Free Bully for Brontosaurus by Stephen Jay Gould Page A

essay for years. But I never had the data I needed until Paul A. David, Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University, kindly sent me his fascinating article, “Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: The Necessity of History” (in Economic History and the Modern Economist , edited by W. N. Parker, New York, Basil Blackwell Inc., 1986, pp. 30–49). Virtually all the nonidiosyncratic data in this essay come from David’s work, and I thank him for this opportunity to satiate an old desire.
    The puzzle of QWERTY’s dominance resides in two separate questions: Why did QWERTY ever arise in the first place? And why has QWERTY survived in the face of superior competitors?

    A classic upright typewriter of World War I vintage. Brother to the machine that I use to write these essays.

    Notice the patterns of wear for most frequently used keys, as illustrated by breakage through the surface after so many years of striking. In QWERTY, all the most common keys are either not in the home row, or are hit by weak fingers in the home row—thus illustrating the suboptimality of this standard arrangement.

    A keyboard for a typewriter made in the 1880’s, illustrating one of the many competing non-QWERTY arrangements so common at the time.
    My answers to these questions will invoke analogies to principles of evolutionary theory. Let me, then, state some ground rules for such a questionable enterprise. I am convinced that comparisons between biological evolution and human cultural or technological change have done vastly more harm than good—and examples abound of this most common of all intellectual traps. Biological evolution is a bad analogue for cultural change because the two systems are so different for three major reasons that could hardly be more fundamental.
    First, cultural evolution can be faster by orders of magnitude than biological change at its maximal Darwinian rate—and questions of timing are of the essence in evolutionary arguments. Second, cultural evolution is direct and Lamarckian in form: The achievements of one generation are passed by education and publication directly to descendants, thus producing the great potential speed of cultural change. Biological evolution is indirect and Darwinian, as favorable traits do not descend to the next generation unless, by good fortune, they arise as products of genetic change. Third, the basic topologies of biological and cultural change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.
    So, when I compare the panda’s thumb with a typewriter keyboard, I am not attempting to derive or explain technological change by biological principles. Rather, I ask if both systems might not record common, deeper principles of organization. Biological evolution is powered by natural selection, cultural evolution by a different set of principles that I understand but dimly. But both are systems of historical change. More general principles of structure must underlie all systems that proceed through history (perhaps I now only show my own bias for intelligibility in our complex world)—and I rather suspect that the panda principle of imperfection might reside among them.
    My main point, in other words, is not that typewriters are like biological evolution (for such an argument would fall right into the nonsense of false analogy), but that both keyboards and the panda’s thumb, as products of history, must be subject to some regularities governing the nature of temporal connections. As scientists, we must believe that general principles underlie structurally related systems that proceed by different overt rules. The proper unity lies not in false applications of