DESIGN • Jun 16, 2020
Natural Selection is more pervasive and valid than I ever thought...
All of us must have come across really popular theories, Like Einstein’s Relativity, Newton’s laws of gravity, or Max Plank’s quantum physics, which had a tremendous impact within the scope of science, but pretty much irrelevant outside it. But I think the scope of Charles Darwin’s Theory of natural selection might extend way beyond biology. You might say that I am seeing what I wanted to see (apophenia), as I suggested in my Golden Ratio article, But that’s not the case here. I am positive about that.
We need to know 2 things to understand Natural selection…
1) Life produces a lot of experiments (mutations) on the population continuously.
2) When left unchecked, the population grows exponentially but food supply only grows linearly.
This leads inevitably to a struggle for the existence once the population is large enough. A favorable mutation experiment would be preserved because the probability that an organism with a favorable mutation to live up to maturity and to reproduce is much higher, so it thrives, whereas an unfavorable mutation tends to be destroyed in time.
I will illustrate this with a simple example
Now let’s consider an even more complex case,
We have been looking at this picture forever, so we now almost take it for granted.
Have you ever wondered why there is a giant jump between humans and the chimpanzees, whereas there are multiple close relative species of chimpanzees? Why aren’t different species of people? Differences between people of different countries don’t count because we are still the same species (Since reproductive compatibility is the definition of species). There had been several species of Humans (In the Homo Genus) for at least 100,000 years ago. How did all of them vanish? Natural selection happened. There had been bloodbaths. For a more extensive account, give the book Sapiens: Brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari a read. It’s an awesome book, I will recommend it.
You get the idea, Natural Selection is a very complex and random phenomenon. A lot of variables are at play and It takes place over hundreds of thousands of years if not millions.
Now let's get to the point of our discussion...
We have something very similar happening around all the time… In someways artificial, but in a lot of ways natural.
But the process is much expedited, from just years to decades.
Ever wondered why all the buildings are built with concrete and steel, All the automobiles, if removed the headlamps and grill, look the same or whether why all the mobile phones look the same.
Natural Selection happened.
When a new product is introduced into the market, sales often increase exponentially, whereas consumer’s buying power increases very gradually. So, an inevitable fight for market share happens. The advantageous design (not necessarily better, will explain about it later) thrives, whereas disadvantageous design fails and erased from existence.
Let’s look at the evolution of automobiles.
It is a really interesting example because it happened over a period of over a century, there were a lot of competing design philosophies and it is well documented too.
At the dawn of the 20th century, there were all types of automobiles around.
In the hindsight, it might look obvious why the gasoline car won out, but back then it wasn’t so obvious. Handling gasoline was still difficult and there wasn’t a chain of gas stations out there. Ford wasn't the biggest name too.
There was a complex interplay of a plethora of factors in favor of the gasoline vehicles for it to prevail at the end (at least for now and hopefully not for long, EVs are coming).
If you look at the vehicle’s body styles and design languages, the concept is still valid. only here the cycle is faster.
You may confound what I am saying as “Survival of the fittest”, but it is not the case. The phrase “survival of the fittest” is a misinterpretation of natural selection. It talks about the aspect of strength which has not a lot to do with the selection. It is about the ability to reproduce. In our case, the ability to reach with the customers.
Even here, there were a lot of better engine designs developed after the reciprocating engine which were better in a lot of aspects than the conventional engines. For example, Take the Wankel Rotary engines, they were smoother, more power-dense, lighter, simpler, and just simply better than the reciprocating engine design. It couldn’t win. It simply couldn’t get enough traction.
Look at QWERTY, there were a lot of different combinations in keyboards (typewriters) in sales in the 1880s. A completely random bulk sale made QWERTY as ubiquitous as it is today. Even people have developed proven faster keyboard combinations designed after that, but no one even thinks of considering it. That’s the power of natural selection here.
We see only the successful and more dominant designs and we overlook the cemetery of design experiments and it makes the design evolution look more obvious and simpler. But as a matter of fact, it was way more complex and random than you ever thought of.
If you make a google search for the design evolution of mobile phones, you would probably get something like this.
But it never was the case, we are forgetting to look at the design cemetery.
The bottom line, The way we reached here is not how we think it is and more importantly, wonder how ubiquitous the theory of natural selection is… Darwin was a genius.
References
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection