Puzzling Gyros

[jporter]

While reading  John Maynard Smith's review of Daniel Dennett's:

 "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life"

in the NY Review, 11/30/95, I noted a paragraph of possible interest to
those foax here with some technical expertise. In this paragraph, the
eminent evolutionary theorist, J.M. Smith is highlighting the value of
"reverse engineering" to biologists for determining the function of some
newly discovered biological structure. That is, they are frequently
successful by asking themselves: "...what function it was selected to
perform."  Although he states that this is the opposite tact usually taken
by actual engineers, who most often "start with a function in mind and
[then] design a structure to do that job..." he goes on to relate:

        As it happens, engineers occassionally do reverse engineering.
        In 1945, when I was working in an aircraft design office, the
        Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough put on an exhibition
        of recently captured German equipment. A friend and I spent two
        fascinating days looking at the equipment and asking ourselves,
        "Why did they do that?" Both the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket
        were on show, and we spent some time trying to figure out how they
        worked. I seem to remember that the V2 rocket had a gyroscope
        puzzlingly connected to the fuel supply to the motors; surely,
        one would think, it should be connected to the guidance system.
        I leave it as an exercise to any readers who fancy themselves as
        reverse engineers to work out why, if my memory is correct, it was
        connected to the fuel supply.

I'm still puzzling. But because reverse engineering "works" as an
explanatory method for both the products of a blind, random, non-teleologic
evolution, and for those of human design, Smith equates the two processes:
purposeful and purposeless. He thereby sets the theoretical stage for his
real aim: the equation of all life processes with purely mechanical ones:

        ....I thought about the two problems. Indeed, I have become
        increasingly convinced that there is no way of telling the
        difference between an evolved organism and an artifact designed
        by an intelligent being. Thus imagine the first spacemen to land
        on Mars are confronted by an object which appears to have sense
        organs...and organs of locomotion...How will they know whether
        it is an evolved organism, or a robot designed by an evolved
        organism? Only, I think, by finding out where it came from, and
        perhaps not even then.

This, in effect, is not just reverse engineering, but a "reverse Turing
Test" for the possiblity of a consciousness behind the design of life. In
other words, if it is impossible to discrimminate a difference- in method-
between purposefully designed inanimate products, and the animate products
of a blind, random, non-teleologic process, then there is no difference,
and humans are, in theory at least, capable of engineering life forms.

The origin of the first life form(s) in an inanimate universe remains
misty. Cause and effect thinking seems to break down at that point. It
becomes much like a skull session at "the White Visitation" attempting to
ascertain the reason for the congruence of Slothrop's stars and the V2 hits
in Pynchon's London. Mexico's  methods demonstrate the randomness of the
pattern, but could the secret of the relationship between Slothrop's penis
and the guidance system of the rocket ever be revealed by reverse
engineering?

Jody