Does the history of human technology reveal an evolutionary process at work? In other words, does design evolve? If so, can we take the considerable repertoire of conceptual techniques developed in the field of biological evolution, and adapt them to study of the evolution of design?
As an illustration of this way of thinking about design processes, one might consider the history of the commercial combustion engine vehicle over the last century. A series of mass production ‘saloon’ vehicles, from the Ford Model T onwards, is reminiscent of the familiar school biology diagram of human evolution from the knuckle-walking Proconsul through the heavy-browed muscularity of Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, looking sleek if a little naked in front of a line of more hirsute ancestors.
Such evolutionary trees are often extensively branched; for instance the tree of the vertebrates shows both terrestrial mammals and deep sea fishes to be descended from primitive chordates which lived some 400 million years ago. Likewise, the Formula 1 racing car and the Honda Civic are both ‘descendants’ of the Benz Motor-Wagen of the 1890s. Like the cod and the kangaroo, they have adapted in the meantime to perform quite distinct roles, to fit into very different evolutionary niches. Similar evolutionary sequences may be constructed, with a little imagination, for almost any human artefact. Thus in addition to the evolution of the motor car, we may visualise the evolution of the television, the evolution of the refrigerator, a far longer evolutionary series from Palaeolithic hand axe to the latest kitchen knife, and even a short but rapid evolution of the personal computer.
Other parallels between biological evolution and the history of technological change also spring to mind. For instance, some designs, such as the Beetle or the Mini, have considerable longevity whereas others last scarcely a few years. Similarly, in biology, most species last a few million years at most before extinction or evolution into something else, but there are the Beetles and Minis of the animal kingdom, such as horseshoe crabs and sharks, which seem to have been perennially successful over hundreds of millions of years. In design as in biology, we have our evolutionary successes as well as our extinct species.
However, are these processes of change really evolutionary processes? Evolution, as we shall see, is not a synonym for any kind of change, but requires the three linchpins of transmissibility, variability and selection. Identifying these factors in human culture, and formulating evolutionary explanations of cultural change is the domain of a cross-disciplinary effort termed ‘memetics’.
The term ‘memetics’ is now over twenty years old, and the general concept of cultural evolutionism has deeper roots going back well into the 19th century and even earlier (rev. Gatherer 1997). Nevertheless, its progress has been tortuous and slow. One of the reasons for this is that a sound understanding of evolution is helpful, and this is usually only obtained through pursuit of a degree in biology. Even that is no guarantee - in the words of the great evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky: ‘the problem with evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it, but few do’. In any case, most trained biologists are more interested in purely biological problems, and tend to see the study of culture as at best a secondary issue. On the other hand, the humanists and social scientists who are well versed in culture can be a little suspicious of arrivistes from biology. However, these fears are unjustified. Culture is biologically interesting, as one of the principal ways in which we humans adapt to our environment, and humanists need not fear an invasion of philistine reductionists onto their intellectual territory - evolutionary theory has come a long way since the days of Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists. More importantly, Dobzhansky’s jaundiced comment incorrectly implies that it must be a virtually insurmountable problem to make evolution comprehensible - if even those who claim to understand evolution really do not, then what hope can there be? In fact, the pedagogical difficulty with evolution is that it is often made more complex that it need be. Evolutionary theory is like learning to ride a bicycle, simple but just a little tricky at the beginning. It is certainly easier than some of the concepts that are regarded as de rigueur in a humanist education, such as dialectics, structuralism or the synthetic a priori. Whatever our disciplines, we should all make the effort to understand evolutionary principles. If memetics is correct, then all human culture - science, art, technology and religion - falls within the remit of evolutionary theory. The first step in this process is to consider the nature of evolutionary change, in other words what a process must be like in order to be described as evolutionary.
Evolution is a much used, and abused, word. Sometimes it is taken to be virtually synonymous with change of any variety, sometimes restricted to a specific set of changes that occur in genetic systems, i.e. biological evolution. The former is certainly too loose a definition, and the latter probably too narrow, but there is no absolute consensus. One influential theory is that of Universal Darwinism (Dawkins 1983). This proposes that any informational system that fulfils certain criteria is potentially an evolving system. These criteria are:
a) heritability - the information must be transmissible in some way.
b) variability - although fidelity is important, there must be some scope for errors to creep in, a perfectly replicating system cannot evolve.
c) selection - some variants may be more efficiently replicated or more durable than others; those variants will tend to increase in frequency in the system as a whole. Selection need not be continuous; a variable hereditary system may drift for long periods between episodes of selective pressure, without necessarily losing any of its potential to respond to selection should the situation demand.
