I think you have a very inflated perception of what happens, fundamentally, during a design development process compared to trial and error!
I have seven year old twin boys. About six months ago they came to me and asked if they could have an increase to their allowance (spending money). I told them ‘no’, but suggested a way that they could maybe make a little extra. I offered to buy each of them an
Easy Bake Oven, and suggested that they could make tasty treats and sell them to their mates. I explained that if they made a modest profit on each snack they sold they could then buy higher-quality ingedients and make even better things to eat. This appealed to them, so I bought two
Easy Bake Ovens and left them to it in their respective playrooms.
After a few days Ollie came to me with a handful of loose change and explained that it was the proceeds from his food sales. He asked if I could buy some more recipe ingredients for him with it. He even handed to me a list of what recipe ingredients he wanted! So, I went ahead and bought them for him. A few days later a similar thing happened, but he had even more cash this time, and an even longer list of required ingredients. This pattern continued, and it seemed that Ollie was building himself a little gourmet empire. Meantime, Stan was nowhere to be seen.
This continued for about six months, after which I decided to sit the boys down and find out how they’d been doing. Ollie proceeded to explain that he’d started by following the cook book and made his first basic dessert. It was a simple cupcake. He explained that his mates at school had been impressed and one of them had bought it from him. He’d come home and made more cupcakes for his mates, who had willingly handed over their cash. Ollie explained that after a while he’d decided to have a go at the next, slightly more complex recipe in the cook book. This recipe expanded on the dessert idea by adding a first course to the meal. He’d taken a full tray of meals to school to discover that they were even more popular than just dessert. His mates obviously found an entree with dessert to be more satisfying than just a simple cupcake, and, indeed, more nutritious than buying lollies instead! Ollie stopped making just desserts and concentrated on the entrees and appetizers, too. Nobody was interested in a simple cupcake any longer. He jokingly explained to us how he’d considered the simple cupcake to have gone ‘extinct’, obviously drawing an analogy to the dinosaurs he was then learning about. This pattern had continued and he was now designing three course meals, such as pan seared
foie gras with a potato shallot pancake in a cider reduction followed by grilled pork loin with mango pecan chutney accompanied by a mesclun salad with gorgonzola and pears, finishing with a chocolate pistachio truffle beignet.
Meanwhile, whilst Ollie was explaining all of this, Stan was looking increasingly puzzled. I asked him what was wrong. He explained that there hadn’t even been a cook book included with his
Easy Bake Oven. He hadn’t even known he should have had one. So I asked him how he’d first gone about making something to eat. Sam explained how he hadn't felt well that day, had drunk quite a bit of water and, then, vomited onto his shoes, and that he’d taken the shoes to school to try to sell them. Understandably everyone thought that was pretty stupid. Then Stan explained how later, purely by chance, he’d happened to throw up into an aluminum bowl and set it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. In the process he'd knocked over an open can of cherry pie filling, some of which ended up spilling into the bowl Stan had set there. He’d taken this aluminum bowl to school and one of his classmates (a coprophagist with a sweet tooth) had shown great interest, so much so that he bought the entire bowl from Stan. Stan then proceeded to arrange simple fare through hurling minestrone, selling that to his erstwhile geophagous mates. Obviously, his mates saw a benefit in what he was creating and elected to spend their money on "salad dressing" over lollies and football cards. Stan then went on to explain that after a while he’d decided to experiment a little by eating scented laundry detergent before vomiting. Unfortunately, this ambergris proved to be less popular, as the extra foam and suds just got in the way and made the "balsamic vinegar" that much more difficult to dribble over their
crème caramel.
Stan jokingly commented that most of his "recipes" had gone extinct almost immediately. I thought it was good that he could still see a funny side to all of this. However, Stan explained that after a few weeks he had, again by chance, happened to develop renal failure and purged an ounce of colloidal silver. When he’d taken that to school all the boys suddenly showed renewed interest, just as they had with Ollie’s Roquefort blue cheese in phyllo with Chardonnay reduction.
The more Stan explained the pattern of his growth the more it became apparent that it had followed essentially the same as Ollie’s, even if at a somewhat different rate of development. Ollie had followed the cook book, but Stan had "driven the bus". It also turned out that Stan’s random diet of dirt and clay had, in fact, inspired the design of a polyethylene waste trap for the U-bend of a sink that will be appearing in next month's
Popular Mechanics. Ollie found it all most interesting, as it gave him ideas for some antacids, incorporating some of the discoveries that Sam had made purely by chance.
So, we concluded the discussion with both Stan and Ollie realizing that they were, in fact, both developing essentially the same culinary art. The only difference was that Stan, because of the absence of intent and forethought, was simply making random changes to the bacterial synthesis of nutrients, particularly B group vitamins and vitamin K in the colon and, therefore, taking far longer to vomit live frogs than Ollie. Needless to say, Ollie has now relinquished his
Easy Bake Oven to Stan; Ollie has already progressed beyond it and has no further need for it.
What this story clearly demonstrates is:
1. Intent and forethought are not necessary for seemingly intelligent
human design to develop. Mamma mia, that's a spicy meatball!
2. Natural selection and artificial selection are closely comparable. The ability of any particular ‘species/design’ to thrive is determined by its 'predisposition' to be preferentially selected over the competition, which is driven by how well equipped it is to perform in any particular environment given its particular characteristics and features. No intentional and thoughtful external agent is necessary; the environment, whatever that may cough up, is the agent in both cases.
3. Self-replication has no greater inherent qualities than simple copying. Whether such replication is is discharged naturally or artificially doesn't matter. What does matter is whether the environment is such that survival is able to blow grits over extinction thereby enabling replication (copying) simply to occur.
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