Some advocates of automotive design (generally blue collar, zealot-headed, design unionists, see SuperNatural Car Design) have argued that cars must be properly designed. This is not a necessary, nor even a reasonable worldview, in a world overrun with automobiles.

We know how cars today come into being, and by applying the principles of automotive reductionism and natural mechanics it becomes obvious they are solely the byproduct of natural processes operating upon natural materials. Cars are merely the "offspring" of car factories. They may superficially appear to be the work of design zealots, but now that the underlying processes of car formation are understood (except for a few minor details) we must reject all appearances of design as just that, appearances. The factory is just as much a natural process as is the car itself. Here is how cars originate.

Iron ore is picked up from the ground by a large iron bucket that moves the ore through a series of containers until it ends up in a large furnace where the thermal environment melts the ore from the rock matrix and, with the aide of oxygen passing through, the melt becomes purified steel. The steel that results passes through a series of rolling presses to flatten it into sheets. The sheets are press-formed into shapes which through a series of selective events have resulted in shapes most functional to the car and most appealing to those car-nivores who feed on the offspring of car factories. It is now understood that the car-nivore process is the main stimulus to the process: the more cars eaten by car-nivores, the more it creates a car vacuum, which nature abhors. Thus, more of that type of over-grazed car is produced. This is the fundamental natural selective pressure. Those types of shapes, and those generative processes, which did not produce offspring appealing to car-nivores simply did not result in durative car species, and such species which were not selected -- and there are well-documented examples such as the Edsel -- did not become the progenitors of future generations or "lines" of cars.

In a similar manner, various other raw materials found throughout the earth also have been selected through simple natural processes of functional utility resulting in engines, tires, transmissions, upholstery, wires, lamps, switches, computers, batteries, fluids and paints. Through further selective advantages all these parts can be readily located in several large structures distributed throughout the world. In those structures a series of rolling pathways bring the various parts together in a precise sequence (Well, it's precise now, but not so in the beginning, according to our studies of old dead car factories. Early on, rather more luck must have been involved.) The parts interact with rotating levers and screws which fit to the head of bolts and nuts like a hand fits a glove. Also levers with high power spark generators on the ends touch the parts at various points. This fitting process occurs in such a fashion as to affix one part to the other in precise ways. (Some factories are more precise than others.) The parts each have a unique part code that has been determined to fully account for the assembly sequence. No designer needed. On superficial inspection the fit of these parts is very awkward and seemingly unnatural (outside of the factories these parts seldom self-assemble), but upon closer inspection (still under study), we see the complex fit of the parts is critical to the functionality of the overall car as a system. Again, though this process may appear to be teleological, in fact the introduction of teleology into the explanation is clearly superfluous: a simple selection mechanism accounts for the presence of these car-tifacts. Those cars in which the parts were ill-fitting were subject to slightly greater anti-selective pressures. (This is now called the general motor theory of large gaps, also called neo-Fordism. Not to be confused with the special theory, which applies only to small gapped cars from small nations. But if one can get small gaps it is easy to see how large gaps are produced as well.)

We are somewhat, but not overly, amused that such a selection process could have resulted in some of the more bizarre features observed. Who can but help to be amused at dead ends like the Corvair. On a more sober note, placing up to thirty gallons of highly flammable gasoline in these contraptions and then expecting car-nivores to hurl them within a few feet of each other at excessive speeds is absurd from a design perspective. This bit of the selection process is clearly a bit reverse-thumbed. If automotive design had been at work, it would never have produced this reverse-thumbed car-toon. Everyday the news is filled with examples of the horrific car-nage resulting from such a callused bit of selection. If such is an example of the products of beneficent auto designers, we will say "no thank you." Clearly, the "Henry" myth is just a figment of design zealot legend.

We have the fossilized remains of untold millions of dead cars in various states of preservation. By careful inspection (from the field of automopology), we have been able to reconstruct a complete phylogenic tree of automobiles from even before the time when they were just precursors to wagons. The transitional forms (which, to be completely honest, do not exist at the "model" level but are abundant at the "line" and "company" level) reveal an exquisite testimony to this automotive selection process at work throughout automotive history. It is a process of gradual accumulated change from descent with slight modification in the face of large differential production rates. From this record of the past it is obvious that a very great many more "designs" were produced than actually survive into full scale production. While it is a gradualistic process overall, there is also an aspect of punctuated stasis. Each year is marked by a leap in form, after which those surviving forms stay pretty much the same for the rest of the year, and sometimes for many years until extinction occurs. During these punctuation periods it is obvious that the selection process operates at a much different rate than during the annual stasis events, but the fundamental processes are the same. A clear indication of the high selective pressures involved is illustrated by the numerous cases of convergent designs (remember, they only appear to be designed) distributed throughout the history of cars. No master designers need be invoked, selection does it all. Cars come from car factories, plain, simple and demonstrable. Dead cars recycle into new cars. No automotive designer has ever "made" a car, nor can he. Physical Mechanics does it all in accord with well known natural laws.

Design zealots point to expressions such as "picked up by the bucket" with some loud rhetorical "ah-HA!" This is merely our accommodative language, which they simply can not seem to comprehend. Upon closer inspection one will find that the bucket itself is made in bucket factories in much the same manner as cars. Again no bucket designer is necessary. Occam's razor slices away that extra epistemological baggage. The "picking up" is accomplished by an admittedly complex series of levers and pulleys. These operate as they do according to the well known laws of hydraulics executing a sequence of steps (obviously determined by selection) mediated by a sequence code in a bit of silicon. (Or, by a wrinkled lump of carbohydrate in the cruder implementations. The lumps of carbohydrate perform simple repetitive tasks over and over, making the lack of purpose and intelligence in this aspect of the development process obvious! Further evidence is the speed at which silicon is replacing carbohydrate for these mindless activities.) There is no "purpose" or "design" required at any step of the process. Since the application of selection principles has proven so efficacious in revealing the large scale processes at work, right headed thinking will understand that the existence of the sequence code itself shall also be easily explained on the same naturalistic basis.

The unreasonable persistence of design zealots' superstitions is a burden on nature. Casting off these delusions allows one to fully take our ignoble place in the program of nature merely as the selective car-nivores we are. We exist only to facilitate the production of more cars. Cars themselves exist merely to facilitate an environment suitable to the production of more cars. All of nature is really just a giant mother car factory. Indeed, nature and cars must be exactly this way for cars to be cars. What place then for a Great Car Designer?

Now if the design zealots would be willing to accept that they are nothing more than natural selector car-nivores, we would be willing to admit them full residency into this enlightened naturalistic worldview so that they can fix what is so messed up with all those c'rumba'd cars! (expletive retained)
 
 

© Hill Roberts, 2000 (PDF Version)