I like metaphors and am always on the look-out for new ones. In that spirit, I'd like to propose a new metaphor for the unemployment dislocation caused by creative destruction, globalization and technological advances. My metaphor is the car cigarette lighter.
There were a couple years there when the future of the car cigarette lighter looked bleak. Changing fashion (and that pesky link to cancer) were quickly reducing the number of smokers in the US. Cars were recognized as particularly bad places to smoke: there were other passengers to consider; those other passengers are often children; and people suddenly realized that maybe holding burning leaves while driving wasn't the best idea anyone had ever had, particularly as your hands had to be free to eat lunch. It seems obvious that the familiar cigarette lighter was doomed.
And then along came the cell phone, the iPod, the navigation system, the DVD player, the car fax, the car air pump, the hand held video game and, of course, the hot cold personal car fridge. Suddenly, the problem is too few cigarette lighters.
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22 comments:
How interesting. This comes right before a post on evolution, yet you fail to see the connection.
Skipper: Having worked at Ford, you'd know better than I, but I've always assumed that even American cars are actually designed, rather than simply the agglomeration of random changes.
Ask yourself: why is it there are too few cigarette lighters in modern cars where no one is smoking?
Hint: the answer is not because of all the things we have to plug in them.
We're slow around here, Skipper, why don't you go ahead and spell that out for us.
Actually, I wonder how long the cigarette lighter will be around. My van has AC 120 outlets instead of extra lighter sockets.
On the other hand, you can buy AC120 to cigarrette lighter converters.
The relevant element of the car analogy to evolution is not that humans design cars, but that each generation is built on the previous, changing things just a little bit, keeping the good bits, discarding the useless or obsolete, so by 2006 you end up with a car that looks very different from the first car invented. But the inventor of the first car had no idea of the 2006 car in mind when he invented his car, otherwise he would have invented a better car in the first place. And the 2006 car designers have no idea what the best cars will look like in 2056, nor indeed need they care.
Brit: So you agree that evolution is teleological?
SH: I just saw that for the first time in the new low end Jeep. I suppose it's so you can plug in the XBox and play on the DVD screen. Now they just need to make a strip with five 120 v outlets and five 12 vdc outlets.
No, if it was teleological, the first car inventor would have invented his car with the preconceived goal of it eventually becoming exactly like the 2006 car. Or the 2006 designer makes a tweak with the 2056 car in mind, not because his tweak is useful now.
The very point of the car analogy is to demonstrate how evolution is non-teleological. It's all about now.
Joe:
Sorry, I would have, but had only sufficient time for a rhetorical question.
Brit pretty much hit all my high points, so I'm at risk of repetition. But here goes, anyway.
There is absolutely no need for an accessory power connector to come in the form of a cigarette lighter. It is a doddle to design a connector that would be far more suitable (the tiny, magnetically attached, power connector on my MacBook is one particularly good example).
However, just as with evolution, a design adequate to the task was appropriated. (Ordinarily, I loathe passive voice, but in the absence of an active agent, a designer, there is hardly any other way to write the sentence.) What's more, just like with evolution -- and here full credit goes to Professor Dawkins -- even though one can easily conceive of a better connector, it is nigh-on impossible to get there unless the path lies through the existing connector, and does not include any reduction in suitability along the way.
Given the huge installed base of devices using connectors much better suited to cigarettes than GameBoys, there will continue to be too few cigarette lighters in cars that have never seen a cigarette.
SH's observation, while true, only further substantiates the point. There is nothing in a GameBoy, or my MacBook, that requires anything other than low voltage DC, so the inclusion of 120 VAC outlets on cars is the consequence of how power is delivered to houses. It works because it is good enough, but using a converter to power a device that could run off the car's power supply directly (laptop batteries typically operate in the range of 10 - 15 volts) is nothing a designer would do.
As Brit noted, in pre-refuting David's comment that evolution is teleological, the generational aspect of cars (as well as the survival requirement for inter-operability) means that cars are stuck with 12V electrical systems, even though, given the plethora of power consuming devices on modern cars, 48V would be far better (a change BMW attempted to make a couple years ago, but might not have had they read Dawkin's book).
Natural history, and the human body, are littered with cigarette lighters that are there solely because, in the absence of a Designer, co-opting good enough has been the only game in town.
