Engineered Adaptability and Design Features

Some critters can put up with a great deal of bad conditions and still survive. Darwin wanted us to believe that they had to evolve in response to their environments, but that is the opposite of the truth — and the opposite of what can be observed. We can make some comparisons with construction.

Earthquake damage in Chile image credit: USGS / Walter Mooney
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We see damage from natural disasters like earthquakes and storms (and even man-made disasters) where some buildings have fallen but others are still standing. I'll allow that there are many factors involved such as where the storm or quake struck, but we can see that the buildings were designed in anticipation of potential damage to remain standing. Evolution cannot happen if an organism cannot survive, obviously. Instead, the Master Engineer set up creatures to adapt.

Engineers are rarely able to redesign external exposures. Conditions like wind, waves, and geology aren’t economically feasible to control. It is the traits and features designed into entities that are controllable. These can be engineered to solve a range of uncontrollable and uncertain challenges. These features, not the conditions, determine both whether a design is successful and if that engineered solution becomes dominant in a trade.

The engineers assess if they have correctly gauged the external challenges the designs were purposefully intended to solve. When failures happen, they focus more on an entity’s traits than its exposures. They search for possible poorly or under-designed traits and correct them—not the challenges.

To read the entire article, click on "Engineered Adaptability: Engineered Features Determine Design Success or Failure". You may also want to see more about a creature that was discussed early in the previously linked article at "Tardigrades too tough for evolution".



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