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The gathering of some fifty society members and their wives convened at the Monadnock Building at eight o’clock. In his brief introduction Chanute spoke of the advances made in aerial navigation by “two gentlemen from Dayton, Ohio” bold enough to attempt things neither he nor Otto Lilienthal had dared try. The speech Wilbur delivered—modestly titled “Some Aeronautical Experiments”—would be quoted again and again for years to come. Published first in the society’s journal, it appeared in full or part in The Engineering Magazine, Scientific American, the magazine Flying, and the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. In the words of a latter-day aeronautics specialist at the Library of Congress, the speech was “the Book of Genesis of the twentieth-century Bible of Aeronautics.” It was authentic Wilbur Wright, straightforward and clear. What was needed above all for success with a flying machine, he said, was the ability to ride with the wind, to balance and steer in the air. To explain how a bird could soar through the air would take much of the evening, he said. Instead he took a sheet of paper, and, holding it parallel to the floor, let it drop. It would not “settle steadily down as a staid, sensible piece of paper ought to do, but it insists on contravening every recognized rule of decorum, turning over and darting hither and thither in the most erratic manner, much after the style of an untrained horse.” This was the kind of horse, he said, that men had to learn to manage in order to fly, and there were two ways: One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. If one were looking for perfect safety, he said, one would do well to sit on the fence and watch the birds. “But if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough
Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them. This is all part of the process of setting the goal. But what happens to that calculus once you’ve set the goal and you’re pursuing it? After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object. This thing that is a proxy for something else becomes the object itself. The goal is the thing we’re trying to achieve, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal. The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it. To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that. In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
Early in 1844 he wrote again, asking Hooker’s help with “one little fact” about endemic island plants. Then he ended his letter with an impetuous blurt of candor. This is a famous moment. It appears in all nine of the Darwin biographies now piled on my desk, plus countless other studies, and it can’t be omitted merely on grounds that the hands of previous writers and scholars have worn it smooth. The letter was undated, but the postmark said January 11, 1844. Darwin confided to Hooker that, besides his interest in southern lands, “I have been now ever since my return engaged in a very presumptuous work,” a work that most people would call downright foolish. He’d been pondering the odd patterns of plant and animal distribution that he had seen in the Galápagos and elsewhere; he’d been reading up on domestic breeding; he’d been collecting every bit of data that seemed relevant to the question of whether species are changeless entities. “At last gleams of light have come,” Darwin wrote, “& I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” This was a daring admission, cast in sheepish understatement, and contradicting one of the fundamental tenets of British natural theology. Truth be told, he was more than “almost” convinced. Less famous is the disclaimer he added immediately: “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ &c.” He was trying to distance himself from the discredited ideas of one particular precursor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin knew well that his theory, besides being unsavory, might too easily be confused with other unsavory transmutationist notions that even he considered worthless.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
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