In spite of this difference, however, there is no reason why artificial selection could not be described using the same concepts and principles used in natural selection accounts. In both cases, selection involves both forward-looking intelligence and events that involve no foresight. A rabbit breeder cannot completely control the circumstances that determine the phenotype or genotype of new generations of rabbits, so his foresight is just part of the explanation of why a bred rabbit looks the way it does. Conversely, an explanation of why a certain generation of rabbits in the wild has the phenotypic traits it does may include, amongst others reference to the intentional states of parent rabbits, predators, and other animals that played a role in selection.
In the evolution of technology, a designer or maker has the same relation to technical artifacts as a breeder has to the animals he breeds. The designer attempts to create a certain artifact with desired properties, but is not in full control of the outcome. Concrete artifacts are a compromise between the designer’s ideals and the contingencies of the physical and social world through and in which the designer operates. While a designer is not fully in control of the outcome of his designing activity, he is even less in control of the success of his artifact once let loose in the environment, i.e., the marketplace and the world of users. Once a certain brand of artifacts leaves the factory, it is the intentions and choices of sellers, users, regulators, and others, as well as random events, that determine whether it successful as a brand (or species) and whether it proliferates.
In the evolutionary process of variation and selection, the designer is the main agent of variation. He produces new types of artifacts, after which various selection constraints in the environment determine whether they are successful. In the production of these variations, forward-looking intelligence has a large role, much greater than it has in the production of new variants in biological evolution. In contrast, the designer’s forward-looking intelligence normally has a much less significant role in subsequent selection. As many product designers have found out the hard way, it is often very difficult to predict or control which products will be successful in the marketplace.
A product designer may, however, attempt to control the selection process, by controlling the environment in which his products operate. He may for instance attempt to require or encourage that a certain type of product is only used in pre-specified contexts or by pre-specified users. He may also attempt to alter the contexts of use in which products operate, or alter the traits of users. He may for example offer training to users, or encourage such training, or he may recommend that adaptations are made to the environment in which the product is used. The designer’s main ways of controlling the environment include the authoring of manuals and direct communication with suppliers or users. As such, a designer may project his forward-looking intelligence beyond the artifact itself to also influence the conditions under which selection takes place. His actions are like those of a parent who prescribes where his children can go and whom they can associate with, and who eliminates risks and dangers in the environment so that his children have the best chance of succeeding in the world.
In Basalla’s and Mokyr’s approach, I conclude, design can be understood as the process of creating variants in an evolutionary process of variation and selection. Designers use forward-looking intelligence in the creation of new variants, but new variants (artifacts) are not wholly determined by the designer’s vision, but also by the everyday constraints under which designers operate. Designers and others may also use forward-looking intelligence in trying to influence the selection process. However, their efforts are ultimately part of an evolutionary process that cannot be controlled by any party.
By contrast, in Aunger’s memetic theory of technological change, neither variation nor selection involve forward-looking intelligence, as he holds that even design, or innovation, involves random mutation of form. This is the result of a radical vision of cognition according to which cognitive processes are themselves processes of variation and selection of memes over which human beings have no real control, since they are subconscious processes driven by the laws of memetics. In the language of memetics, designers are “meme fountains”: along with artists and scientists, they are people who happen to be good at producing new memes or integrating existing ones. The new memes they produce are designs of technical artifacts.
Let me finally come to an evaluative question: which perspective on design and technological innovation is right? Is it Aunger’s radical approach, in which designers are mere pawns in an evolutionary process? Is it the traditional, non-evolutionary approach in which designs spring from the creativity and intelligence of designers? Or is it Basalla’s or Mokyr’s approach, located somewhere in between? I want to suggest that there may be more than one valid conceptual framework in which to analyze design and innovation. If the purpose is to explain the presence of certain features or functions in an artifact, then it may be most useful to highlight the intentions of designers. For example, it can be explained that the panhandle is curved because the designer wanted the pan to have an easy grip. This kind of explanation is called an intentional explanation, as it explains things or events as the product of human intentions. If the purpose is to explain technological change, then too many constraints are at work besides the intentions of designers or innovators, and one should resort to a causal (or structural or functional) explanation that references to structural features or mechanisms at work in producing such change (Little, 1991). The claim of evolutionary theorists of technology are that such mechanisms are evolutionary, in a broad sense, and should inherit part of the vocabulary and laws of evolutionary biology.
In Basalla’s and Mokyr’s approaches, the resulting evolutionary explanations are underpinned in part by intentional explanations: they are macro-analyses that can be related to micro-analyses which include individuals such as designers and users who have intentions, desires and beliefs, and act on them. In Aunger’s approach, however, the micro-level of analysis includes no intentional agents but agents with minds that are themselves subjected to blind variation and selection. Put differently, Basalla and Mokyr still treat the mind as an intentional black box (Haugeland, 1981), an entity that has intentions and generates ideas and requires no further explanation, whereas Aunger, correctly or incorrectly, reduces the mind to a non-intentional, non-forwardlooking process of meme variation and selection.
7 Conclusion
In this chapter, I aimed to examine whether the evolution of technical artifacts is radically different from the evolution of biological species, and whether designed artifacts are best explained as resulting from the purposive intelligence of designers or instead from a process akin to biological evolution. I discussed evolutionary theories of technology by George Basalla, Joel Mokyr, and Robert Aunger, and examined whether they qualified as genuinely evolutionary theories. I concluded that on Basalla’s account, technological innovation and change are weakly analogous to biological evolution, whereas on Mokyr’s and Aunger’s account, they are strongly analogous.