Competence Without Comprehension

MacKenzie described Darwin’s idea of Absolute Ignorance being the source of “all the achievements of creative skill” as a “strange inversion of reasoning,” since it turns upside down one of the most “obvious” ideas we have: comprehension is the source of competence. Why do we send our children to school, and why do we emphasize “concepts” over “rote learning”? Because we think that the best route to competence, in any sphere of activity, is comprehension. Don’t settle for being a mindless drudge! Understand the principles of whatever we’re doing so we can do it better! This is surely excellent advice in most arenas of human activity. We recognize extreme exceptions, such as gifted musicians who “play by ear” and can’t read a note of music, or natural athletes who always seem to do the best thing but can’t explain how or why they do it, and hence can’t coach others. Then there are “idiot savants” with bizarre combinations of incompetence in most regards and superhuman prowess in some limited domain. But in general, the rule of thumb is hard to deny: comprehension is usually the key to (human) competence.

And Darwin really does invert that reasoning, showing, as MacKenzie so vividly put it, that Absolute Ignorance is the artificer. The process of natural selection is breathtakingly competent—think of Orgel’s Second Law—but utterly mindless. Moreover, the organisms it designs get the benefits of all their exquisite equipment without needing to understand why or how they are so gifted. My favorite example is the cuckoo. Cuckoos are brood parasites that don’t make their own nests. Instead, the female cuckoo surreptitiously lays her egg in the nest of a host pair of some other species of birds, where it awaits the attentions of its unwittingly adoptive parents. Often, the female cuckoo will roll one of the host eggs out of the nest—just in case the host parents can count! And as soon as the cuckoo chick is hatched (and it tends to incubate more quickly than the host eggs), the fledgling cuckoo goes to great efforts to roll any remaining eggs out of the nest! Why? To maximize the attention it will get from its adoptive parents.