DARWINIAN CHANGE; DESIGN FROM DISASTER.

About 200 million years ago (in the late Triassic) some 35% of all animal families died out including most dinosaurs.  This was a disaster for them but it was a blessing for those mammals that were around then because it allowed them to stop hiding under the ground and begin their evolution into us. This kind of effect can be called ‘The Rainbow Effect’; the beauty of a rainbow follows the disaster of a flood.

Good things emerging from bad is built into the way things change where ‘things’ can be living things or artifacts. This type of change can be called ‘evolution’ but great care is needed with this word that has different meanings. Darwinian change is a better usage than ‘evolution’ and it is claimed that changes in design are a Darwinian process. The paper discusses the views of various writers, divided into three groups, Pre Darwin, Darwinian natural selection and neo-Darwinian (i.e. natural selection plus replicators)

In the first group (before the publication of Darwin’s Origin in 1859) we have architects who were aware that buildings and ships were the way they were as a result of trial and error processes. Buildings fell down and ships sank but were then improved giving good examples of improved design emerging from disaster. One such writer was the American architect, Horatio Greenough (1843) who was trying to improve architecture by comparing it with the disaster based changes in shipbuilding .The idea that things can change gradually did not appear with Charles Darwin; Vitruvius was writing about change in architecture more than two thousand years ago.

The most well known of the pre Darwinians must be Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and wrote about the evolution of art and design before 1859.  Unfortunately, his strange theory of evolution is still with us in the writings of Design Historians and others who do not understand natural selection. (As shown in Langrish 2004)

‘Darwinian’ writers are those who have an understanding of natural selection but are rather vague about the descent part of Darwin’s descent with modification. Authors of this kind who wrote about the evolution of technology or the evolution of design include the Norwegian contemporary of Darwin, Eilert Sund (1862), an architect, Steadman (1979) and a historian, Basalla (1988).

Ideas that fall into the neo-Darwinian category have to include some notion of a replicator, the thing that is passed on. In biology, the replicators are the genes. For neo – Darwinian change outside biology, the best candidate for a replicator is the meme, as described by Dawkins (1976). Memes are ideas that get themselves copied.  Since the evolution of artefacts is the evolution of design which is itself the evolution of ideas, then we need to talk about memes and their transfer (memetics).  The rest of the paper develops the ‘three kinds of memes’ concept (Langrish 1999) to show how it can be used to analyse the Rainbow effect of design emerging from disaster.

References to work cited in the full paper.
Basalla, George. 1988. “The Evolution of Technology”. Cambridge U P.
Damasio, A R. 1994. “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, reason and the human brain”. New York: Putnam.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. “On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection”. J Murray, London
Dawkins Richard. 1986. “The Blind Watchmaker”. Longmans, London.
Dawkins Richard. 1976. “The Selfish Gene”. Oxford U P.
Gelernter, Mark. 1995.  Sources of Architectural Form: A critical history of Western design theory. Manchester University Press.
Greenough, Horatio. 1843. “American Architecture”, United States Magazine and Democratic Review 1843, republished in Small H A ed “Form and Function: Essays by Horatio Greenough”. University of California Press 1947.
Langrish, Gibbons, Evans and Jevons. 1972. Wealth from Knowledge: Studies of Industrial Innovation. London: Macmillan.
Langrish, J. 1999. “Different Types of Memes: Recipemes, Selectemes and Explanemes” Journal of Memetics  Vol 3.
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1999/vol3/langrish_jz.html
Langrish, J Z. 2004. “Darwinian Design: The Memetic Evolution of Design Ideas” Design Issues Vol 20 Issue 4.
Margulis, Lynn. 1998. The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books. 
Steadman, Philip.1979. “The Evolution of Designs: Biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts.” Cambridge U P.
Sund Eilert, 1862, On the Evolution of Building Customs, translated from Norwegian in Elster, Jon.1983. “Explaining Technical Change.” Cambridge U P.
Usher, A P. 1929. A History of Mechanical Inventions. Revised ed 1954, Harvard University Press.
Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan, Harvard U P 1914 - replicated as a paper back in 1960, New York: Dover. 
Wright, Erica. 2005. “Why things look the way they do: Explaining change in design by cycles and natural selection”. Unpublished PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag. 1997. “The Handicap Principle. A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle”. Oxford U P