Which is where Hint: the answer is not because of all the things we have to plug in them comes in: the implicit acceptance of the antecedent to the metaphor elided the existence of the cigarette lighter iteslf. Ironic, given that the metaphor is about change.
So, David, while the cigarette lighter is a good metaphor for employment dislocation, it is an even better one for evolution, while simultaneously spearing Intelligent Design.
You scored a three-fer metaphor there -- darn good work.
As Brit noted, in pre-refuting David's comment that evolution is teleological...
I don't think that evolution is teleological. I think it's random. You guys apparently think that it is teleological.
Peter:
You're using 'teleological' to mean piecemeal development.
In evolutionary debates, Creationists sometimes accept the fact of evolution, but argue that God, being omniscient, started evolution with a goal in mind. In other words, he knew where it would end up (with humans) when he started playing around with the primordial soup, and each element of evolution was a step along the path to a specified destination.
That's what is meant by 'teleology' in this context.
Darwinism holds that there is no specified goal in evolution, so it is non-teleological.
When car designers add a new feature, they are not doing so with a particular, final, perfect car in mind, so in that sense it is also non-teleological.
Everything reminds Milton [Friedman] of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper
--Robert Solow
Skipper: you've done a brilliant job explaining why my 2006 Trailblazer has the same 12-volt electical system as my dad's 1964 Plymouth. You've also explained why I have the same carbureted, cast-iron, pushrod engine with breaker-point ignition, the same drum brakes all around, the same bias-ply tires... Of course design is a process that responds to incentive. Of course engineers weigh cost against benefit when deciding whether to re-invent or re-use. And of course it's an incremental process. Nevertheless it is still a deliberate and directed process. The main connection between car design and natural selection is that everything reminds you of natural selection.
Peter, Joe and David
OK, let's spell this one out.
1) Teleology means starting something with a particular, conscious, deliberate goal in mind from the beginning. (This is not the opposite of random.*)
2) Skipper and I and Charles Darwin all think evolution is non-teleological - so there was no original goal in mind when the process started, and no particular element of evolution occurs with a future goal in mind.
3) Some Creationists argue that evolution did occur, but that the process was teleological – ie. there was an end in mind from the beginning.
4) Some people who think they are darwinists also think that darwinism says that evolution was teleological. They are wrong: darwinism says that it is not. (So Peter, this is not particularly an attack on Creationism, it’s a clarification of darwinism.)
5) The analogy with car design is supposed to show how darwinists think that evolution is non-teleological by comparing it with something which is supposed to be obviously also non-teleological, so that any old idiot can grasp what we’re on about.
6) Unfortunately, in your case the analogy has only confused the issue further. This is a problem with the clarity of the analogy, not with darwinism, nor with mine or Skipper's understanding of darwinism. Darwinism is non-teleological.
7) The analogy works ok for me and Skipper, but obviously not for you chaps. I suspect this is because you are all hung up on the fact that each individual car is deliberately designed. To understand the point of the analogy, wipe that fact from your minds for a second.
Let me be explicit: darwinism says that biological evolution is non-teleological, a bit like the history of the evolution of car design is non-teleological.
So not any particular car: but the history of car design. The first car inventor did not have a final, ultimate car in mind. And no car designer on the way has a final car in mind - they just improve on the last generation, and so it goes on. So the evolution of car design itself is non-teleological.
Does this help at all?
-------
I can tell David is confused because in this thread alone he’s said both “So you agree that evolution is teleological?” and the opposite: “I don't think that evolution is teleological. I think it's random.”
(*Note that teleology is NOT the opposite of ‘random’. Teleology is the opposite of ‘unplanned’. Water in a river does not flow randomly – its path is determined by the shape of river bed and banks and physical forces, ie. gravity. It can’t flow randomly in any direction. But it’s path IS non-teleological: the water has no conscious, determined goal to get to the sea.)
B is irrelevant. At that point the analogy has been stretched too far.
The car design conceit is an analogy for biological evolution based on 'meta-car design'. It's usefulness is limited solely to the point that there is no overall or originating consciousness guiding cars to a particular, defined evolutionary goal.
