Read Undeniable for Free Online

airplane? Obviously, zero, because it would be random.
    The problem with this argument is that the premise is wrong. Evolution, and the selection of reproduction-worthy genes that drives it, is the opposite of random. It is a sieve that living things have to pass through successfully, or we never see them again. At Boeing—well, at any company—there are selection pressures that work quite a bit like natural selection. There is competition between airplane companies. Customers and airline corporations that buy billions of dollars’ worth of planes want their equipment to be efficient. They want their planes to use less fuel, to be easy to maintain, and to be cheaper overall, because those things are expensive. So, managers, engineers, machinists, interior designers, ergonomic experts—everybody works to make the planes faster, better, and cheaper.
    When I was in engineering school, my aeronautics professor showed us that winglets were gimmicks, a waste of time and energy. (You’ve seen them. Winglets are the little vertical pieces on the tips of modern airliner wings.) Airplanes and birds are able to fly because the air pressure under the wing is higher than the air pressure above it. It’s a result generally of tipping the wing up in the front a little, giving it what’s called an angle of attack. It works for 787s and barn owls. The higher pressure under the wing induces air to squirt around the wing tip. As the plane or owl moves through the air, it leaves a continuous whirlpool behind it. Spinning up the atmosphere in this fashion takes energy. It robs the plane or bird of a little efficiency. Winglets block a great deal of the tip spinning, and so improve energy efficiency, but they also add weight. My old professor had us do this analysis assuming aluminum wings and aluminum winglets. What we didn’t account for, at least the first time through, was the invention of lighter weight, strong plastic composite materials.
    Today, planes have composite plastic winglets. It’s a form of evolutionary selection pressure. It’s a result of market forces, but it’s still human-caused decision-making. A company that did not embrace that technology might end up selling fewer planes and going out of business. Winglets are a result of countless hours of research and development. They result from management decisions, engineering analysis, and fabricators’ skill.
    Here’s the amazing thing: Barn owls have a style of winglets, too. There is no evidence that they were deliberately designed that way. Instead, owl winglets are the product of generation after generation of owls reproducing and occasionally producing babies (owlets) with feathers that suppressed wing tip vortices just a little better than others of their species. That trait got passed on and on and on, without any org chart.
    It’s not too hard to imagine a corporation, given countless years, with the ability to fire every employee that was not as good as another one. Eventually, after millions of employees came and went, the company would be the best in the world at doing whatever it did. Boeing actually has employed over a million different people since it was founded almost a century ago, but Boeing has not had nearly as much time to work things out as nature has. Nevertheless, we see both bottom-up and top-down processes at work. Airplane designs have been tried and discarded, just like bottom-up evolution, and the end solution looks (not surprisingly) similar to the one that emerged from evolution. But the airplane designs were created de novo (from new) by human brains in a distinctly human, top-down organization.
    We are at once constrained to play the hand that creation deals us, and empowered to come up with our own top-down methods to create our world the way we want it to be. We can employ our evolution-given brains to fly in planes and use our imagination to soar in spirit. We are a result of evolution, and