Design constraints
by Andrew Gordon MiddletonIt is an often presented truism that the human body is a bad idea. What a terrible design, this body trying to keep itself upright on two limbs, only to develop back problems early in adult life and to fall prey to even small animal aggressors. We need to hide behind our tools and weapons otherwise we would never survive our interactions with the outside world. That is, it is only our intellect that protects us and the body suffers from a great design flaw, a flaw perhaps allowed because of—or somehow in service to—the furthering of the species-intelligence. If the argument is pursued this far, it might be assumed that, because we cannot separate body from brain, in order to allow the brain and our curious hands unfettered reign—to give the brain more potential—the apparent design choices for the body were reduced to the subset that would allow the intellect to develop. Our tool building abilities have quickly provided further allowance for the further deterioration of the body. If we can design a good enough tool and we can organize ourselves into functional social units with our intellects, the body is not the limiting factor to our survival and it ceases to be important what shape it takes. We can be fat and ugly, slow and awkward but if we are smart enough, we can win and keep our place at the top of the food chain.
This argument has many convincing attributes and is, with some variation, central to ideas about ourselves, physical or otherwise. Nonetheless, these assumptions have to be carefully considered. Among them is the interplay of the brain-body pairing and the necessary emergent properties that accompany any change in ‘design’. Just as an engineer can tell you, if we want to design a boat, we cannot just throw a lot of money at the project and make the best boat there is. If we put our minds to work, we can still never overcome certain physical constraints. Modern kayak design is educational in this regard. If we want a kayak for going down rivers fast, it must be long. If we want to navigate with fine precision, it must be short. But short boats are slow and to navigate with precision in a slow boat on a fast river may be to miss the mark. If we want to be able to turn quickly, it must be flat-bottomed. If we want it to go in a straight line well, it must have some suggestions of a keel… but then it won’t turn as well. And so on. In military history, we can see the same developments. Plate mail was once used in certain cultures because it allowed protection from many attacks. When chain mail was developed it allowed much greater freedom of movement but did not offer protection from the largest attackers or from smashing attacks. When guns became practical, even the weight of the relatively light chain mail was a serious liability and was abandoned for the greater agility of wearing no metal armour at all.
These are all design questions and the relation of them to the human body may not be obvious. Nonetheless, never have our brains been in isolation from our bodies. Our opposable thumbs may well have led to tool-making and our tool-making led to the advantage of selecting for intelligent lovers to breed with. These questions are necessarily speculative but they do make the point that design attributes are not made in isolation. If our bodies cannot run as fast as most four footed animals, has the body had a consequent design trade off? Or has it all been in favour of the intellect and to the detriment of the body?
In addressing this question, we have to ask how long have we been sophisticated weapon users and if these weapons would have been enough to enable a physically enfeebled species the time to develop better tools? We must remember that, for most of our history, we have had not much better than sticks and stones to use against much stronger and faster animals. Is organizational ability enough to have survived against our predators? Leaving aside the idea that we are clever monkeys that must compensate for poor sensory perception such as smell and hearing with our quick wits, might there not also be a trade off similar to the one between the weight of plate—or even chain-mail and that of a tanned hide made into a musketeer’s vest? We may not be faster than most other animals but, like a flat bottomed kayak, maybe we compensate in other ways.
Which is to say, can we talk about advantages? We know from boat design that perhaps it is a mistake to think in terms of advantages, better or best, but in terms of trade-offs. Given those, how best to take advantage of the particular trade-offs we have been given?
Perhaps our advantage is out adaptability, our ability to climb trees but run better than other primates, to run on two legs but to climb trees better than most ostriches, to swim but to walk on land better than most fish. Oh, and use tools of course. But let’s look for the moment at a design features.
This thought are what underlie some of my fascination with the Russian system of fighting commonly known in English as Systema. The question that somehow got posed or somehow came to be very pertinent back in the day when they were using swords made of inferior (soft) metals seems to have been: what are we doing and how can we do it better?
In some martial systems they have taken certain idealizations a bit too seriously. For example, we know that balls roll the best. So in some disciplines, like Aikido, they try their best to roll but they do it a bit like they are pretending they are balls. Balls roll the best, don’t they? Except we aren’t balls. We have spines with bones among other things. So we must practice rolling on our meat parts, one side of our backs and crossing when we need to by rolling across our shoulders.
This became very evident to me when I attended a seminar with Martin Wheeler at McGill not long ago. The evidence was that when he rolled—enthusiastically leaping from a standing position—he was silent in his contact with the floor. Vlad says that a mat is like a bad friend; it lies to you. The advantage to training on a hard floor is that you know when you do it badly. If you roll across your spine you feel it and learn not to do it.
What ground flow! On Sunday we were working on falling and rolling. The gym we were in at McGill was all hardwood floors and Martin would dive at the floor into a roll, bounce up and immediately do it again from another angle. And again and again. Very impressive. When I get to be as old as him maybe I’ll be able to manage that. This all with the aim of making the transition from standing to being on the ground as seamless as possible.
We aren’t balls and it is interesting that so few of us have figured out how to roll around in our living environment just using our bodies in a more clever way. Instead we seem to be interested in either gearing up like armadillos or else being very fussy about where we roll on the ground. A much better solution it seems to me is to think creatively about how we are engaging with our environment. And we can, if we acknowledge the ‘design principles’ of the bodies we have.
