Abstract
I see in the nature of our minds and the character of our problem-solving methodologies a search for simplifying tools that will let us model a complex world (be it biology or society) and get away with it far more often than we might suppose. As it turns out, this broad a reach to mind and world is possible because both turn on common properties of evolved complex adaptive systems. These are in effect “design principles” for the architecture of nature—all of it, from biological systems to ourselves and the technologies that we engineer.
I explore how generative systems may, under some circumstances lead to adaptive radiations, and how the growth of complexity is entailed by their compositional embedding of prior systems, their stabilizing their features as architecture thru a process that I call generative entrenchment. I also explore how modularity has two forms: top-down modularity or “quasi-independence” (Lewontin 1978) in which evolving systems require the possibility of changing parts of the system without scrambling the organization of the rest, and bottom-up modularity in which a stable alphabet of standardized parts can be combined in various ways to generate an adaptive radiation of diverse systems to accomplish different things.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on my engineering studies and work, see the epilogue of Wimsatt (2007a). That volume also provides content to other ideas mentioned in this article, such as robustness and hierarchy.
- 2.
An important exception here is in the work of Brett Calcott, (e.g. 2014) who was a software engineer for a decade before he came into philosophy. His work is important, paradigmatic of the perspective I urge, and complementary to the approaches advocated here.
- 3.
This explains why there should be life cycles, returning to a very similar place at the beginning of development, though not why life-cycles should also start in the particularly simple one-cell zygote. For discussion of this, and the hypothesis that it would serve reduction of transmitted parasites or cancers, see Grosberg and Strathman (1998).
- 4.
This would include William Wimsatt, Wallace Arthur, Jeffrey Schank, and Nicolas Rasmussen in evolutionary and developmental biology, (Wimsatt 1981, 1984, 1986, 2007b, 2015; Schank and Wimsatt 1988, 2000; Wimsatt and Schank 1988, 2004; Rasmussen 1987); Brian Arthur in Economics (1992) and technology (2009), Wimsatt and Griesemer in cultural evolution Griesemer and Wimsatt (1989), Wimsatt and Griesemer (2007), Wimsatt in cognitive development (1986, 2003), the evolution of scientific diagrams (2012), and technology (2007a, 2013a), and linguistics Dove (2012), See Turner (1991) for the transformation of figurative to literal meaning thru entrenchment.
- 5.
Wikipedia entry, American Airlines Flight 191 consulted on February 12, 2019. Some details of the failure are condensed, resulting in a simplified but much shorter description.
- 6.
The size range for mammals is even larger, from 2 g for moles (less than a tenth of an ounce) to over 200 tons for the great blue whale. That is more than nine orders of magnitude! It is astounding that the same basic architecture can be well-adapted over such an enormous size range, but also that it is preserved over such a range. The mass of 200 tons is possible only for a marine animal, whose massive displacement of water helps to support it. A much smaller whale would (and does) smother when beached. The largest land animal, a dinosaur, was just (an astounding) 65 tons, and it is still not clear how it could support such a mass for land locomotion.
- 7.
The “Bithorax” mutant, in Drosophila, gave an extra pair of wings (or restored, since four wings, like the Dragonfly, was the ancestral state) This too was a very deleterious mutant (for the fly), but was historically important and interesting since it seemed to provide such an organized (but dysfunctional) mutant. It proved to be the first mutant of a new class of genes, the Homeobox genes, whose study was crucial in unravelling many major features of development in diverse organisms from yeast to man.
- 8.
- 9.
The problem of the reliability of vacuum tubes was severe. Writers forecast tight limits on the size of computers which above a few thousand tubes would have a tube burn out and break down before they could execute a program. One of von Neumann’s most intriguing papers (1956) was titled “An essay in probabilistic logic: how to build a reliable organism with unreliable components”, and was an attempt to design components that would be more reliable by introducing redundancy of function within the component, and modern memory chips introduce redundancy of function at higher levels.
- 10.
“Look thou o sluggard to the ant; consider her ways and be wise.” Proverbs 6:6 was cited at the bottom of the illustration.
- 11.
I owe this delightful reference to Bret Calcott, who spent a decade as a software engineer.
- 12.
Actually, it is arguable that supporting this task is one of the aims of Object Oriented Programming, by making parts of code more easily portable, extendable, and reusable.
- 13.
In some ways this parallels the mysteries of “deep learning” in connectionist networks. There too, we have improvements in the behavior of a network driven by no architectural plan, but only by positive effects under training with reinforcement.
- 14.
Apparently the crossbows accompanying the thousands of Chinese pottery warriors associated with the tomb of Emperor Chin Shi Wang ca. 200 BC show signs of having been mass-produced, and do have parts that are interchangeable (Williams 2008), anticipating the West by two millenia.
- 15.
Such arms were initially far more expensive, due to the cost of setting up for and de-bugging manufacturing, even though they ultimately became increasingly cheaper as this was accomplished.
- 16.
This term was reintroduced to modern students by Bruno Latour, in his Science and Action (1987), and goes back to the second world war when electronic “black boxes” were incorporated in aircraft and ships to accomplish functions that their users did not need to understand. Norbert Wiener also used it in the introduction to his classic book,. Cybernetics, (1947, 1957) where he contrasted it with a complementary operation which he called “white boxing” in which one synthesized a circuit of known components and architecture that would behave in the same way as an unknown “black box”. This is a systematic methodological variety of the modern procedure of “reverse-engineering”. See also discussion of the increasing black boxing in car user manuals over time beginning with the Ford model T in Wimsatt (2019). (Arthur’s work is also of broader interest, see Arthur 1982, 1984, 1988, 1997).
- 17.
There is perhaps an exception justified here for hard disks or memory that assesses itself, and avoids sectors that it identifies as bad. This is of course a software issue.
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Wimsatt, W.C. (2021). Engineering Design Principles in Natural and Artificial Systems: Generative Entrenchment and Modularity. In: Pirtle, Z., Tomblin, D., Madhavan, G. (eds) Engineering and Philosophy. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70099-7_2
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