Provided, therefore, that selection can act on some variable transmitted information, evolution will occur. In biological systems, as Darwin perceived, these conditions are satisfied. Creatures reproduce themselves, but seldom perfectly; the resulting variability is raw material for the quality-control processes of natural selection. Geneticists of the 20th century went on to demonstrate that heritability in biology is provided by the encoding of structural information in DNA, and that variability is a consequence of the processes of mutation and recombination in that DNA. The exact nature of selective pressures can be difficult to identify, but Darwin’s successors have pursued his intuitions and focused on such factors as competition for food and mates or avoidance of predators. Darwin’s contribution is all the more remarkable in that it was achieved with little or no understanding of the mechanisms of either heritability or variation.
Dawkins’ concept of Universal Darwinism was framed in the form of a thought experiment concerning how life might evolve, assuming that there are conditions sufficiently benign, elsewhere in the universe. Dawkins’ purpose is not so much to make a contribution to the search for extraterrestrial life as to suggest that evolution is not dependent on specifically biological elements such as DNA or organisms, but may apply to any other informational systems where heritability, variability and selection occur. The other informational system that Dawkins has specifically in mind is human culture.
Examples of cultural selection pressures spring to mind without too much difficulty. To return to the evolution of the motor car: firstly the car must run adequately. Secondly, economics requires the product to be affordable by the target consumer. Fuel prices may result in the development of engines designed to maximise efficiency. Legislation or public demand may push for more environmental friendliness. General stylistic tastes may influence vehicle shape etc. Variability is even less of a problem, numerous designs are in the showrooms and on the road at any one time, all competing for a larger future slice of the market. These two factors are relatively straightforward. Heritability, however, is a different matter. Motor cars obviously do not reproduce in the way that organisms do. They need to be constructed by humans, and also designed by humans. There can be little doubt that Proconsul (or a similar species) is the ancestor of Homo sapiens, through thousands of generations of replication, variation and selection. Apes are literally our distant grandparents. However, to consider the Ford Model T the ancestor of the Ford Probe is considerably more problematic.
Since cultural artefacts such as motor cars or refrigerators do not directly reproduce themselves, where does the information for their (re-)production lie? The obvious answer would seem to be in the blueprints upon which their physical form is based. In biological systems the blueprint is present in every genome as DNA (or in a few systems the related molecule RNA), in culture these blueprints are very distant from the objects they encode. In some cases, before production of the artefact has begun, the blueprint may only be in the mind of the designer, or may lie diffusely in the minds of several members of a design team, each of whom is employed to make a contribution to the final form of the object that they are about to create. The implications of this separation of cultural artefact and cultural blueprint need to be spelled out, as they are pivotal to the whole attempt to construct an evolutionary analysis of design.
In biological evolution the 20 million year sequence from Proconsul to modern humans represents the evolution of both physical form and also the informational blueprint, since that information is contained within the physical form of the organism, sequestered as DNA in the nucleus of each cell, and passed to the next generation in the gametes. The evolutionary sequence of the physical form of the motor car in the 20th century contains no such tangible evolution of information, but nevertheless hints at a corresponding evolution of the blueprints in the minds of the designers. Parallel to the apparent evolution of the artefact, we can begin to form a notion of the evolution of the ideas behind the artefact. In short, evolutionary processes in human cultural artefacts imply an evolutionary process in the human mind.
