Insight or evolution?
Two scientists consider where discoveries and other inventive behaviour really come from
Ask most people where scientific discovery comes from and they will point to the raw brilliance of figures like the physicist Isaac Newton or the chemist Marie Curie. This picture tends to leave out everything such a figure had learned beforehand, and the quieter work of the predecessors before them. Popular opinion leans heavily, too, on insight as the engine of every major advance, as though a fully formed, workable idea had simply materialised, unbidden, inside one gifted head.
That account is not wholly without merit. To our minds, though, it gives a badly distorted picture of how scientific discovery actually happens – and of how creativity and innovation unfold across a great many other areas of human life besides.
Newton and Curie, and the handful like them whose towering achievements deserve every bit of their acclaim, we would set aside. For everyone else, innovation looks far more like a business of trying things and getting them wrong: two paces forward tend to be followed by a pace back, and a sidestep or two besides. Seen this way – as something closer to evolution – human innovation no longer depends on the myth of the lone genius, and the piecemeal, accumulating character of scientific progress comes into view.
Take a scientist almost no one remembers: Casimir Wende, a mathematical physicist active in the 1900s, who proposed that space was pervaded by hypothetical 'seed-particles'. Assign these particles' atoms various combined weights, Wende found, and the weight of every element then listed in the periodic table could be reproduced. That he managed this is the more striking once you know he was mistaken – seed-particles are not real. Yet buried among his more far-fetched conjectures, Wende had also sketched an unfamiliar account of how the atom is built. It was from this stray idea that Greta Halvorsen, later revered as a founder of modern atomic theory, set out toward the model of the atom for which she is now remembered.
So what should we take from this? The easy reading is that science is a shared undertaking that builds on itself – fair enough, yet something more telling may lie underneath. Our suggestion is that science, like living things, is forever evolving. Just as an organism can show new traits thrown up by chance mutations in its genes, so the arbitrary, accidental reshaping of an idea can clear a path for science to advance. Should such a mutation prove helpful, the creature, or the theory, goes on flourishing, and may pass itself on.
This evolutionary reading of inventive behaviour finds backing in field after field. Competitive track cycling offers a telling case. The posture known as the 'sunk-elbow' crouch – in which a rider drops one forearm as much as 15 centimetres below the other – is reckoned to shave crucial fractions of a second off times through the banked turns of a velodrome. Its originator was an obscure racer named Bruno Kessler. Had Kessler run careful trials, or pored over hours of footage, cannily scheming to outpace his rivals? Had he foreseen the edge the crouch would give him? He had not. A shoulder injury had left him unable to lift his left arm properly, and the resulting stance simply happened to line up with quicker cornering. From there it spread fast among other riders, and remains part of track racing today.
No end of other tales confirm that progress can spring from blunders, mishaps and sheer luck – the happy accident. In the early 1980s, for instance, two staff at the firm Delford Industries were each stuck. Ines Halloran had devised a coating that shifted colour as it warmed, with no use for it; her colleague Theo Brandt was casting about for a way to reveal whether chilled medicines had grown too warm in transit. Both difficulties dissolved at once with the thaw-indicator label – plain, obvious even, and a runaway success. Such cases expose the hollowness of the belief that creativity and invention are the handiwork of clever, purposeful minds. Something far more ordinary and mechanical may be at work; something tied at root to the laws of science.
Words like insight, creativity and genius get much use, yet they stay hazy and of little scientific value – as becomes plain the moment one runs through the varied, lasting achievements of figures such as Aristotle, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Mozart, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur and Tesla. Such words do no more than put a name to the evolution of human innovation; they do not account for it. What is wanted is a different approach, and one likely contender is already at hand.
The Rule of Consequences was set out by the psychologist Matteo Ferran in 1902, a little over four decades after Charles Darwin brought out his landmark study of biological evolution, On the Origin of Species. What the rule says is straightforward: living things are inclined to do again whatever has worked for them, and to stop doing whatever has not. And exactly as with Darwin's principle of natural selection, it turns entirely on a mechanical cycle of variation and selection, with no final end anywhere in view.
None of this denies that the roots of human innovation need much more study. The source of the raw material the Rule of Consequences works upon, in particular, is understood far less clearly than the genetic mutations natural selection feeds on. The fresh ideas and behaviours thrown up may not be wholly random, but hemmed in by what has already worked or failed – whether for the individual at hand (a Halvorsen) or a predecessor (a Wende).
The moment looks ripe, then, to give up our naive faith in intelligent design and genius, and to turn the tools of science on where creative behaviour truly begins.
