston-valved cornets like this one began to be made in Paris around 1825; they are still made—predominantly in France, England and the United States (though China and India now make them too; Germany, Russia and the Scandinavian countries historically have preferred similar instruments but with rotary valves like those on a French horn).

I started playing cornets (and trumpets) in the fourth grade. One of the greatest days in my life—ever—was when I was allowed to take a cornet home from school. I took lessons and played in school bands and orchestras through my early years in college. Then the pressures of education and career began to take their toll—and I was pretty much reduced to dragging out a horn to play Christmas carols just that one time a year.

But then, in the mid-80s, my wife Michelle bought me an old cornet in an antique store—and I was instantly hooked! The paleontologist in me wanted one of everything—for I soon saw that cornets came in an amazing array of different shapes, seemingly no two alike (well, not quite…). And they seemed (unsurprisingly) to change through time. Aha!

So I began building up my collection—at first haunting antique stores and flea markets; then becoming an Ebay junkie—and then hooking up with a group of equally passionate cornet maniacs (the "Cornet Conspiracy"—getting together once a year). I started to play again too—mostly big bands and some Dixie.

But by the late 1990s, I had begun looking at my collection through my habituated evolutionary eyes. Here is a section of my "wall o' cornets" (a parallel wall to the Wall of Life in the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History—of which I was the Curator-in-Chief). The photo was taken by famed trumpeter Joe Wilder:

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

In the past few years, I have become established as a leading authority on the history of the cornet. I have visited museums and pored over the literature—all to supplement the information of my 500+ instruments in my personal collection. My collection—like my trilobites at the American Museum—are a research collection more than just a core collection of pretty horns. (Other people have better collections in the sense of more, beautifully preserved and more expensive instruments; few, if any, though, have more cornets of as many different forms, from as many different makers in France, Britain and U.S. than I do—essential ingredients of a research collection). I have been accepted as a member in the academic world of historical musical instruments (I am proud to announce I have been recently elected to the Board of Governors of the American Musical Instrument Society). And my published paper on cornet history is the most complete and authoritative treatment yet to appear.

All of which is simply to assert that I have paid my dues. No one knows more about cornet history—hence design evolution—than I do. It turns out my computerized data base on cornet history seems to be the most complete—and possibly unique—formal database on the history of any designed object.

So that's where I am coming from. I am poised and ready to (1) develop a theory of material cultural evolutionary process, and to (2) compare it with my take on how the biological evolutionary process works. Progress, as I shall soon recount, has already been made. There are some similarities between the two systems, of course—but also vast differences.

No way the intelligent design people are right: biological evolution is not the product of an intelligent designer—if the history of my intelligently designed system—cornets—is any guide. More on all of this in future blogs!!!!

Niles Eldredge

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