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Kayak and Canoe Design Bulletin Board
Re: Inuit rules for kayak design.
Posted By: Mike Scarborough In Response To: Inuit rules for kayak design. (Christer Samuelsson)
Date: Tuesday, 19 October 1999, at 5:57 p.m.
Even though you didn't ask me, I'm going to put in my two cents. I read Article #936, Skin Boats and Science and I have some strong feelings about the article.
The author explains the principles of scientific method: observation, hypothesis, experiment, repeatability. Later they make a huge jump to their conclusion: __________ It may have taken many generations to get it right, but the process was essentially thoughtful, logical, and scientific. The variations prove that. They could only have come about through the processes of observation, hypothesis, and experiment. Designing and building kayaks was an applied science, needing no formal mathematics but abundant quantities of everything else that good science demands. __________
The author does not present evidence that kayak builders practiced any sort of scientific method. Their statement that "The variations prove that." is false. Variations in the evolutionary process occur through random mutations. Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands displayed enormous variation; there was no scientific method to it--it was the result of random mutation and natural selection.
I suspect that the development of the Inuit kayak had an evolutionary element to it. It may have also had a scientific element. But I see no evidence that proves either element guided kayak design.
For instance, there may have come a point in time when kayak builders realized that, everything else being equal, a longer boat was a faster boat. But I don't think that this came about because someone built a series of increasingly longer boats in a search for greater speed. I'm far more comfortable with the idea that one day a builder found an extra long piece of driftwood for his gunnels and built a longer boat. Once he paddled the boat he may have discovered that it was faster and incorporated extra length into future designs. But that's not scientific method. It's evolution; a random change that proves to be beneficial and which is therefore repeated.
I'm sure that over several thousand years builders learned a great deal about how to design particular qualities into their boats. I'm less sure that they conducted "experiments" to correlate a design change to a performance change. I think it more likely that Inuit builders observed differences in performance caused by random design changes and learned from those observations.
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