This enables us to proceed to analyse the evolution of the motor car in terms of parallel evolutionary processes. The vehicles themselves, although created by people, are independent physical objects in what we might call the real world. The ideas that resulted in the production of any particular vehicle are abstract notions of form. In the process of design and production, these abstract notions were first created in the minds of the designers, and then used as templates from which the physical form of the motor car was constructed. The mental concept was thus expressed in physical terms. Any individuals looking at the new vehicle, observing its shape, examining its engine or driving it, will develop an abstract idea of that vehicle in their minds, based on the physical form with which they are presented. There need not even be a first-hand interaction with the artefact, the concept may be passed purely by word of mouth, with or without the aid of a few sketches or photographs. If the individuals involved are themselves designers, they may use some of that concept in the production of their own new designs. There is thus a continual interaction between the conceptual and the physical, between vague ideas in designers’ heads and the final physical manifestation of those ideas. Conceptual evolution can also occur on its own, as ideas are passed from individual to individual without ever taking material form as a finished motor car or refrigerator, but nevertheless existing in the mind as vague plans and dreams. The physical evolution of artefacts, however, cannot be independent, as there must always be a conceptual design for any artefact. Refrigerators per se do not evolve, but the design of a refrigerator does.
The evolutionary analysis of human culture was given a further twist by Dawkins’ (1976) coining of the term meme. This was originally posited as any ‘cultural replicator’, implying that both mental blueprints and artefacts are memes, but was later (Dawkins 1982) restricted to a replicating informational pattern in the brain. Any resulting artefacts or behaviours are considered to be physical manifestations of those memes, part of the ‘extended phenotype’ of the organism. The memetic informational unit in the brain is not defined other than by its ability to replicate, that is to find itself instantiated in another brain. It therefore need not be precisely the same in any two individuals. A meme for tying a Windsor knot, for instance, will not involve exactly the same pattern of neurological activity in any two individuals tying the knot. However, there must presumably be some neuronal correspondence in order for the behavioural activity of Windsor knot tying to be effectively replicated. The meme is the mental blueprint for the knot. It is not a rigid unit of mental structure, but a functional definition of transmitted, variable cultural information. Transmission and variation will, as we have seen, produce evolution when subjected to selective pressure. Memetic evolution is the evolution of mental blueprints for physical objects or behaviours.
If this was all there was to it, the meme concept would simply have restated the old case for cultural evolution. However, by deliberately punning ‘meme’ on ‘gene’, Dawkins suggests that the range of analytical approaches developed in post-war genetics should also be applicable to the renovation of the 19th century edifice of cultural evolutionism. The principal thesis of the memetic approach is that we should focus on the memes themselves rather than on the people who have the memes in their minds, just as evolutionary geneticists now focus on the genes themselves rather than the organisms that are their temporary vehicles. Valid questions which may be posed within a memetic framework are such things as: why is one idea transmitted more rapidly and efficiently than another? Why are some ideas long-lived and others rapidly dated? How does variability appear in our ideas? What selective factors cause some ideas to spread and others to disappear?
A more precise definition of the meme, beyond saying that it is simply a replicating unit of culture either physical or mental, is not available, nor is it easy to see how one might be formulated. This is often seen as a weakness of the theory, but it need not be. Since the gene is no longer atomistically defined but has, in the era of molecular biology, acquired a flexibility in both size and form, neither is it necessary that a term like the meme should imply any rigid inheritance of indivisible units of culture. The meme-gene analogy is to a certain extent simply the revival of the bio-cultural analogy of 19th century anthropology, but it is also much more than that. It is the bio-cultural analogy refurbished in the light of a century of genetics and molecular biology. Part of that refurbishment package is the realisation that the unit of selection can be very small - in genetic terms a gene rather than the organism that carries it, in memetic terms a meme rather than the individual mind that carries it. However, another part of the package is the reassurance that units of selection are of variable size and need not be rigidly atomistic. Just as modern molecular genetics can deal with any entity between a single nucleotide informational ‘bit’ to an entire genome, so can memetics consider everything from the simplest proposition to an entire religion. Memetics is also more than the old bio-cultural analogy in that the meme is taken literally to be a replicator. Therefore memeticists do not merely say that culture is like biology, but that both are genuine evolutionary systems in their own right. It might equally be maintained that biology is like culture. If this seems too absurd a claim, it is worth recalling that Darwin may have had precisely this thought when he pondered Sir William Jones’s work on ‘homology by descent’ in the Indo-European languages. It was as a consequence of this study that Darwin was persuaded to entertain the same notion concerning the relationships of species (Darwin 1985, p.406).
