I think your criticism of MtW’s use of the term “invention” has things backward. Invention, referring to the the human process of creating new and novel stuff is frequently, and probably always, a Darwinian evolutionary process. Before retirement, I worked for 30 years as a systems and design engineer for the satellite devision of a major aerospace company. That job entailed the following procedure: customer would present us with a detailed set of requirements (the environment). We would gather a team of experts in the various relevant fields with knowledge of current and previous designs for similar systems that proved to work (the heredity - which we referred to as legacy systems).
We would them ‘brainstorm’ the new requirements, literally throwing in any ideas that we could come up with for various component, subsystem, and system designs (random variation). We would then perform trade analysis on these ideas to winnow down the ideas to a few that would meet the requirements and considerations for cost, lead times, and practicality (survival of the fittest and extinction of the not so fit). We would cycle this process several times to a final design concept (evolution). Yes, a team member would occasionally have a ‘lightbulb’ moment of creative brilliance, but I would argue that that is really just the move process taking place in their subconscious. I strongly believe that when we have a much deeper understanding of the subconscious that this will be seen to be how it works. Support for this belief is that many of these lightbulb inventions were quickly seen to be poor concepts and occasionally were ridiculous.
I believe most design engineers, if being honest, would agree with this assessment. So Mike the Whizz is looking at this issue of the origin of biological structures and species through a convex mirror, and the answers might be much closer that he realizes.
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