2010 May–June 183www.americanscientist.org
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Designing Minds
Edward A. Wasserman and Mark S. Blumberg
The basic argument of intel-
ligent design was famously set
forth in the watchmaker analogy of
William Paley in 1802: The complex-
ity and functionality of a watch im-
ply a watchmaker; analogously, the
complexity and functionality of living
things also imply a designer, albeit one
vastly more potent than a mere watch-
maker. This argument rests on a sim-
ple analogy between the design of hu-
man artifacts and the design of natural
forms. For the analogy to work, we
must first accept that we design our
inventions with purpose and foresight.
On this point, most evolutionists and
creationists agree. What distinguish-
es these two camps is that, when ac-
counting for the origin of living things,
proponents of intelligent design sum-
mon a divine creator, whereas evolu-
tionists credit natural selection. Thus,
evolutionists share with creationists
the same understanding of design; they
differ only in how they invoke it.
Discussions of design are promi-
nent in the writings of evolutionists
from Darwin to Dawkins. Ponder-
ing the implications of his theory of
natural selection for Paley’s “old ar-
gument of design in nature,” Charles
Darwin wrote in his autobiography
that we can no longer argue that “the
beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must
have been made by an intelligent be-
ing, like the hinge of a door by man.
There seems to be no more design in
the variability of organic beings and
in the action of natural selection, than
in the course which the wind blows.
Everything in nature is the result of
fixed laws.” A century later, Richard
Dawkins pursued the issue of design
and divided the world “into things
that look designed (such as birds and
airliners) and things that don’t (rocks
and mountains).” He further divided
those things that look designed into
“those that really are designed (sub-
marines and tin openers) and those
that aren’t (sharks and hedgehogs).”
What did Dawkins mean when he
wrote of things that “really are de-
signed”? In The Blind Watchmaker, he
provided a clear answer: “All appear-
ances to the contrary, the only watch-
maker in nature is the blind forces of
physics….A true watchmaker has fore-
sight: He designs his cogs and springs,
and plans their interconnections, with
a future purpose in his mind’s eye”
[emphasis added].
Such uncritical acceptance of pur-
pose and foresight in human design
may well be unwise. After all, do we
really know how door hinges and
can openers were created? In fact,
we may know less about the origins
of these everyday contrivances than
we know about the origins of bivalve
shells, sharks and hedgehogs. By at-
tributing the origins of animals and
artifacts to different kinds of design-
ers—one blind, the other intelligent—
both Darwin and Dawkins lapse into
the same kind of “designer thinking”
that ensnared creationists like Paley.
Such thinking rests on the familiarity
and deceptive simplicity of mentalis-
tic explanations of behavior, as when
Dawkins uncritically appeals to the
foresight and purpose of the watch-
maker rather than entertaining possi-
bly deeper questions about the origins
of the watch. He may be giving human
designers too much credit.
Form Follows Failure
The engineer Henry Petroski has writ-
ten extensively and convincingly about
our often misguided characterizations
of the origins of human inventions. In
The Evolution of Useful Things (1993),
Petroski argues that artifacts “do not
spring fully formed from the mind
of some maker but, rather, become
shaped and reshaped through the
(principally negative) experiences of
their users….” In short, form follows
failure, not function.
And what about those failures? It
is all too easy to forget that the first
attempts at flight featured impossible
aircraft with flappable wings, man-
of-war sails, and box-kite frames. Do
we see the origins of today’s jumbo
jets in those early, comical failures?
Similarly, do we appreciate the knowl-
edge gained by bridge builders from
studying the undulating destruction of
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Wash-
ington or, more recently, the wobbling
of the Millennium Bridge in London?
Do we understand that even the most
tragic failures—such as the Hyatt Re-
gency walkway collapse in Kansas
City or the Challenger space shuttle
explosion—are the consequences of
human tinkering on a grand scale?
Beginning with the very first glimpse
of a problem or an opportunity, such
failures—whether large or small, trag-
ic or comic—prompt the fine-tuning
and retrofitting that, over time, have
shaped even our greatest engineering
achievements, from Egyptian pyra-
mids to medieval cathedrals to sus-
pension bridges to spacecraft.
Edward A. Wasserman (ed-wasserman@uiowa.edu) is
Dewey B. and Velma P. Stuit Professor of Experimen-
tal Psychology at the University of Iowa and coeditor
with Thomas Zentall of Comparative Cognition:
Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence
(Oxford University Press, 2006). Mark S. Blumberg
Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa, edi-
tor-in-chief of Behavioral Neuroscience and author
most recently of Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies
Tell Us About Development and Evolution (Ox-
ford University Press, 2009). Both are members of the
Delta Center at the University of Iowa, dedicated to the
investigation of learning, development, and change.
How should we
explain the origins of
novel behaviors?
