I just finished Stuart Firestein's interesting little book 'Ignorance: How It Drives Science.'
Toward the end, he was talking about how his many years in theater prepared him to be a biology student (after memorizing scripts for years, organic chem was easy) at age 30 and how he came to his research on the neuroscience of smell. Part of his description might be relevant to the concept of function in design in a couple of ways:
"Only in retrospect does it seem that the question and you were made for each other. This is the fallacy of design, not much different from the misleading argument made against evolution with its random mutations and post hoc selection. Once the function of something is known, it always appears to have been designed. This, of course, was Darwin's great intellectual leap--to see that such utilitarian structures as eyes were not designed for their purpose, but that their purpose was selected for them. We often wonder at the miraculous circumstances that bring together two lovers. How in the more than 7 billion people inhabiting the planet did those two people, so ideally suited to each other, find one another? What are the chances? Actually, they are probably pretty good, which is why it happens so regularly."
Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
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+1 252 258 7006
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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