Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

Cumulative selection works, then, if there is some form of “memory”: i.e., if the results of one selection test are fed into the next, and into the next, and so on. This process is so powerful that, in the natural world, it confers what has been called “the illusion of design”: animals that look as if they were designed by a vast intelligence when they were, in fact, created by a blind process. An echo of this illusion can be seen in the nozzle example. The final shape is so uniquely suited to creating fine-grained detergent that it invites the thought that a master designer must have been at work. In fact, as we have seen, the biologists used no “design” capability at all. They simply harnessed the power of the evolutionary process.