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Chapter Seven: The Challenges of Reverse Engineering
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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132 C H A P T E R S E V E N The Challenges of Reverse Engineering Rhinoceroses have a big horn at the end of their noses. That may be their most distinctive feature. But they also have thick, coarse, wrinkly hides. How did the rhinoceros get his skin? An author with a Nobel Prize (in literature) provided the following explanation about one hundred years ago: Once upon a time—the author’s explanation really does begin with those four words— there lived in the region of the Red Sea a Parsi who loved to bake. One day he baked himself an enormous biscuit. But before he could eat the biscuit an illmannered rhinoceros came along, frightened the Parsi, knocked over his stove, and ate his biscuit. The Parsi was not happy. Then, exactly five weeks later, a heat wave struck the area. Everyone took o√ his clothes to bathe in the sea. The rhinoceros took o√ his skin, which buttoned underneath, and also went into the water to bathe. In those days, the rhinoceros’s skin was smooth and fit snuggly around his body. But as the rhinoceros was bathing the Parsi had an idea. From his house he collected a basket of breadcrumbs—for he never swept out his house. As the rhinoceros was bathing, the Parsi rubbed the breadcrumbs all over the inside of the rhinoceros’s skin. When the rhinoceros emerged from the water, he put his skin back on. But, naturally, his skin began to itch. (Here the author explains that the rhinoceros felt as you would if you were lying in a bed that happened to be sprinkled with breadcrumbs.) The rhinoceros scratched, but that only aggravated the situation; he lay down on the ground and rolled around, trying desperately to stop the itching. But all this did nothing but cause his skin to become calloused and wrinkly. Finally, he ran over to a palm tree and rubbed himself against it mightily. But still, this only caused his skin to become that much more calloused and wrinkly. And The Challenges of Reverse Engineering 133 that is why today rhinoceroses have bad dispositions and calloused, rough, and wrinkly skin. Rudyard Kipling provided this explanation of how the rhinoceros got his wrinkly skin, as well as other explanations (including one for how the leopard got his spots, and one for how the camel got his hump), in a series of children’s stories published at the beginning of the last century.∞ For almost a century, Kipling’s Just So Stories have been delighting children—and adults who allow themselves to be delighted by such tales. But these stories have also become something of a rhetorical weapon of belittlement in the hands of opponents of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it is almost impossible to read an account critical of evolutionary psychology without sooner or later coming across the claim that the explanations that evolutionary psychologists o√er for whatever human adaptation is currently under study—adaptations, for example, like those for spatial ‘‘reasoning’’ that I mentioned in the previous chapter—are nothing more than ‘‘just so stories.’’ This phrase is repeated so often in the anti–evolutionary psychology literature that Kipling’s estate should at least get some copyright royalties for its incessant use. I suspect the reason that the phrase is used so often has much to do with its rhetorical power. It provides a nice counterweight to the portentous sounding activity of ‘‘reverse engineering ’’ that evolutionary psychologists insist they practice. Reverse engineering, as the phrase is used by evolutionary psychologists, builds on the metaphor of the mind as a computer—or rather, as an information -processing and computational device. Although the phrase may sound formidable, reverse engineering is simply what one does when one knows the function of a machine but does not quite know exactly how the machine is designed to carry out that function. As Pinker explains, ‘‘Reverse engineering is what the bo≈ns at Sony do when a new product is announced by Panasonic, or vice versa. They buy one, bring it back to the lab, take a screwdriver to it, and try to figure out what all the parts are for and how they combine to make the device work.’’≤ The point to emphasize here is that for reverse engineering to work, one must assume that each and every aspect of the machine under study has a purpose. One must, in other words, take a teleological approach to the artifact...