Astronaut
Neil Armstrong said in a speech, science is about how things are, engineering
is about how things can be. In his own case of landing on the moon the science part
was about understanding aerodynamics, gravitational interactions and other
insights, while engineering was about using these understandings to make a
working rocket and lander.

This
essay explores an analogy of Armstrong’s theme on science and engineering
and applies it to life. In other words, if we understood the science behind
life could we engineer a better life for ourselves, both as individuals and
society?

Unfortunately,
science of life is much harder to understand than science of aerodynamics or
laws governing interaction of planets. In fact it’s been impossible to
understand it.

Take
three of the most significant attempts at understanding the science of life and
the societies that they have led to in the last 100 years. Adam Smith, often
referred to as the father of capitalism, explained “how rational
self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity.” On
the other hand, Karl Marx, whose ideas lead to Communist and Marxist
societies, rejected capitalism and put forward the view “that human societies
progress through class struggle:
a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a
dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production.” And
finally, some religions have used interpretation of their holy books to structure theocratic
societies.

It
is fair to say that none of these insights into the human condition have led to
properly functioning societies, some with disastrous consequences. So we must ask
whether the ‘science’ behind a particular society, for example the insights
of Adam Smith, Marx or Holy Books, are the blame, or the attempts of
the believers to engineer their societies based on them.

Of
course most supporters blame ‘engineering’ for the failure of a particular
society, in that they say the society was not engineered properly according to
the specification outlined, say by Marx.

History
will be the judge.

Either
way, the common feature of these insights into the human condition, and the
societies they have led to, is that they are man-made, relatively new and have
a poor track record of getting it right. In contrast, there is a natural and
very old process that has been getting it right for billions of years.

Charles
Darwin called it “Evolution of species by natural selection,” essentially the self-interested
urge of all living species to compete for survival in a particular environment.
So when Adam Smith talked about “rational self-interest and competition”
as a way of achieving a prosperous society, he was merely verbalising in
human terms the billion-year-old urge of all species to survive in order to procreate.

However,
there is a catch. Self-interest and competition may have been the driving force
of life on earth for billions of years, but now that the human species has developed
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (WMDs), self-interest may have taken a
step too far. It is ironic that self-interest with such a good track of
sustaining life on the planet now may becoming our undoing and the cause of our
extinction.

This irony highlights the weakness of self-interest as the basis for a
human society, because it can, and it has, led to evolution of a species that can be irrational enough to deliberately destroy itself and even life on earth.
Clearly this outcome is not in the self-interest of any species, particularly
one that claims to be rational.

So the question arises that since self-interest is proven itself to be a
viable means for engineering living habitats and societies, what would a
rational self-interest, as Adam Smith suggested, look like? Surely, the
rational and logical answer is to widen the circle of self-interest. The wider
the circle of self-interest the less need there will be for WMDs, which after
all exist to protect smaller circles. The banality of this argument dos not
take away from the fact that humanity nearly destroyed itself in a nuclear
exchange in the 1960s, and the danger is no less today.

In summary, given self-interest’s billion-year good track record it makes
sense to engineer our futures based on it. After all, nations, religions,
races, tribes and selfish-individuals have self-interest in their genes. What’s
left to do then is to widen the circle of self-interest to embrace all
humanity. This is what self-interest would do if it were a rational being.