Biology, Technology and Culture - the three things that in more ways than one define our existence today.
Biology of course arose as a result of the well known and well understood Darwinian Selection where the struggle for the "Survival of the Fittest" leads to the evolution of forms with greater and greater adaptation to the changing world systems. Now this is a subject where one can write volumes of books with numerous examples, exceptions, theories, principles etc. But lack of time, energy, effort and more importantly knowledge force me to limit my ramblings on this subject to the barest minimum. The point of relevance of course is that the forces of natural selection which drive evolution are limited by the availability of raw material. This means that selection pressure can only act on already existing variations, and not "design" something altogether new. These tiny variations in existing form arise due to mutagenic events which confer a phenotypic change. And then this pre-existing pool of variation gets subject to the forces of natural selection to generate diverse forms. In fact, as SJ Gould says, "the complex and curious pathways of history guarantee that most organisms cannot be designed optimally. Indeed, to make an even stronger statement, imperfections are the primary proofs that evolution has occurred...". This principle of imperfection in biology has been interestingly named by Gould as the Panda principle to honor the example of design imperfection as seen in a Panda's unique thumb. I would have probably been more anthropocentric and would have probably chosen "the appendix principle" or "the pain in the back" principle but then Gould was ahead of me in time and thought and I will stick with his terminology.... ;)
To summarise the Panda's thumb, Pandas are herbivorous descendants of carnivorous bears whose anatomical thumbs were committed to limited motion suited to their carnivorous lifestyle. However, a Panda's adaptive diet of bamboos requires greater manipulation with the appendages and this required some redesigning. Since the Panda's anatomical thumb was irrevocably committed to a different morphology, they developed an enlarged radial sesamoid bone of their wrist as a false thumb, serving a similar function but having a very different origin. So while the enlarged sesamoid is a sub-optimal structure, it functions and serves the pandas fairly well. And thus change in the panda's biology was in someways limited by their history.
Culture. Now culture is yet another constantly changing aspect of human existence. In fact, it is a well accepted notion that while biology changes in a Darwinian manner, human culture evolves based on Lamarckian principles which entail the inheritance of acquired characters. What it simply means is that the changes/advancements in human culture are transmitted from one generation to another through education, publication, word of mouth etc. Consequently, cultural evolution is faster by orders of magnitude than biological change. Also the basic topologies of cultural evolution is very different from that of biological evolution. While biological evolution constantly diverges without a subsequent rejoining of branches, human culture grows with transmission across lineages - spatially and temporally. We learn from people who are spatially and culturally far away from us and from our past.
So two of fundamental aspects of human existence - biology and culture are both subject to different kinds of "evolution".
Technology however is an odd one here, at least that's how it seemed to me till I read Gould's essay called "The Panda's Thumb". Now this is an essay which I had read a few months back and I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It was thought provoking in many ways.
In this essay Gould builds a case for the existence of the "Principle of Panda's thumb" in the arena of technological development. This is in some ways counter intuitive because technology is aimed at simplification and efficiency and one would think that technology should be able to easily rid anything unsuitable and inefficient in light of newer advancements. After all constraints of genealogy and inheritance do not apply to steel, glass, plastic and therefore to change in technology. Theoretically we should all be able to make a switch to a more efficient technology in a span of a few years. In fact this is one thing that keeps us all updating to newer and newer gadgets - smart phones, laptops, e-readers, operating systems etc etc. So, who would think that some of our technology is also limited and shaped by History... ? Atleast i didn't till I read Gould's essay.
Think about it ! Which parts of the technology that we currently use is actually inefficient and suboptimal but is still used by virtue of history.
Gould does justify his argument in the essay and his argument is based upon something ubiquitous in our lives these days - the keyboard which starts with QWERTY. Now, anyone who works with a keyboard would wonder the weird and counter-intuitive organization of the keyboard. Instead of being alphabetical or based on the usage the current keyboard is efficient in that the frequently used alphabets are least accessible. Consider this - More than 70% of english words can be typed with the letters - DHIATENSOR, and one would imagine that logically they should be the most accessible. But, one look at the keyboard will tell you that they are actually scattered all over the keyboard. For those who type with the eight finger touch typing method, these keys and the vowels are either placed away from the home row or are placed in such a way that they are used by the weaker fingers - like the little pinky finger.