Geneticists were quick to turn their theoretical tools onto the processes of memetics, and an impressive body of mathematical theory rapidly developed (e.g. Richerson and Boyd 1978, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Lumsden and Wilson 1981). Many of these authors took issue with some parts of the meme concept, and all coined their own alternative terminologies; for instance culturgen, divided into mentifacts and artifacts, by Lumsden and Wilson or culture-types by Richerson and Boyd, but their ideas contain more points of agreement than disagreement (rev. Ball 1984). However, empirical attempts to verify or deny some of the predictions of memetic theory have been a little slower in appearing. The major part of this work has been carried out on animals, whose cultural repertoire is more limited and thus less confusing to study. One particularly fruitful area has been birdsong (Payne et al 1988, Lynch et al 1989, Lynch and Baker 1993, 1994, Ficken and Popp 1995). Human memetics has been energetically examined by Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues (Cavalli-Sforza et al 1982, 1983, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1983, Hewlett and Cavalli-Sforza 1986, rev. by Cavalli-Sforza 1986) from whose school comes the most thorough study to date (Guglielmino et al 1995). This examines several dozen memes in a wide variety of West African populations, demonstrating that transmission of memes is mostly within a local context e.g. family or village groups, and that accumulation of variability is quite slow. Only a small proportion of the traits were correlated with the environment, which was taken to be indicative of selective pressures. Identification of genuine cultural adaptation seems to be the greatest current challenge to any empirical memetics on humans. Perhaps the Cavalli-Sforza school would find more obvious selection pressures if they were to confine their analysis to technology instead of attempting to analyse cultures in their entirety. The very breadth of their approach means that they are forced to consider aspects of culture such as religion, art and language, where selection may be only intermittent at best.
For Pocklington and Best (1997) the solution to this problem is to limit the field of study, to extract a single aspect of human culture that is easily analysable. These authors concentrate on the statistical properties of word usage in NetNews (the ‘noticeboard’ of the Internet, where users can ‘post’ text contributions in lists sorted by field of interest). They demonstrate that certain words or combinations of words appear to replicate with high efficiency from one news posting to another.
One of the differences, so the classic argument runs, between a design process and an evolutionary process is the apparent autonomy of the designer, who is able to make direct decisions about the form a design will take. The designer can, at least in theory, rip up the basic design and seek to produce something entirely novel. Design is thus apparently both directional and able to take enormous leaps (in evolutionary jargon, ‘saltatory’). This is very far from the random generation of diversity and slow phenotypic change in biological evolutionary processes. Only two mechanisms are generally considered available for the generation of evolutionary variability. One is mutation and the other recombination. The latter may be likened to the shuffling of a pack of cards. The order of the units is changed, new combinations are generated, but the individual units stay the same. Mutation, by contrast, is the piecemeal alteration of the units, such as taking a card and changing it from a jack to a queen or from clubs to spades. In a memetic context, recombination can be seen in, for instance, the fusion of two artistic styles, and mutation in small changes in technique and taste within those styles.
Crucially, memetics requires these processes to occur at random, just as the analogous process are random in biological systems. There is no Grand Designer in biological evolution - hence the religious furore that surrounded Darwin’s work in the 19th century. It would therefore appear that there is no space for designers in memetic evolution. Since there obviously are people who describe themselves as designers, artists, composers or creators of diverse kinds, the conclusion is often reached that Darwinism is therefore strictly biological and cannot be applied to culture (eg. the terse comment of O’Hear (1995) in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy). But are we ascribing an originality to ourselves in our design functions which is not justified by an objective examination of the way culture evolves? This author here proposes that the apparent directionality and saltationality of design are consequences of the selective process, and occur several steps downstream of the generation of memetic diversity. It must be remembered that design is apparent in nature as well, i.e. in genetic systems; however, this ‘design’ is a consequence of selection, the underlying generation of novel genetic variation is random. The same is true in memetics. To declare, as some would, that culture is different to a genetic system because it exhibits directional change (because, as O’Hear maintains, it is teleological) is to misunderstand both culture and biology. What then is the mechanism by which memetic variation appears?
