Biography of an Idea
Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Edward O. Wilson

Darwin: What does this mean?
Daedalus: I don’t know....it has to do with not knowing. We need a place to hide our thoughts, so they can’t get out to shout rude comments at the day. A place like a castle, a place like a cage,  a place to imprison our dreams, where we can take care of them and visit them sometimes....a place built of secrets.
Darwin: A labyrinth?
Daedalus: Which we will never finish. Walls and halls and rooms. But no roof. Wherever we are, when we look up, we’ll always see the sky.

If the mythical character Daedalus were to meet the great scientist Charles Darwin with the hindsight of today’s knowledge and technology, would Darwin dismiss Daedalus: “You’re a designer, inventor, architect — a myth. What can you possibly tell me about Nature’s creative process?”
____________________________

We've embraced a theory that reflects back our own image, effectively explaining why life on Earth is heading toward “the Tragedy of the Commons” — the idea that each agent pursuing his own self interest for survival of the fittest exploits shared resources to everyone's detriment (Garrett Hardin, 1968). Hardin's insight visualized the problem. We now need a way to prevent our headlong collision with consequential emptiness.

E.O. Wilson’s reference to Darwin’s dice (quoted above) substitutes evolution for an anthropomorphic God, playing dice (or not). Darwin acknowledged that he could not explain variation, or how new species originate. His breakthrough was toward explaining extinction, and how effective adaptation occurs. To reconcile the origin of novelty in evolution with his theory of evolution was Darwin’s dilemma, which today draws from evidence in molecular biology, unavailable in Darwin’s time, suggesting that the traditional interpretation of evolution is incomplete.

Shortly before I finished graduate school, my aunt gave my father a large folio book, The Sublimations of Leonardo, by psychologist Raymond Stites, a remote cousin of my grandmother, whose maiden name was Stites. My father read the book and passed it on to me. Stites contended that Freud deserved blame for broad misconceptions about Leonardo da Vinci. Stites aimed to set the record straight. Historians tended to focus on the impressive objects da Vinci invented, neglecting his process. In 1895 Henri de Geymuller, after studying da Vinci’s word lists, remarked that ideas may be born “in some mysterious region of the mind.” The word lists were mixed with pictographs and sketches, suggesting that da Vinci had a method to stimulate his inventive powers. Stites speculated that da Vinci may have used “automatic writing” as a technique to bring submerged material up from his subconscious to fuel his ideas. What intrigued me most was Stite’s hypothesis that da Vinci’s great achievements as a technologist resulted from his unique way of putting his mind into “artistic mode” to conceive new inventions. There seemed to be a correlation between the way the brilliant artist-designer works and how evolution produces novelty.

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene captured popular imagination. I searched there for insight to build my bridge and wondered about our pervasive military metaphor — the so-called target of selection. But paradox reared at every turn. Finally I wrote “The Paradox of Prediction” and sent it off to Daedalus: Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Editor, friendly with evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, persuaded him to give me feedback.

Ernst Mayr thought Dawkins was wrong about the selfish gene, that each gene is not an isolated “information byte” selfishly fighting for its own survival. Each gene operates in the context of other genes. Collaborating genes create the genotype: “The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interactions with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable.” He noted that chromosomes can be highly successful in one combination, lethal in another.

The more I worked on translating the accepted view of evolution to my study of the creative process, the more debates surfaced and barriers arose. Something was missing. When Daedalus’ successful biotech experiment produced a Minotaur, success boomeranged into menace. When his labyrinth, conceived as a protection, ended up a prison, Daedalus’ dilemma echoed our own: success is a two-edged sword.

Humanity is, in the words of Nobel laureate de Duve, a perturbation — “life itself acting through a species of its own creation, an immensely successful species, filling every corner of the planet with continually growing throngs, increasingly subjugating and exploiting the world.”
____________________________

What could Daedalus possibly tell Darwin? Nothing, I thought.

Darwin’s dilemma was that he could not explain variation, the source of creativity in evolution. What could human creativity at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree — an idealized archetype — possibly say about a lowly random mutation? How could Daedalus shed light on Darwin’s dilemma?

I had my ideal job at NASA where I envisioned developing a research platform to study the design process, and how to make collaborative teams effective. When Bush era politics unraveled this work, deciphering the message seemed part of following my thread out of the labyrinth back into the world. I pressed on. Lawrence Durrell spoke to me through Justine: “Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence that we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?”

I’d gone quite far down my path when an aha struck. I realized that what was missing in my translation from evolution to human creativity was not merely “lost in translation.” It had been missing from the start.

I realized that our well-accepted theory of evolution was incomplete. At this moment my twenty-year path came full circle. The cycle bit its tail. Daedalus and Darwin were two complementary faces of a single dilemma and shed light on each other.

Daedalus had something to say to Darwin after all.

What Daedalus told Darwin:
Darwin's dilemma & designing intelligence

describes the thought process that led to the conclusion that two complementary concepts, generally taken for granted, are wrong in theory, and destructive in practice, jeopardizing our capacity to address the great ecological problems that life on Earth now faces.
____________________________

Auguste Rodin
Eustache de Saint Pierre
When I was seven, I visited the Rodin Museum in Paris with my father. I remember standing with him in front of Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of Eustache de Saint Pierre, leader of a group of “Burghers of Calais.” During the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century, Eustache chose to step forward first and led the group of five who volunteered to sacrifice their lives to save their town of Calais. The eyes of this bronze statue stared into mine, eyes of a man who freely chose to sacrifice his life six centuries before I was born. Decades later, I saw Rodin’s sculpture of Eustache again, and it inspired the core question Daedalus asked Darwin: