The long, medium, and short of the cones

Color is three-dimensional. I've said that before. Almost four years ago, I blogged about how it is not possible to arrange all your crayons in a line. This led to a discussion about how you need three numbers to uniquely identify any color, because color is three dimensional. Hence, when we describe a color, we need three attributes.

In an RGB camera or on a computer monitor, those attributes are the intensity of red, green, and blue. In the Munsell color system, the attributes are hue, value, and chroma. In the CIELAB system, the three coordinates are L*, a*, and b*. In any color space, there are three.

Actual photomicrograph of the strawberry, lime, and blueberry cones in the eye

Why is color three-dimensional?  Simply put, it's because we have three types of color sensors (called cones) in our eye.

In case this is starting to sound familiar, I have talked about the three sensors before. I blogged about how having three color sensors can lead to something called metamerism, where two objects can have identical colors under one light, but look different under another. I have blogged about colorblindness which is caused by missing one or more of the three cones. This came out in a blog about apps for testing for colorblindness, And then a followup blog post about colorblindness, and in one which asked the metaphysical question about whether two people see color the same way.

But today, I want to talk more about what those three cones look like.

Rainbowology 101

Time to pound some Fezziks into your head

Below is an artist's rendition of a rainbow. I like saying that my drawings are artist's renditions cuz it makes me feel like an artist. But perhaps it would be better if I call this a scientist's rendition, since I did actually put a little effort into making it anatomically correct. I am referring to the spacing and positions of the colors and the numbers on the scale below the rainbow.

The scale at the bottom is in wavelength and is measured in nanometers (abbreviated nm). A nanometer is a really tiny unit of measurement ... like about the width of a dent in a hair on a freckle on the butt of a baby flea that is the runt of the litter. A nanometer is the distance I will move over in the middle of the night when my wife tells me I'm hogging the bed. There is a whole lotta Fezziks behind wavelength and nanometers and how they got involved with rainbowology, but that would be getting off the topic. For our purposes, a nanometer refers to a position in the rainbow. At one end (400 nm) light is violet, and at the other end (700 nm) it's red.

If I wanted to be pedantic, I might extend the rainbow a bit. We can see light, however faintly, as low as 380 nm, and all the way up to 780 nm. So, I am lying when I say that my rainbow is anatomically correct. But it is a useful lie.

Strawberry, lime, and blueberry?

The obvious first guess is that there must be one set of cones in the eye that respond to the red part of the spectrum, one set that respond to the green part of the spectrum, and one set that respond to the blue part of the spectrum. Go RGB! 

Let's assume that the blue cones respond to light that is between 400 nm and 500 nm, the green cones respond to light that is between 500 nm and 600 nm, and the red cones respond to light between 600 nm and 700 nm. The top half of the picture below shows a graph of the sensitivity of each of the three cones as a function of position in the rainbow. Below that, we see the hypothetical rainbow that such an eye would see.

First guess at the response of the cones.

I don't know what you see when you look at a rainbow, but my rainbow has more that three colors. So, saying that the three cones respond each to their own 100 nm wide part of the rainbow is not just a lie. It's a lie that isn't even useful. The worst kind, if you ask me.

One of the difficulties with the first guess model is that it has the cones responding equally to all wavelengths within their respective ranges. That is why the first guess rainbow looks so blocky, and to be honest, very few light sensors in the real world have such a flat response.

So, let's tweak our hypothesis a bit. The graph below shows a second guess at sensitivity of the three hypothetical cones in the eye. So, as before, the blue cones will collect light that is in the range from 400 nm to 500 nm, but they are less sensitive near the ends of the ranges.

Second guess at the response of the cones

Note that the hypothetical rainbow has a decidedly more natural look, but it still doesn't look like a rainbow. I like my rainbows (and my brandies) with a little splash of orange. And then there's the dark areas. I don't ever recall seeing black listed as one of the colors of the rainbow.

Strawberry, strawberryish-lime, lime, limish-blueberry, and blueberry?

You know when you get one of those triple scoop cones? The fun part is when you are transitioning from one ice cream to another. You get a bite with some strawberry and some lime. You're not sure how much of each will be in the bite, and you're not sure how peacefully the two flavors will coexist in your mouth. But it will be fun. 

We can try that with our hypothetical cones... mush together the responses of the strawberry with the lime, and the lime with the blueberry. In this third guess, the responses of the cones have a significant overlap. So, if light at 500 nm comes in, both the green and the blue cones stand up and proudly wave their little neurons to say that they see the light.

Third guess at the response of the cones

I think that this has enough of the rainbow vibe to get Kermit the Frog to reach for his banjo. But when it comes to anatomical details, I think we can do a little better. Note that the yellow in the third guess rainbow is at 600 nm, when in reality, it's zip code is pretty close to 570 nm under cool lighting and 580 nm under warm lighting. Sky blue is another color that doesn't quite land in the right spot. I would really like for it to slide down from 510 nm to maybe 470 or 480 nm.

Based on that, I adjusted the width and position of the three hypothetical cone responses. Here is what I come up with - my final guess at the spectral sensitivity of the three cones in the human eye. Note that this analysis is pretty rudimentary. This was just a Gedanken - thought experiment. No lab rats were inconvenienced by the experiments described herein.

My fourth and final guess

The real answer

How close did I come? This last image shows one reliable estimate of the response of the three cones.

A guess from some real experts

I am rather pleased with my guess. I did of course, have the benefit of knowing what the real response looked like, and all the time in the world to rationalize my own estimate. But, I think the point has been made that the response of the three cones in the eye is not as simple as red-green-blue.

In fact, the responses of the cones really aren't red, green, and blue. There was a movement to call them by the Greek letters rho, gamma, and beta. Clever... you know? But the official designation is now to call them L, M, and S cones. L stands for long, or long wavelength, and it is the curve that is furthest to the right - the one we would be tempted to call red. M stands for medium, and it is the one in the middle. I still kinda think of it as green. And S is the short wavelength cone, the one that is furthest to the left. Speak kindly to it. It's kinda blue.

Why?

Why do I bother with all this explanation? First off, just cuz it's fascinating. Anything to do with color is gosh-darn interesting.

But this overlap between the L and M cones is kind of a head-scratcher. In those brief moments when I think like an engineer, I often think about stuff like how reducing the correlation between sensory channels increases the entropy of the system - the efficiency of information gathering. Based on that, I would think that the engineers who designed the human eye would have avoided overlap, especially such an egregious overlap.

But while Dr. Eva Lution (the designer of the human eye) doesn't always come up with the best designs, the poor designs are mercilessly discarded. I am left with the conclusion that maximizing entropy might not be the only worthwhile goal.

Note that as we slowly move upward in the rainbow from green to red, the response from the M cones is decreasing while the response from the L cones increases. This has the effect of accentuating the change, since the human visual system relies on comparison of L and M to discern greenish to bluish. Thus we see very rapid change, with green, yellow-green, yellow, orange, reddish-orange, and red all packed into 70 nm. If you are a photon out to have a wild time, this is where the action is.

There was one blogpost of mine about why we evolved to have three different colors sensors. I argued in this post that the addition of the L cones allowed us to see the difference in leaves as they change color. The additional cone also makes our eyes sensitive to a change in hemoglobin at the surface of the skin. This has some clear advantages for a social animal who does not have fur on its face. (With the exception of color scientists, who have beards and have yet to evolve into anything useful.)

Oh... what a little L cone can do

And that, dear reader, is why the L and M cones have such flagrant overlap.

Happy Darwin Day

First of all, I want to wish everyone the very merriest of Darwin Days. February 12 is the birthday of Charles Darwin.  Enjoy your celebrations, but please be sure to drink responsibly. This would be an unfortunate day to be inducted into the Darwin Awards. 

Darwin is the author of The Origin of the Species, which brought forth the idea of natural selection. Darwin defined natural selection in the introduction of his book:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

In other words, those characteristics which lead to more offspring will tend to be propagated over the long term. How can this possibly be debated? It is perfectly logical, and has been demonstrated over and over through selective breeding. The inevitable implication of this idea - evolution - is what appears to be the big issue with creationists.

Bjork's unnatural selection of an Oscar dress

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a web page that deserves note on this auspicious day: 44 Reasons Evolution is Just a Fairy Tale. Michael Snyder's article starts out as follows:

The theory of evolution is false. It is simply not true. Actually, it is just a fairy tale for adults based on ancient pagan religious philosophy that hundreds of millions of people around the world choose to believe with blind faith.

Perhaps I am not understanding his point here, but, aside from the mention of pagan, I think Snyder's comment about blind faith applies equally well to creationsists. For example, in the recent debate between Bill Nye (the Science Guy [1]) and Ken Ham (founder of the Creation Museum), Ham had the following to say: "The Bible is the word of God. I admit that's where I start from." No amount of evidence could convince him that the world was more than 6,000 years old.

Argument #1

Snyder leads off with this argument: "If the theory of evolution was true, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero."

I didn't have to think very long to come up with the words Eohippus and Merychippus that I learned in grade school. I admit that these are the only stages in the evolution of the horse I could think of off the top of my head, but the Florida Museum of Natural History was able to fill in some of the gaps for me. Even this is a summary of the transitional fossils found. For a more complete family tree, see this article on Horse Evolution.

Transitional fossils in evolution of the horse 

I'm sorry Mr. Snyder. You are not making a very compelling argument here. Your leading argument is just plain wrong. 

Or maybe I don't understand the idea of "transitional fossil"? I decided to check the ultimate authority on everything, Wikipedia on transitional fossils. This entry describes what appears to be three quarters of a zillion transitional fossils.

Argument #2

My readers may have not noticed that my tongue was firmly implanted in my cheek when I referred to Wikipedia as being the ultimate authority on everything. Any argument that rests solely on references to Wikipedia is potentially shaky. 

The question of exactly what constitutes a "transitional fossil" comes into question because of the next four arguments from Snyder. To summarize these arguments, Snyder has provided quotes from various scientists who say that transitional fossils do not exist.

The first scientist that Snyder brings up is none other than Darwin himself. Darwin is quoted as saying “why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Snyder goes on to say that Darwin believed that these fossils would be discovered.

The search continues...

I don't think that anyone in the evolution business would claim that Darwin wasn't a luminary. But his comments on the completeness of the fossil record are perhaps not all that up to date. After all, paleontologists have had 155 years to sharpen their pickaxes since Darwin asked that rhetorical question.

Like a good historian, Snyder provides a reference for his quote from Darwin. Synder's quotation of Darwin is correct, but he refers to a rather dubious source for the quote. This secondary source is a web page with the title "The Big Lie - Exposed". This article starts by linking evolution to racism. The article follows with a quote from Mein Kampf. The second paragraph essentially says that evolution was a lie started by the Devil.

Ummm... need I go on? I'm sorry, Mr. Snyder, but if you wish to be taken seriously by me, you really should reference sources that are just a tiny bit less blatant in their bias.

Argument #3

In Snyder's next argument, he exhumes a quote from a paleontologist by the name of Colin Patterson. According to the quote, Dr. Patterson said there were no transitional fossils. Well. There you have it. The quote was from a book he wrote in 1978.

But this is a bit odd, really. The book that the quote came from was about evolution and had the curious title "Evolution". Surely if he had proof that evolution was bunk, he would not have chosen to be a paleontologist, and wouldn't have written a book on evolution!

The quote from Snyder's article also seems to contradict a statement from Dr. Patterson's own book:

In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes ...

So what gives? I found a few references to Patterson referencing his own quote:

One quote: "I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that ... the creationists' [interpretation] is false."

Another quote: "I was putting a case for discussion, as I thought off the record, and was speaking only about systematics, a specialised field."

Still another: "I do not support the creationist movement in any way, and in particular I am opposed to their efforts to modify school curricula. In short the article does not fairly represent my views. But even if it did, so what? The issue should be resolved by rational discussion, and not by quoting 'authorities,' which seems to be the creationists' principal mode of argument."

It's not nice to twist my words!

One important thing to note is that Patterson was open to continuous revision of his understanding of evolution. He book on evolution came out in 1978 and was revised in 1999. The introduction to the second edition says something of his change in thinking:

The knowledge in my first edition came from education and indoctrination; it was that neo-Darwinism is certainty. The knowledge in this second edition comes more from working things out for myself; it is that evolution is certainty. And part of the ignorance in the first edition concerned the difference between neo-Darwinism and evolution, whereas the ignorance in this edition is of the completeness of neo-Darwinism as an explanation of evolution.

I am not sure I understand the distinction between neo-Darwinism and evolution, but... my explanation of the original Patterson quote that appeared in Snyder's article was that Patterson was a man willing to revise his own beliefs based on the facts presented. This is what science is all about. His questioning did not result in his abandonment of evolution, but rather his embracing a refinement to the original theory which was a better explanation of the existing facts.

Argument #4

In Snyder's fourth argument, he brings a quote from the well known author and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. [2] I didn't have to go to Google to find out who this guy is. I recall having read several of his books, and I think I still have a copy of The Panda's Thumb in one of my piles of books.

Snyder quotes Gould as having said the following in 1980:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.

Once again, I find myself a bit skeptical that such a strong advocate of the science of evolution would have been found saying something which appears to completely contradict the whole idea of evolution. Is there another explanation?

Note that Gould does not say "persistent and nagging problem for accounts of evolution". The word "gradualistic" is stuck in there. What could this possibly mean?

Gould's quote was taken out of context. Gould was not saying that evolution is false, but was arguing for a refinement to the theory of evolution. Don Batten (who Snyder references) does give a reasonable explanation for the quote from Gould:

Recognizing the non-gradualist nature of the fossil record, in 1972 Gould and Eldredge published a radical new theory of evolution that supposedly fitted the observations of the fossil record. They described the fossil record as representing long periods of equilibrium or stasis (things staying much the same), which are punctuated by the relatively sudden appearance of new forms. Hence they dubbed their new theory ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (PE).

This explanation actually fits quite well with an explanation from an eminent blogger who was summarizing a book by Stephen Jay Gould. I understand it was a book about pandas that the blogger found in a pile of books he had somewhere or other. I quote from the blog:

[Gould] argues that, while [the lack of missing links] could be explained by our sparse sampling of the geologic record, the lack of evidence points to our misconception about the evolutionary process. He claims that evolution is not always a gradual process, but that new species are created only when evolution occurs in spurts.

So... argument 4 is an example of quote mining, that is, sifting through to find a small snippet and then presenting it out of context. It is also an example of a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Here I get to the point of the blog I referred to earlier. Evolution may sometimes be a very gradual process, but oftentimes evolution is revolution.

Argument #5

Snyder brings yet another paleontologist to the stand. In this case it is Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University [3], who is quoted to have said the following in 1981:

In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.

Here we have another case of quote mining. The full context of this comment is that Stanley was not referring to the whole of the fossil record, just the Bighorn Basin. For the full quote, see section 8 on this web page.

Summary so far

So, Snyder's first argument was just plain incorrect. His quote in the second argument is 155 years old so it hardly can be taken to describe the most recent advances. The next three quotes (the newest of which is 35 years old) were taken out of context. In addition, Snyder is apparently unaware of the refinement to gradual evolution which is called punctuated equilibrium. This was first published in 1972.

Argument 6

The next argument shows a complete lack of understanding of the evolutionary process. Snyder says:

If “evolution” was happening right now, there would be millions of creatures out there with partially developed features and organs. But instead there are none.

Happening right now?  Evolution is happening right now, or at least "right now" on the geologic time scale. The domestication of plants and animals has demonstrated that natural selection can speed evolution along. A more recent example of evolution is the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Corn and its distant cousin, teosinte

 

My dog Scrabble and his distant cousin

Wild boar and pig

Here are some additional examples of evolution in action:

Here is one list of seven examples, starting off with elephants' tusks.

This list of eight examples includes everyone's favorite, the skink.

A mouse that is immune to rat poison? (The second of ten examples)

Humans are evolving, too.

Test tube validation that yeast can evolve multicellularity 

I'm sorry, Mr. Snyder. You really should do a little research before making such statements.

Argument #8

Snyder's eighth argument concerns a quote from paleontologist Mark Czarnecki. Snyder says that Czarnecki "once commented on the fact that complex life appears very suddenly in the fossil record…" Unfortunately Snyder never read the quote that Czarnecki followed up with, since the quote from Czarnecki is about intermediate lifeforms, and not about the first lifeforms. So, the quote actually belongs among the first set of quotes about transitional forms.

The quote from Czarnecki may or may not have been taken out of context. I have not been able to find a copy of the article or a longer quote. The quote is apparently from the Canadian magazine MacLean's in 1981 [4]. The magazine is still in existence, but the archives on their website don't go back that far. When I do a Google search with a sequence of words in quotes, the search is unfortunately littered with hits from creationsist's websites that have copy/pasted the quote from somewhere else. Google tells me that there are about 20,000 copy/pastes.

So, I'm sorry... I can't fact check a quote from a little known paleontologist (not even mentioned on Wikipedia) writing in a popular magazine 33 years ago.  

Arguments #7 and #9

Snyder's seventh argument is a short one:

If the theory of evolution was true, we should not see a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Instead, that is precisely what we find.

Wisconsin's state fossil

About 500 million years ago, there was a sudden jump in the diversity and complexity found in the fossil record. When I say "sudden", what I really mean is "over a period of ten million years". For his ninth argument, Snyder brought out a quote from none other than Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a well known atheist and adversary of creationism. Here is what Dawkins says about the Cambrian explosion:

It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative.

Or at least that is what Snyder claims that Dawkins said. The quote above is an example of blatant and irresponsible misquotation. Snyder left out the ellipses just after "delighted creationists". This omission hides the fact that Dawkins offered one explanation for this sudden appearance. Here is the part that was elided (I added the bolding):

Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize. If you are a creationist you may think that this is special pleading. My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations of 'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'.

I provide the following three quotes to substantiate my claim that a critical part of Dawkins' quote was omitted:

First, this is from the book itself "The Blind Watchmaker".

Second, from Dawkins' book "The Greatest Show on Earth", where he quite rightly complains about being misquoted.

Finally, this is from a website that is devoted to correcting the dishonest quote-mining that has been done in the name of creationism.

I am not suggesting that Snyder is the one responsible for this outright lie. There are about 4,158 other websites which include the unethical misrepresentation of Dawkins' quote. Any one of them may have started this lie [5]. It is likely Snyder is guilty only of irresponsible scholarship. And being too lazy to think.

Summary

I stopped reading Snyder's article at this point. If you have to resort to lying to prove your point, there is no point. Not to mention that fact that Snyder has repeatedly demonstrated his ignorance of evolutionary science.

If there are logical and scientific reasons for evolution to be "a fairy tale for adults", those arguments are not to be found in this article.

---------------------------------

[1] Imagine the pretense of someone calling himself "the science guy"!  John the Math Guy would never be so self-aggrandizing.

[2] Not that I am keeping track, but this is the third deceased scientist that Snyder has quoted, Darwin died in 1882, Patterson in 1998, and Gould in 2002.

[3] Dr. Stanley is still alive as I write this. But he did retire in 2005.

[4] What is it with Snyder's pulling up quotes from over 30 year's ago?

[5] I Googled the phrase "sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought" including the quotes. Google initially turned up 41 hits. I scrolled to the bottom and clicked on "repeat the search with the omitted results included". It told me there are about 4,160 results. One of these was the legitimate fact checker site about quote mining.

Evolution versus revolution

I have heard it said that the process of improving our processes of doing things is evolutionary, and not revolutionary. The point is made that it is desirable to follow the course of evolution, and make small gradual changes to optimize our way of doing things. I want to consider this analogy through a number of other analogies.

Just how smart is it to be an ape?

In college, I took a primate psychology course in which I was required to write a paper. I had always been puzzled by the fact that the apes are in general not very successful species, so I tried to answer my puzzlement in my paper. It seemed to me that higher intelligence would imply greater adaptability, and hence greater success.

I started my paper by comparing the apes with other mammals which occupy similar niches. The pairings I made were between the gibbon and the spider monkey, the chimpanzee and the baboon, the orangutan and the tree sloth, the gorilla and the bear. In each case the ape in the pairing was less successful. Three of the apes are also on the endangered species list. The point is clear that there must be something detrimental acquired along with intelligence.