The memetic model proposes that the brain is a generator of random novelty. The resources for this factory of cultural innovation are drawn from the total cultural heritage available to the individual. This may be seen as the meme pool, by analogy to the corresponding gene pool of genetics. No single person holds this entire meme pool in the mind at any one time. Rather, we are immersed in it. It is all around us in the material world of our cultural artefacts, in books and libraries and increasingly on computers, and also in the discourse we have with our fellow human beings. Our individual minds are thus continually drawing memes from this pool and using them to throw up novel memes. Because of the randomness of this process, much of this new memetic variability may often be bizarre, irrelevant or banal. Here we are very close to the territory of William James and the ‘stream of consciousness’. Occasionally, however, perhaps very occasionally, useful novelty is generated by mutation and recombination and it can then be transformed into objective cultural innovation or transmitted to other individuals. We therefore return memes to the meme pool just as we siphon them off. The often fragmentary and incoherent nature of the stream of consciousness now appears more purposeful as its primary aim is to generate random novelty rather than to reinforce the familiar, the comprehensible or the regular. It is precisely because we only tend to efficiently remember that which is comprehensible and useful memetic novelty, that the process appears to have a direction.
When a problem presents itself to the designer, it is often possible immediately to see the answer. This may be taken to infer that the problem has in fact already been solved, that cultural resources in the meme pool are available to deal with the problem. Alternatively it may be that only a small memetic mutation or recombination is sufficient to produce the required novelty. The resulting design solution may be very well suited to the problem in hand, and subsequently spread rapidly through the material world of things - perhaps as a mass-produced problem-solving artefact, and rapidly through the meme pool as a new meme available to all. The designer is here acting as a generator of memetic diversity, a filter of that diversity (the first selective force acting on new memes), and finally a transmitter of those novel memes that have passed that first selection test.
The second of these three points merits further consideration. One popular technique for problem solving is the ‘brainstorming’ session, which was developed by Alex Osborn in 1938 (rev. Holt 1996). Ideas are poured forth onto paper, often by groups of highly imaginative and intelligent individuals, with the strict rule that no criticism be offered at this initial productive stage of the process. Once the flow of novelty has begun to flag, the brainstorming group begins to process its creations, discarding the trivial and the absurd, weighing up the more plausible options and hoping for a consensus in the production of ‘a good idea’. Brainstorming as thus described is simply a group technique. However, memetics proposes that this is in fact what the individual brain is doing all the time. The first selective pressure that a new meme is exposed to is whether it makes sense to the individual who ‘thought of it’. Many a brilliant idea is probably consigned to oblivion because that test is failed. The function of the designer is not to produce novel memes in the sense of increasing the memetic mutation and recombination rate, not to be an individual super-brainstormer, we are all doing that all the time anyway, but to be the first step in the application of selective pressure to those ideas. (Memeticists, with our evolutionary background and pretensions to hold onto our scientific stance, generally have little positive to say concerning Freud. However, in this context, it seems that the borderline between the unconscious and the conscious may be found in the moment that a novel meme passes its first selection test and enters the domain of comprehensibility.)
Some designers may feel that this belittles their individual contribution to culture. Some philosophers may feel that it fails to deal with ‘intentionality’, i.e. the fact that thought is always ‘about something’ rather than merely thinking-in-itself. Outside of some forms of meditational practice which are designed to cultivate what may be termed a non-specific awareness, it does seem as if thought always consists of a thinker-as-subject having thoughts about some object. A designer thus thinks about the artefact under construction and makes decisions regarding this structure etc. However, memetics insists that this intentionality, this sense of subjectivity, is an illusion produced by selection, just as the notion of design in nature is an illusion produced by selection. The impression of intentionality may be produced by the rapid sequence of problem and solution. However, the solution was not so much derived by the sheer effort of the designer as intentional subject, but as a meme extracted from the meme pool, quickly mutated and recombined in the brain of the designer, and the results of the process applied to the problem in hand. The designer may protest: ‘But I solved it’, but the memeticist would reply: ‘No, you were the brain/processing unit in which the cultural solution to the problem arranged itself’. Furthermore, the constant process of memetic shuffling and mutating in our minds is continually producing solutions to problems that have not yet been posed (“But what is it for?”, as Napoleon is reputed to have said to Alessandro Volta). The moment of design is the moment that solution comes together with problem for the first time. If this seems implausible, it may be worth considering those situations where problems are not readily forthcoming. Often the most unusual thought processes give rise to the solution: the “Eureka!” of Archimedes as the water flowed over the sides of his bath, or Kekulé’s solution to the benzene ring problem in a dream of a snake eating its own tail. Here the random diversity generator of the brain is on more open display and its capriciousness is more evident.
