To what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? For example, imagine that we enlisted the service of the worlds most creative and brilliant engineers and tasked them to design a space craft that will carry men to Mars and back. Now, let’s add one constraint – the only material available to the designers is concrete. Would these brilliant designers be able to meet the design objective?

Or consider the computer. Today’s computers are more sophisticated than computers from the 1950s, allowing people to design programs that allow you and me to communicate with great ease and little cost. Why is it that programmers seem to be able to do more with computers today than they could in the 1950s? Is it because today’s designers are smarter than yesterday? Have new laws of nature been discovered? Or does it have something to do with an observation from Hartwell et al.?

An early stored-program computer (left), built around 1950, used vacuum tubes in logic circuits, whereas modern computers use transistors and silicon wafers (right), but both are based on the same principles.

While I myself am not an engineer, I do know that without the right building materials, I cannot design a tree house. I do not that without the right seeds, I cannot design a garden. Designers are limited and constrained by the building material (and tools) that are available to them.

Since natural selection can act as a designer-mimic, it too would share this feature and be subject to similar limitations.