So clearly, by your observation and by that of many others, our present keyboard is inefficient and suboptimal. It is a relic of history that has gotten embedded in our fabric of life in such a way that a change to a more efficient system would cause more disturbance and upheaval than continuing with the same inefficient approach. QWERTY however began as a sensible adaptation with a sound rationale in the early technology of typewriting but soon became a constraint on faster typing as the advances in the technology erased the initial problems which mandated a QWERTY system. A little history at this juncture should clarify the whole point. Typewriters when they evolved suffered with one basic drawback which was that excessive speed or unevenness of stroke would lead to jam two or more keys near the striking point. And if this entanglement is not resolved the subsequent uses of these keys would type a repetition of the key leading to the jam. These problems were magnified in early machines which were constructed so that the keys approached the paper from the underside, invisible to the typist and thus the typist would not know till the end if there was a Jam at some point. As a result a page full of prose could be garbled into a repetition of A's or D's when the keys were jammed. This necessitated that the frequency of the jam be minimized or that the speed of the typing be reduced and this is how the frequently used characters ended up being scattered all over the keyboard. One would imagine however that as technology evolved to make the paper visible to the typist at all times, the keyboard and its organization would have changed to permit greater efficiency. But then through coincidences of history which Gould has elaborately described in his essay, it so happened that the 8 finger touch typing on the QWERTY keyboard became established as the most efficient mode of typing. And thus this feat of anti-engineering in the form of a QWERTY keyboard got successfully carried through history and into our lives as an evolutionary relic of no present day relevance.
This was certainly a great example which nailed Gould's point for me but then despite a lot of thinking, I could not come up with any other examples which substantiated his point of technological advancement being a prisoner of history.
I have contemplated on this for a few months and I have seen that we have adapted to change in many avenues and things have moved forward. The older desktops have now been replaced by the laptops. Windows is being challenged by Mac. Paper cash is being fast replaced by plastic money. Operating systems are being driven out faster than they are being developed. Automobiles are being engineered and re-engineered for fuel economy and emissions. In fact, to my understanding, technology was constantly changing in ways faster than we could comfortably learn them. And so, to my mind, this solo example of a relic in the form of a keyboard (even this was changing as most cellular phones did have an alphabetical keyboard and still do) was not sufficient to justify a whole principle that held technology hostage to history.
But then a couple of weeks back I came across this example of the width of a rail road gauge that perfectly illustrates the same point yet again. I do not have all the evidence to substantiate this example but I do see some truth in this whole chain of thought and that prompted me to finally keep a more open mind to Gould's statement of having more common underlying principles between biological evolution and technological advancement than what is superficially apparent.
So here is the example as I found for your judgement -
"
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did 'they' use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?', you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's asses.) Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel
is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced
transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important?
Ancient horse's asses control almost everything ...
and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else."
Now, while this is a humorous post and is probably an overtly simplifying description of the complex history of the origins of standard railway gauges, it is easy to see that a lot of our present day technology is also in someways trapped by the past. I mean, even if, we have had the standard broad gauge railroad tracks for the past few centuries, we should be able to switch out of them as and when there is a better system but the vast prevalence of the older system and the cost-benefit ratios tilt the scale against such massive change and we end up sticking to the old and the familiar.
I am still not completely convinced in applying Gould "Panda's thumb" principle more generally to technology, but with these two examples, I believe that history, like in all other fields, does mould the future of technological advances too. Sometimes, by acting at the level of economy, sometimes acting at the level of convenience and at other times by acting as blinders which tint our view of the world and limit our perspectives.
In case you are able to think of other such examples and/or opinions on the same, do write in.