Why then are some individuals more talented designers than others? The memetic answer would be that different brains have a greater information sifting and pattern recognition capacity. Some algorithms are more efficient than others, but nevertheless an algorithm exhibits no intentionality. Our varying talents are frequently a reflection of the breadth of culture to which we have been exposed. The more of the meme pool we can download, the more material our minds have to work on and the greater the range of options they can generate. This has some implications for educationalists, as it certainly suggests that as far as ‘creativity’ is concerned, breadth of education is preferable to narrow training in specific tasks.
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) provides an interesting case history in design ‘genius’ (Lutyk 1989). Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was run on a combination of his own idiosyncratic originality and the technical prowess and practicality of the engineers and scientists with whom he surrounded himself. Ideas thrown out by the maestro were left to the underlings to troubleshoot and optimise. However, Edison himself had little academic training and an aversion to mathematics. The secret of his phenomenal success seems to have been the practical application of earlier scientific developments, in particular those of Michael Faraday, by whom he was profoundly influenced. Edison displayed an openness to memes that were already in circulation, making to a large extent discoveries that were waiting to be made. It may seem churlish to speak of a great inventor in this way, but only to those who are wedded to the idea of the designer as demiurgic auteur.
Edison’s determination to exhaust the possible applications of 19th century physics is revealed by the inventions that failed. Some, like the electric car powered by an alkaline storage battery, were well-formed memes (‘good ideas’) that nevertheless failed under strong memetic selection pressures - in this case economic ones. Others, like concrete furniture, were truly memetic mutants. Only an imagination devoted to the expression of every possible memetic variant could have produced such a bizarre concept. At other times, the randomness of his approach resulted in superb innovations that were not followed up. For instance, despite discovering the vacuum tube, Edison seemed scarcely to comprehend the enormous potential of this breakthrough, and left it to others to develop the electronics industry, which he despised to his dying day. At his death he left 3.5 million pages of notebooks and 1093 patents. Memetic success, like success in any evolutionary system, relies upon selection, and the more variability the higher the likelihood that an advantageous mutant will be found.
The memetic theory also helps to explain how some discoveries tend to happen simultaneously, often in different parts of the world. Many individuals will have similar memes appearing in their brains at any one moment. Only when these memes are in a situation where there is potential for them to be selected, which initially simply means that they must make sense, will they transfer efficiently into the public domain. Cultures often arrive at stages where there are discoveries ‘waiting to happen’. What is then required is less a supreme creative inspiration than the clicking into place of the final meme necessary for the technical innovation to be produced. A good example of this is the independent development of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. The crucial point, as it was also with the work of Edison discussed above, was that the basic science had already been developed. In the case of photography, the relevant preceding memes were the study of the properties of sodium thiosulphate by Sir John Herschel, and of light-sensitive chemicals by Joseph Niépce. With these two memes already in place, it was simply a matter of memetic recombination to bring them together and produce the principle of photography. Another salient example is provided by Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain, who were able to develop jet engines simultaneously and independently.
Often, old memes can make a comeback. Even when an idea is no longer part of the everyday usage of a culture, the information may well still be stored in libraries and other repositories, and can be recycled when conditions are again favourable. There is a clear parallel between the retrieval and refurbishment of old memes and Susumu Ohno’s (1970) concept of ‘junk DNA’. This theory, which is well supported by molecular evidence, posits that random duplicational events in the genome create copies of genes. These copies are functionally redundant, and may accumulate mutations to become non-functional ‘pseudogenes’. Ohno observed that a substantial proportion of the genome may be composed of such junk DNA in varying states of post-duplicational ‘decay’, and proposed that it may occasionally return to functionality by random mutation. If this novel function is advantageous to the organism, it will be selected. Vestigial, or ‘junk’ genes are thus important potential sources of new function for the organism. Similarly, vestigial, half-forgotten or rarely thought, memes can persist in the long-term storage of a culture, in libraries or in oral folklore, waiting for their contents to be cannibalised in the construction of new memes.
