¿Quién construye las cosas?

Cuenta Émile-Auguste Chartier en su obra Propos d’un Normand 1906-1914 de 1908 cómo construían los polinesios sus canoas:

Tout bateau est copié sur un autre bateau… Raisonnons là-dessus à la manière de Darwin. Il est clair qu’un bateau très mal fait s’en ira par le fond après une ou deux campagnes, et ainsi ne sera jamais copié… On peut donc dire, en toute rigueur, que c’est la mer elle-même qui façonne les bateaux, choisit ceux qui conviennent et détruit les autres.

Que puede traducirse como

Todo barco se copia de otro. Razonemos como Darwin. Es claro que un barco mal construido se hundirá después de uno o dos viajes y, por lo tanto, no será jamás copiado. Se puede decir, en rigor, que es el mismo mar el que diseña los barcos, elige los convenientes y destruye el resto.

Cuenta Geoffrey West en su libro Scaling:

Even at the time of the Great Eastern, there was very little, if any, such “real” science in shipbuilding. Success in designing and building ships had been achieved by the gradual accumulation of knowledge and technique via a process of trial and error, resulting in well-established rules of thumb passed on, to a large extent, by the mechanisms of apprenticeship and learning on the job. Typically, each new ship was a minor variant on a previous one, with small changes here and there as demanded by the projected needs and uses of the vessel. Small errors resulting from simple extrapolation from what had worked before to the new situation usually had a relatively small impact. So increasing the length of a ship by 5 percent, for example, might produce a vessel that didn’t quite meet design expectations or one that didn’t behave quite as expected, but these “errors” could be readily corrected and even improved upon by an appropriate adjustment or inspired innovation in future versions. Thus, to a large extent, shipbuilding, like almost all other developments in artifactual manufacturing, evolved almost organically, mimicking a process akin to natural selection.

Y sigue poco después:

However, King Gustav Adolf had demanded a ship that was 30 percent longer than previous ships with an extra deck carrying much heavier artillery than usual. With such radical demands, no longer would a small mistake in design lead to a small error in performance. A ship of this size is a complicated structure and its dynamics, especially regarding its stability, are inherently nonlinear. A small error in design could, and did, result in macroscopic errors in performance, resulting in catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, the shipwrights did not have the scientific knowledge to know how to correctly scale up a ship by such a large amount. In fact, they didn’t have the scientific knowledge to know how to correctly scale up a ship by a small amount either, but this hardly mattered. Consequently, the ship ended up being too narrow and too top-heavy so that even a light breeze was sufficient to capsize her—and it did, even before she left the harbor in Stockholm on her maiden voyage, resulting in the loss of many lives.

Como estos podrían extraerse muchos más textos que nos ayudasen a responder a la pregunta: ¿quién construye los barcos?

Los barcos no los diseñan los ingenieros, como parecería, sino el mar. Es el mar el que informa a los ingenieros acerca de cómo construir sus barcos y el que en última instancia evalúa sus diseños. Estos se limitan a copiar lo que funciona, a copiar lo que regresa del mar.

Obviamente, en estas páginas no estamos particularmente interesados en la ingeniería naval. En estas páginas utilizamos nos referimos a lo anterior como alegoría extrapolable a otros ámbitos: la economía, la política, el derecho, etc.

Así que reformulamos la pregunta: ¿quién y cómo construye las cosas?