It is all in how the story is told.

I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but I was dipping into Stephen Jay Gould's Full House, The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. An excellent, though nuanced and complex story, as all his books tend to be. One of Gould's points of emphasis was that peperspective is critical. Specifically, he argued that we tend to tell stories in a directional form: beginning, middle and end. We tell the story of evolution in the same fashion, from past to present. But by imposing a story telling form on disparate facts, we sometimes confuse ourselves. Gould's particular bugbear is that evolution is not a linear story with an endpoint of excellence. Evolution is a process that is left bounded (there is a constraint on how simple life can be) but is not right bounded; there is no essential limit to how complex life can be.

While we tend to focus on the miraculous complexities that can and do arise, Gould argues that we should not lose site that the predominant life forms are bacterial, fungal, etc., i.e. most biomass is exceptionally simple in form. The longer life runs, the more opportunities there are for complexity but we too often try to impose a narrative direction when there is simply a statistical process at work. That process may be no less miraculous but it is different.

While there are any number of deep and interesting aspects that could be debated, I believe the fundamental insight is that about perspective. We always are seeking patterns and we always want to fit the data to the patterns we know best and use the most. Sometimes that works, sometimes it leads us down false trails.

The three images that Gould uses in Full House to illustrate the difference in perspective regarding life as a directional process versus life as an increasingly dense bush are useful.

In the nineteenth century there was an especially strong proclivity to directional narration of evolution. A couple of examples were attempts to communicate the path way of the evolution of horses from the little critters scurrying around to the animal with which we are familiar today. These stories tended to look like this.



And this.



The story is linear from small, simple beast to magnificent and complex animal.

The equivalent for humans is the iconic progress of man from ape to modern man.



By standing at the bottom of the path and looking back towards where we came from, Gould effectively argues that we lose site of all the digressions and alternate paths that were taken and came to an end. Once you can ride a bike, it is hard to recall just how difficult it was to do so in the first place, just how many mistakes you made. Gould's view is of life's emergence more in the form of a complex bush which shows all those tributaries and divergences that get lost in the storytelling.



Click on the image to enlarge it.

You can see that there are some twenty branches of Equus history that have not advanced into the present and only one that has. If you run a horizintal line across the image and then raise and lower the bar, you can see that at any instant of time, we would have a quite different perspective of both the past and anticipation of the future.

If you let the bar sink to the late Miocene, there are nearly a dozen branches of Equus thriving. Who at that time might have anticipated that these dozen wonderful and superior adaptations would shrink to a single branch, which we still instinctively regard as a marvelous adaptation.

I see this issue of perspective (and attempts to over-read the data) all the time with teams with whom I work. In trying to solve a problem, they will identify which other companies or organizations are achieving that which they wish to achieve. They look to Walmart, to Coca-Cola, to Google, and many others, to try and learn lessons about what they, the team, ought to do.

This is not in itself a bad thing. We should seek out data and find patterns where they exist.

It is important though, just as with evolution, to realize that the final form (or more properly, the current form) is not especially explanatory of the steps taken towards the current form. There is a fair amount of chance involved in the process. Attributes which are especially critical to current success were not necessarily the ones that allowed the organization to survive back then. We have to be aware of the other paths taken as well as those not taken. We can learn from current success but there are boundaries to our understanding. Sometimes it is very hard to factually establish why Sears fell while Walmart rose and it is a mistake to retrofit the conditions of current success onto past circumstances.

It is all in how the story is told.