There are dozens of examples of cases where ‘junk memes’, mere curiosities of the history of ideas, have been dusted off and returned to use in a new context. This happens again and again in both the arts and the sciences. For instance, the cosmology formulated by Copernicus in the 15th century was derived in part from pre-Aristotelian cosmologies which had been obsolete for some 1800 years. More recently, Mendelian genetics languished in obscurity for some forty years before its ‘rediscovery’ by Bateson, Correns and De Vries at the turn of the century. The development of the computer has provided three very good examples of this phenomenon, where three hitherto obscure 19th century intellectuals were found to have made key discoveries; the concept of the higher-level programming language extracted from the work of Augusta Ada Lovelace (whose contribution is honoured by naming one language ADA), the general design and conception of the computer based on the work of Lovelace’s collaborator Charles Babbage, and the mathematical logic required for programming based on the work of George Boole. Of course these three junk memes were processed through the hands of Grace Murray Hopper, John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, respectively, before they were quite ready for contemporary use, but once again the role of the designer is in handling memetic resources rather than inventing afresh.
Anyone who relishes the grand concept of the designer as creator, solving insuperable technical difficulties by sheer force of concentrated intellectual power, will find the picture presented in this chapter difficult to accept. However, it must be appreciated that such a characterisation of design genius is very much a product of the growth of individualism during the Renaissance (Cassirer et al. 1948). This individualism, a growth in importance of the ego, is itself a meme that would merit further study. Life in the pre-individualist world had some aspects that seem strange today. For instance, prior to around 1300, it was not uncommon for philosophers to attribute their works to Aristotle or some other giant of the past, in order to ensure a wider readership. Such a selfless elevation of the meme above its ‘creator’ indicates a relationship between thinker and thought, very different to that which exists today. Modern intellectuals are usually so involved in promoting their own achievements (and who can blame them if unemployment is the alternative?) that a such voluntary surrendering of credit would be unthinkable nowadays. No late 20th century mathematician who thought she had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem would fancifully claim to have found the solution in Turing’s lost notebooks. Indeed, if such a notebook did exist, with the solution inside, it would probably be destroyed by its discoverer after the immortality-granting solution had been safely copied onto a fresh sheet of paper.
This process of the deification of the ‘creative individual’ became apparent in the arts as well as in philosophy. Ludwig van Beethoven was the first truly monstrous ego in music, who turned the stereotype of the composer from skilful, obliging artisan to difficult, tormented genius virtually overnight, and his self-regard has been turned into a model of what artistic genius should be. Nevertheless, he carried a notebook with him everywhere, in order to annotate the musical fragments that sporadically appeared in his mind, before they vanished from his memory. If he had really created them, they would surely have had the decency to remain with their originator a little longer before evaporating. Sometimes even Beethoven had to admit that the music seemed to compose itself, but his solution to this apparent conundrum was divine inspiration - a convenient alternative to modesty. Scientists, too, are often inspired by examples of creative genius, in their case by the intense brooding figure of Isaac Newton, whose method involved thinking about problems ‘for a long time’, not eating for several days etc. However, Louis Pasteur, surely in his own way scarcely a lesser figure than Newton, was able to say that ‘chance favours the prepared mind’. Like his contemporary Edison, Pasteur had a superbly prepared mind, but the engine of creativity in both cases (as indeed with Beethoven), was chance, as Pasteur recognised. Mutation is always random, in memetics as much as in genetics.
Memetics seeks to provide a Darwinian framework for the evolution of culture. The art and science of design are elements of that total evolving culture, and therefore as subject to Darwinian precepts as any other aspect of that culture. As this chapter has shown, in order for a process to be truly Darwinian, the following criteria need to be fulfilled:
· Cultural information must be transmitted. This presents no particular problem, as verbal communication, writing and electronic media all qualify as transmission. All of these media are used in the design process.
· Some selection pressures must operate on that cultural information. Most culture may well be free from such pressure, or only exposed to it intermittently. However, as far as technology is concerned, the material advantages it can bring seem to have ensured consistent selection pressure for design improvements. Memetics has pretensions to explain all culture, but the memetics of engineering is certainly more approachable than the memetics of art.
· Variation, in other words cultural novelty, must be random. This is the most difficult point, but a close examination of most episodes in the history of technical innovation will demonstrate the stumbling, coincidental, indeed accidental, nature of our material progress.