Free markets and river flow are also useful analogies for particular aspects of evolution, but you can only stretch any analogy so far, or it becomes useless and confusing.
you can only stretch any analogy so far, or it becomes useless and confusing.
By George, I think he's got it. What we're telling you is that this one came pre-stretched. There really is nothing very useful in comparing car design to evolution at all, largely because we know car design is purposeful regardless of whether we think evolution is or not; but you guys have evolution on the brain, so you think anything and everything can usefully be compared to evolution. Not much we can do for you there.
Ask not what others can do for you...
It is a useful analogy for making a particular point with which an amazing number of otherwise intelligent people struggle.
It isn't about car design - that's supposed to be a given. It's about a common misunderstanding of evolution.
An Everest hath been made of this molehill.
If taking this one sloooooowly doesn't work for you, try the nutshell approach:
In a nutshell, biological evolution is similar to the evolution of car design in the particular sense that in both cases there is no single consciousness guiding the bigger picture.
Joe, Peter:
What got me going was what David took for granted in his metaphor, which meant he didn't question it: what do cigarette lighters have to do with GameBoys?
In the immediate sense, everything; they provide the necessary power.
In the general sense, absolutely nothing, to the extent that while the cigarette lighter provides the necessary power, it does so far less effectively than could many other alternatives, if a Designer was free to implement them.
In the ID/Creationist world, The Designer is perfectly capable of implementing the ideal design.
However, our knees, wisdom teeth, sinuses, lower back musculature, etc are all instances of going with their variants of cigarette lighters rather than their variants of the MacBook power connector. Evolution cannot create something out of whole cloth, it must proceed with what is available.
Just so here. Individual designers are constrained both by physics and the cars that have preceeded them, to the extent that despite IDiots using human efforts as The Design Inference, that what they are really invoking is design lashed to the yoke of evolution. Trace the evolution of the car as far back as you wish, and you will find only a continuum that is apparent in retrospect, but allows no teleology going forward.
What' more, just as evolution is profoundly conservative (see knees, et al), so are nearly all human design efforts (Steve Jobs notwithstanding).
So, contrary to [there] really is nothing very useful in comparing car design to evolution at all, largely because we know car design is purposeful regardless of whether we think evolution is or not, there really are parallel phenomena at work. In automobiles, just as with nature:
-- Change is conservative
-- Existing structures become co-opted (David: this intentional language is shorthand only, and not to be confused with teleology) for new uses. Dr. Behe is immune to this.
-- All systems that exhibit inheritance, variation and differential survival behave similarly. (Steam driven cars may ultimately have been better, but didn't survive long enough to find out).
Yes, it is possible to stretch an analogy too far; after all, cars do not have children. But digging into David's metaphor a little bit seems, IMHO, to yield a whole different level of meaning, one that, without intent, fatally contradicts every design inference claim IDists have ever made.
Speaking of everything reminding one of evolution, can you spot the evolutionary mechanism at work in this quote?
But I think it is pretty well settled that Judeo-Christian thinking rejects the equating of notions of Divine omniscience with predestination or fatalism--free will is kind of a big thing after all. Not even the early Protestants could make it last much more than a generation, I assume because it's not the best foundation for haranguing the flock about their transgressions on Sunday mornings.
All of which seems to lead to the earth-shattering observation that mankind has limited physical and mental capabilities. You needed evolution to tell you that?
No, the earth-shattering observation is that nature accomplishes the equivalent of design with no mental capabilities.
Yes, Duck, exactly. Ideas that are incompatible with the truths of the Universe will ultimately have to be discarded.
Peter:
Right, so the engineer setting out to make a cheaper, safer, more efficient and/or more comfortable car has no inkling whatsoever that his successors will have the same objectives? He thinks they just as well might apply their ingenuity to inventing uncomfortable, expensive, dangerous cars?
No, Peter, I mean that no engineer or designer has any notion of an ultimate end state. If they did, we wouldn't be using cigarette lighters to power Gameboys.
And, if there was some teleological designer with an ultimate human end state in mind, then our lower back musculature is either an exercise in maliciousness or staggering stupidity.
As for the tail end of your comment, perhaps you should review Detroit designs prior to competition from the Japanese.
"Detroit designs" ?! You must be one of those religious freaks.
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