Learning to Fly

Franz Reichelt

Nothing is truly novel. In most cases, objects can be considered the next iteration in a slow evolution of ideas, traceable back to some rickety first efforts. Today you can purchase your very own jetpack online for a gut-wrenching £340,000 from Gravity Industries, an idea entertained in James Bond movies but only recently made possible without a suspension wire and camera trickery. But man’s desire for solo flight doesn’t begin here, and the designers of your new jetpack owe a lot to a long history of failed efforts and pipe dreams that never made it off the ground. Five hundred years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci had dreams of flying, and modelled his own beautifully sketched designs around the anatomy and movement of bird wings. The wings of his wonderful dream machine would physically flap like a bird, driven by an elaborate series of cranks and pulleys. Thankfully, for his health and for western art and science, Da Vinci never made his flying machine a reality, perhaps aware of its inevitable flop. Far more confident in his designs was Franz Reichelt, a bold Austrian tailor-cum-inventor who, in 1912, famously threw himself from the top of the Eiffel Tower in a self-styled flying suit. In the film footage, he can be seen hesitating, perhaps becoming acutely aware of the absurdity of his creation, before tragically plunging to his death. These maverick ideas failed but weren’t in vain. Instead, they are landmarks in a series of innovative designs paving the way towards today’s parachutes, wingsuits, and jetpacks.

Ideas have a history, but old ideas don’t just disappear into the ether. Instead, our creations are patchworks of ideas, representing hundreds of years of human experience assimilated into single entities in the present moment. A striking example is the Chicago Temple, hidden within a jungle of skyscrapers that decorate the city’s skyline. At its base, the temple is a worn square office-style building that reeks of convention. But above this rests a ‘sky chapel’, a gothic spire seemingly pinched from a European cathedral. In a single object – a single idea – two worlds collide. This isn’t the linear emergence of novelty, it’s a mixing pot distilling and fusing disparate ideas in western architecture, brewing something entirely new and unexpected from what is already seen and known. These kinds of design motifs are examples of memes, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene to describe ideas that, like genes in living systems, can survive and thrive or be purged from a population depending on their success in the human mind. They can also be modified, torn apart or merged to generate new memes, new ideas, new objects with cryptic pasts. In its first incarnation, pop music fused the instrumental line up and rhythms of rock and roll with the vocal harmonies of 4-part female quartets like The Ronettes and The Chordettes. The very concept of a chicken tikka masala supposedly emerged through the ad hoc assembly of ingredients in a Glaswegian kitchen to produce something resembling an Indian curry but mild enough for the British palette. Innovation is constructed from what is known.

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The Chicago Temple, 77 W. Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois. Designed by Holabird & Roche, completed 1924. The Sky Chapel was added in 1952.

Biological design, the output of evolution through natural selection, generates novel anatomical traits and behaviours that help organisms to survive and reproduce more effectively in their environments. This can largely be attributed to changes in DNA sequence, which result in tweaks in organismal shape. The creativity of this process is truly gobsmacking. In male narwhals, the upper left incisor disproportionately grows outwards and spirals anticlockwise to form a tusk up to 3 metres long, which can be used to stun prey before moving in for a meal. Among mammals, pangolins have defied their typically hairy peers and evolved keratinous scales that assemble into an impressive full-body armour. Bizarrely, the barreleye fish has developed a transparent head and columnar eyes that facilitate an unrivalled panoramic view of the water above. Because of the radical anatomical differences between animals, and the incredible specificity of their traits that seem perfectly suited to their unique environments, they can be very difficult to reconcile. This makes the natural world a vast and unwieldy hotchpotch of biological ideas. But looks are misleading. Instead, incredible diversity and novelty can arise through mixing together a limited pool of biological ideas already encoded in the genome. Here, drawing an analogy with how we process ideas and generate objects proves helpful in making sense of the natural world.

Most vertebrates have an endoskeleton made up of calcified bone, which provides a sturdy scaffold for large agile bodies. The vast majority of bone cells come from the mesoderm – one of three major tissue lineages in the embryo along with the endoderm, which gives rise to much of the viscera, and the ectoderm, which generates skin and nervous tissue. Collectively, this provides the cells required to make a spinal column, arm and leg bones. Rather important here is the lack of a head, in which the bones of the cranium are more recent evolutionary innovations than those in the trunk. Here, bone is formed from a population of cells that migrates away from the embryonic nervous system shortly after its formation. These cells – the neural crest – migrate in streams into the future head, and then differentiate into bone-making cells much like those deriving from the mesoderm in the limbs and spinal column. Rather than bone re-evolving here in the head, it’s more parsimonious to argue that the new neural crest cells that have wandered away from the nervous system have called upon an old idea present in the genome – a battery of genes and their cross-interactions that generates bone-making cells.

Similar stories can be told about other body parts that seem to be brilliant eureka moments in the evolutionary process. Limbs are incredibly important novelties for locomotion and feeding, and have emerged multiple times in different animal phyla. Remarkably, despite these limbs not being derived from those in a common limbed ancestor, there is uncanny similarity in how they are constructed in arthropods, cephalopods and vertebrates. This could suggest that even though these limbs are independent novelties at face value, their innovation has depended on employing common genetic networks for growth and patterning already encoded in the limbless common ancestor. This kind of logic has led to structures that lack a physical common ancestor but make use of common developmental mechanisms being described as deeply homologous. When not taken too literally, this pushes us to consider that the emergence of novel anatomical traits takes advantage of what has already been learned. In vertebrate limbs, it appears that mechanisms that initially appeared with roles in patterning of the head-to-tail axis and hypertrophy of cardiac muscle have also been recruited to modulate shape, size and complexity. Innovation rests upon the novel use of old ideas, much like sitting a medieval European cathedral on top of an office block in downtown Chicago.

This reframing of novelty as a patchwork of existing ideas shows us how evolution can do some very quick thinking, and rapidly generate novelty simply by playing with what it’s already learned to construct. The use of an idea in this context is unduly anthropomorphic, given that evolution, unlike ourselves, is not a living or thinking agent. However, the parallel is useful is revealing similar principles at play in how we have come to be, and how we in turn construct and interact with our world. Our best designs, and our best actions, come from a careful consideration of our history, and those who have come before us. Each generation learns from the last, it doesn’t need to leap into the dark unknowing of whether its wings will fly. The way we look and function today is equally a consideration of our evolutionary history over the hundreds of millions of years since our unicellular ancestors felt that sticking together was the way forward. In that framework, nothing is truly novel. Our past composes our present, both in our evolution and our conscious reality.

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