Combining the above we arrive at the general statement:
· If the design process begins with the production of novel ideas generated from random combinations and mutations of existing ideas, continues with selection of those ideas for applicability to the problem in hand, and then proceeds to the (not necessarily accurate) transmission of those ideas, then the conditions necessary for an evolutionary process exist. That, in a nutshell, is the basis for an evolutionary theory of the design process.
Those who are disturbed by the implication of this theory, that creativity is a more random and messier process than we might care to admit, may console themselves with the thought that the dignity of the designer is not entirely forfeit. The meme pool is something to which all are capable of contributing, even if our contributions are more accidental than we may realise. Our memes are derived from the meme pool, pass through us in a brief moment and return to the meme pool. Human culture is a seething mass of memes which belongs to all of us. Bickering over originality, and regret over lost opportunities, are understandable human feelings, but the memes are what matter. Descartes’ ‘cogito, ergo sum’, was recast by Lichtenberg as: ‘es denkt’, it thinks (Vesey 1964). In fact ‘it thinks’ in all of us. The trick of creativity to recognise the novelty of our own thoughts.
Ball , J.A. (1984) “Memes as replicators.” Ethology and Sociobiology 5, 145-161.
Cassirer, E., Kristeller, P.O. and Randall, J.H. (1948) eds. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. London: The University of Chicago Press Ltd.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1986) “Cultural evolution.” American Zoologist, 26, 845-855.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Feldman, M.W. (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Monographs in Population Biology, 16. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Feldman, M.W. (1983) “Cultural versus genetic adaptation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 80, 4993-4996
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Feldman, M.W., Chen, K.H. & Dornbusch, S.M. (1982) “Theory and observation in cultural transmission.” Science, 218, 19-27.
Cavalli-Sforza, L., Feldman, M., Dornbusch, S. & Chen, K.H. (1983) “Anthropology and cultural transmission.” Nature, 304, 124.
Darwin, C. (1985) The Origin of Species, reprint of 1st edition (1859), ed. Burrow, J.W. London: Penguin.
Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Paperback edition 1983. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1983) “Universal Darwinism.” In Bendall, D.S., ed., Evolution from Molecules to Men. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ficken, M.S. & Popp, J.W. (1995) “Long-term persistence of a culturally transmitted vocalization of the black-capped chickadee.” Animal Behaviour, 50, 683-693.
Gatherer, D. (1997) “Macromemetics: towards a framework for the reunification of philosophy”. Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 1 (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/)
Guglielmino, C.R., Viganotti, C., Hewlett, B. & Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1995) “Cultural variation in Africa - role of mechanisms of transmission and adaptation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92, 7585-7589.
Hewlett, B.S. and Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1986) “Cultural transmission amongst Aka pygmies.” American Anthropologist 88, 922-934.
Holt, K. (1996) “Brainstorming - from classics to electronics.” Journal of Engineering Design, 7, 77-82.
Lutyk, C.B. (1989) “Thomas Alva Edison”. In: Newhouse, E.L. (ed.) Inventors and Discoveries: Changing Our World. National Geographic Society, Washington DC. pp 56-61.
Lynch, A. & Baker, A.J. (1993) “A population memetics approach to cultural evolution in chaffinch song - meme diversity within populations.” American Naturalist, 141, 597-620.
Lynch, A. & Baker, A.J. (1994) “A population memetics approach to cultural evolution in chaffinch song - differentiation among populations.” Evolution, 48, 351-359.
Lynch, A., Plunkett, G.M., Baker, A.J. & Jenkins, P.F. (1989) “A model of cultural evolution of chaffinch song derived with the meme concept.” American Naturalist, 133, 634-653.
Lumsden, C.J. & Wilson, E.O. (1981) Genes, Mind and Culture: the Co-evolutionary Process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
O’Hear, A. (1995) “Darwinism.” In: Honderich, T. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Payne, R.B., Payne, L.L. & Doehlert, S.M. (1988) “Biological and cultural success of song memes in indigo buntings.” Ecology, 69, 104-117.
Pocklington, R. and Best, M.L. (1997) “Cultural evolution and units of selection in replicating text.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 188, 79-87.
Richerson, P.J. & Boyd, R. (1978) “A dual inheritance model of the human evolutionary process I: basic postulates and a simple model.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 1, 127
Vesey, G.N.A. (1964) ed. Body and Mind. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.