The IC bookstore, revisited

I wanted to rewrite something I posted a few months ago, when a fellow
t.o poster claimed that a bookstore is a great example of an
Irreducibly Complex system that cannot be evolved. To the contrary, the
bookstore example is a great one for evolution, and I'm glad he brought
it up!

THE EVOLVING BOOKSTORE, REVISED

Originally, one guy opens a bookstore by himself. He does everything by
himself. He orders the books, he puts them on the shelves, he tends to
the customers, works the cash register, fixes any of the bookselves or
tables or counters that break, and counts inventory at the end of the
night, and does all the paperwork. He's not very efficient at first,
but his store functions enough to turn a profit and continue existing.


A few months go by, and he decides he has enough money to hire some
help. He doesn't NEED the help, he could go on functioning as normal,
but it's always nice to lessen your workload and stress. He hires
someone to help him run the store. This is how we introduce "redundant
complexity". At first, the added employee just helps the store owner do
all of the functions that he was already doing. In biology, this
happens when things like gene duplication occur. Two identical sets of
reactions are doing the same function. When this happens, one of the
genes is able to mutate and change, without being detremental to the
function of the organism, because the original gene is still in place,
carrying out that function. The extra gene is *redundant*, and is free
to change.


Back to the bookstore:
This process continues. The bookstore grows larger as it sells more
books, and pretty soon they decide they'd like a 3rd employee. In my
fictional situation, there hasn't been any evolution yet. We just have
3 employees carrying out the same function as one. There's no
specialization.


But pretty soon they realize that 3 employees is overkill. They don't
need 3 employees to do the job of maintaining the store. But the store
owner is a nice guy, decides not to fire the new employee, but instead
says to him "why don't you hang around, but make yourself useful
somehow. Find a way to increase the productivity of this store."


The third employee says: "well, I'm really good at fixing those
bookshelves and countertops when they break. Why don't I build some
chairs and some more tables so our patrons can sit down and read over
their books? It will make them feel more comfortable in our store." The
store owner agrees. The third employee is now evolving a new
functionality. Whats more, he's doing it in a relatively small
increment; he's just modifying one of his existing functions
(woodworking in the store) and specializing it to make the system as a
whole more efficient.

The third employee takes a few weeks to build the chairs and tables.
Almost immediately, sales go up. The customers love the feel of the
store, now that it is more comfortable. The owner is pleased, but his
third employee has little to do, since the new furniture doesn't break
too much. "I like how you think kid. Can we do something else with this
store to make it better?" he asks.

"Well" the third employee says, "why don't I setup a coffee station in
the store, so our patrons can drink some coffee while they read their
books? It won't even be a big change, I've already got an area set up
for the patrons to sit and drink, all I need to do is build a coffee
station. It could even helps us bring in more revenue!" The store owner
agrees. The employee is using the existing structure (the tables and
chairs), and only modifying their functionality slightly by building a
coffee station in the middle. It would have been much harder for the
employee to convince his boss, not to mention it would have been much
harder to physically build the cafe section of the store, if the
employee did not already have the existing structural scaffolding
(tables and chairs) in place. This is another event common in biology.
Evolution has a difficult time building large new structures like a
cafe in one step. It's much easier when you have an existing structure
that just needs a simple tweak and a few changes to make the new
structure. In fact, the cafe will probably carry out dual
functionality. It will provide the patrons with a place to drink some
coffee, but it will still allow patrons to simply sit down and read
their books.


The third employee opens up his coffee station the next week, and the
customers love it. They spend more time in the store, they buy more
magazines and newspapers, and now they're buying coffee too. The store
has competitive advantage over the other small bookstores in town. This
new offshoot functionality increases the store's productivity.


Pretty soon they move into a bigger store, with a lot more room for
books and a bigger cafe. The store owner hires a 4th employee to help
with all of the new books, and he tells the coffee guy to hire someone
to help him sell more coffee. They now have 5 employees working at the
bookstore.


The owner at first has the 4th employee just help out with all of the
store functions, like the 2nd employee. After a while, it becomes
obvious that the new guy likes putting books on the shelves more than
he likes taking inventory. But that's ok, because the store owner has
become preoccupied with just keeping up with all the paperwork, so the
3 guys who run the book section of the store begin to specialize.
Originally they were all doing all of the functions, but poorly. Sort
of like how a primitive digestive system would only have 1 or 2 organs
that do all of digestion. But once specialization occurs, the system
becomes more efficient. The store owner specializes in doing the
managerial stuff, mainly paperwork and inventory. The employee who he
had hired way back
in the beginning of the story now becomes the floor manager, aka the
guy who watches over the store, makes sales, etc. The newest kid just
sticks to putting books on shelves. All 3 of them become very good at
what they do, and the store flourishes. Their new specializations give
the illusion that they were always this way; a passerby might wonder
how the store could function if one of the essential parts was missing.


In a biological system, the way these employees would become
"irreducibly complex" would be if they became so specialized that they
no longer could do the other functions they used to. This is a
difficult part of the analogy to grasp, since humans don't "forget" how
to restock books, but in biological evolution, its very common for an
organ to specialize to the point where it loses the ability to carry
out the initial function it did generations ago, since another organ is
now in control of that function. Now it appears to have only 1 purpose,
and without it, the rest of the system fails. Perhaps the cafe chairs
are redone; now they are just stools at a bar where people drink
coffee. No one sits down in them anymore to just read books. More
likely, some of the chairs would evolve into barstools, while other
chairs remain as seating for patrons trying to read.

The aparent "Irreducible Complexity" is now easy to see. Imagine that
the store owner was too sick to work for a week, and the other two guys
who run the book section realized that they forgot how to do all the
paperwork. The store functionality would be in serious trouble. It IS
an irreducibly complex system, but that doesn't mean it didn't evolve.
Quite to the contrary, the system is irreducibly complex as the result
of *extensive* evolution.


The store could continue to evolve without breaking the rules of
evolution. The coffee shop manager might hire a third guy to help with
the coffee shop, but once again, when the system becomes too redundant,
one of the employees can branch off and do a new function (say, open up
a bagel shop to compliment the cafe) without the functionality of the
coffee shop deteriorating. The store functions as an amazingly complex
machine. Without the aid of hindsight, it's easy to see why someone
might think it couldn't have evolved. Everything looks so perfectly
interacting!

.

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