Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

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REMNANTS OF HISTORY

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

— BERTRAND RUSSELL

AR E HUMA N BEING S "noble in reason" and "infinite in faculty" as William Shakespeare famously wrote? Perfect, "in God's image," as some biblical scholars have asserted? Hardly.

If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable. Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable. Our sentences would be crisp, our words precise, our languages systematic and regular, not besodden with irregular verbs (sing-sang, ring-rang, yet bring-brought) and other peculiar inconsistencies. As the language maven Richard Lederer has noted, there would be ham in hamburger, egg in eggplant. English speakers would park in parkways and drive on driveways, and not the other way around.

At the same time, we humans are the only species smart enough to systematically plan for the future — yet dumb enough to ditch our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. ("Did I say I was on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer chocolate mousse is my favorite . . . Maybe I'll start my diet tomorrow?) We happily drive across town to save $25 on a $100 microwave but refuse to drive the same distance to save exactly the same $25 on a $1,000 flat-screen TV. We can barely tell the difference between a valid syllogism, such as All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, and a fallacious counterpart, such as All living things need water, roses need water, therefore roses are living things (which seems fine until you substitute car batteries for roses). If I tell you that "Every sailor loves a girl," you have no idea whether I mean one girl in particular (say, Betty Sue) or whether I'm really saying "to each his own." And don't even get me started on eyewitness testimony, which is based on the absurd premise that we humans can accurately remember the details of a briefly witnessed accident or crime, years after the fact, when the average person is hard pressed to keep a list of a dozen words straight for half an hour.

I don't mean to suggest that the "design" of the human mind is a total train wreck, but if I were a politician, I'm pretty sure the way I'd put it is "mistakes were made." The goal of this book is to explain what mistakes were made — and why.

Where Shakespeare imagined infinite reason, I see something else, what engineers call a "kluge." A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant — yet surprisingly effective — solution to a problem. Consider, for example, what happened in April 1970 when the C0 2 filters on the already endangered lunar module of Apollo 13 began to fail. There was no way to send a replacement filter up to the crew — the space shuttle hadn't been invented yet — and no way to bring the capsule home for several more days. Without a filter, the crew would be doomed. The mission control engineer, Ed Smylie, advised his team of the situation, and said, in effect, "Here's what's available on the space capsule; figure something out." Fortunately, the ground crew was able to meet the challenge, quickly cobbling together a crude filter substitute out of a plastic bag, a cardboard box, some duct tape, and a sock. The lives of the three astronauts were saved. As one of them, Jim Lovell, later recalled, "The contraption wasn't very handsome, but it worked."

Not every kluge saves lives. Engineers sometimes devise them for sport, just to show that something — say, building a computer out of Tinkertoys — can be done, or simply because they're too lazy to do something the right way. Others cobble together kluges out of a mixture of desperation and resourcefulness, like the TV character MacGyver, who, needing to make a quick getaway, jerry-built a pair of shoes from duct tape and rubber mats. Other kluges are created just for laughs, like Wallace and Gromit's "launch and activate" alarm clock/coffeemaker/Murphy bed and Rube Goldberg's "simplified pencil sharpener" (a kite attached to a string lifts a door, which allows moths to escape, culminating in the lifting of a cage, which frees a woodpecker to gnaw the wood that surrounds a pencil's graphite core). MacGyver's shoes and Rube Goldberg's pencil sharpeners are nothing, though, compared to perhaps the most fantastic kluge of them all — the human mind, a quirky yet magnificent product of the entirely blind process of evolution.