Unfit for Survival
The Fatal Flaws of Natural Selection
by Paul A. Nelson
Imagine a calm and sunny afternoon in early summer. You are sitting on a bench on the north bank of the Charles River, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). You have read today’s Boston Globe, and now, gazing abstractedly across the river at the passing rowers and distant traffic, you would like nothing better than to drift off into a daydream. Unfortunately a pesky fly has come buzzing around the bench. Fortunately the Globe is available. You take aim, and the calm returns.
Only for a moment, however. Suddenly you are surrounded by a large group of panting, ashen-faced graduate students. They stare at you in horrified disbelief, while one of them bends to retrieve the remains of the fly from the grass. “Our fly . . .” he stammers in a shocked tone. “You smashed our fly!”
All right, so you’re not an entomologist. But (you say in your defense) does one fly more or less make any difference to the global flying insect census?
In fact, what you just unwittingly destroyed was no ordinary fly. It was the only working prototype of MIT’s Artificial Insect Project. This ingenious construction of microscopic motors and sensors, synthetic tissues, and thousands of lines of complicated programming is—or, rather, was—a marvel of nanotechnology. Indeed, had you looked carefully before swinging that rolled-up newspaper, you might have noticed that this was no ordinary fly.
Its microscopic primary motors, although cooled by sophisticated, specially formulated lubricants, tended to overheat with long use. The synthetic membrane that formed its wings would tear at high speeds, causing aerodynamic instability; hence, the fly often crashed into things. Its complex behavioral software required frequent debugging. No one knew, in fact, if the artificial fly would work at all from one day to the next—unlike the ordinary flies that we destroy with hardly a second thought.
Indeed, the artificial fly was in all respects hopelessly the functional inferior of its natural counterpart. Any curiosity we might feel about the causal origins of the artificial fly should, therefore, be correspondingly stronger about the causal origins of its natural counterpart.
Consider another perspective. In the memorable thought experiment that opens his book Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod describes a machine sent to Earth from an agency of an alien civilization—“a Martian NASA,” as he puts it. The machine has been programmed to detect evidence “of organized, artifact-producing activity,” of the sort displayed (in our experience) only by “intelligent beings capable of projective activity.” The machine lands in a forest and turns on its instruments—which come to focus on a hive of wild bees. Now the computer controlling the machine, Monod argues,
cannot take [the bees] for anything but artificial, highly elaborated objects. . . . [E]xamining bee after bee the computer will note the extreme complexity of their structure (the number and position of abdominal hairs, for example, or the ribbing of the wings) is reproduced with extraordinary fidelity from one individual bee to the next. Powerful evidence, is it not, that these creatures are the products of a deliberate, constructive, and highly sophisticated order of activity? Upon the basis of such conclusive documentation, the machine would be bound to signal to the officials of the Martian NASA its discovery, upon Earth, of an industry compared with which their own would probably seem primitive.1
“Living creatures,” Monod argues, “are strange objects.” They exhibit distinctive properties, such as goal-directedness, which we ordinarily associate with designed objects, such as our own artifacts. Moreover, in their “construction” (i.e., in their reproduction and development), living things call on large stores of information, “whose source,” Monod continues, “has still to be identified: for all . . . information presuppose[s] a source.”2
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