I noted two costs associated with intelligence. First, the additional size of the brain requires that the young be birthed earlier, and hence babies are more helpless and less viable. Furthermore, birth is considerably more stressful for the mother because of the larger head size. Second, the young are dependent on the parents for a much longer period, because of the shift from a "ROM based system" to a "RAM based system".

My conclusion was that, in the range of intelligence inhabited by the apes, the detriments of intelligence outweigh the benefits. I got an A+ on the paper. That was awesome.

The search for the missing link

Years later, I read a book entitled, The Panda's Thumb[1]. The author talks at great length about the fruitless search for the missing links in the fossil record between species. He argues that, while this could be explained by our sparse sampling of the geologic record, the lack of evidence points to our misconception about the evolutionary process. He claims that evolution is not always a gradual process, but that new species are created only when evolution occurs in spurts.

His argument is that, since creatures are generally fairly well fine-tuned to their environment, small changes are likely to be less viable, and will not survive. Only by making large and abrupt changes can a new species find a more successful niche. I think he was probably inspired by my paper.

A-kneeling at the optimal point

This idea is related to problems encountered with the numerical optimization of functions. The goal is to write a computer program which can automatically find the maximum of an arbitrary function. If we could be guaranteed of functions which have only a single local maximum, this is relatively easy. Methods for this have existed since Newton. They all basically steer themselves uphill until they find a flat spot. Unfortunately, in the real world, functions rarely constrain themselves to a single local maximum. Depending upon where you start, you may find yourself on a peak that is not the peak.

There is a numerical optimization method called simulated annealing [2] which can avoid getting caught in a local maximum. It is a procedure which is modeled after the annealing process.

Annealing is the process by which knife blades and the turbine blades in a jet engine are hardened. The piece is first raised to a very high temperature, enabling the molecules to wander around freely, rather than immediately seeking the lowest energy state they can find. Slowly the temperature is lowered, and molecules gradually settle into lower energy states. At any time, they are free to wander around, but as the temperatures goes down, this becomes less likely. The key feature to annealing's ability to find the lowest energy state (a single crystal) is that molecules are allowed to pass through higher energy states.

The numerical annealing process does not force that the method always head uphill. At each stage, the choice between uphill and downhill is random. As the method proceeds, the uphill choice becomes more likely; just as lowering the temperature makes the transitions out of lower energy states less likely.

Application 

I have seen this process play out again and again.

I first started pondering the relationship between evolution and revolution when I was trying to understand what made engineering groups work and what made them fail. For a very small group of engineers, it is acceptable, and in fact, most efficient, to keep everything informal - specs, documentation, project planning.

As an engineering group gets bigger, it goes through a phase where making incremental increases in the amount of structure just plain does not work. Wholesale changes must occur in order for the larger group to be efficient. I lived through a few of these. They were painful, but revolutionary evolution was necessary.


In a previous post about printing standards and a panel discussion I led at GraphExpo, I discussed the issues with optical brightening agents in printing. Several steps must be taken to solve the problem. I lamented that taking only one of these steps will make things worse. Evolutionary revolution is required.

While I am on the subject of standards, let me make an observation. As a member of a few standards committees, I have come to realize that you can never change a standard. Even though a standard makes sense, there will be always be those who cannot adapt to whatever new stuff is put into place. This requires evolutionary revolution to make it work.

Here is a quote from an article that appeared on my LinkedIn page today. Same topic. Evolutionary revolution is necessary.
"As organizations continue to evolve within an ever-changing external environment, it has become quite evident that things are shifting talent- wise. This will not likely manifest as a small iterative adjustment in how we view, attract and develop talent. Rather, it seems destined to become a long overdue metamorphosis concerning our most important asset - people."

The patent fight between Apple and Motorola is another example. There are industries where there are very few patent attorneys. And there are industries where every company needs to have a bushel basket full of them. The transition of an industry from one to the other is an evolutionary revolution. A company cannot survive if the competitors have more patent attorneys.

In all these cases, we are not faced with a choice between evolution and revolution, evolution is revolution.

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[1] Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, W. W. Norton and Co., 1980

[2] Press, William, Brian Flannery, Saul Teukolsky, William Vetterling, Numerical Recipes, the Art of Scientific Computing