QWERTY / Panda's Thumb

........ In his essay "The Panda's Thumb" Gould shows that the thumb - actually the radial sesamoid bone of the panda's wrist -- is not a predictable design of nature's necessitating laws of form, but an improvised contraption constructed from the history of what came before. In "The Panda's Thumb of Technology," Gould argues that the evolution of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard supports his theory of contingency: "To understand the survival (and domination of this day) of drastically sub-optimal QWERTY, we must recognize two other commonplaces of history, as applicable to life in geological time as to technology over decades -- contingency and incumbency." He then defines contingency as "the chancy result of a long string of unpredictable antecedents, rather than as a necessary outcome of nature's laws. Such contingent events often depend crucially upon choices from a distant past that seemed tiny and trivial at the time. Minor perturbations early in the game can nudge the process into a new pathway, with cascading consequences that produce an outcome vastly different from any alternative."

This process is sometimes called 'path dependency,' where systems get slotted into channels, and the QWERTY example is illuminating. Regular users of computers and locked by the history into the QWERTY keyboard, designed for nineteenth-century typewriters whose key striking mechanisms were too slow for human finger speed. Even though more than 70 percent of English words can be produced with the letters DHIATENSOR, a quick glance at the key board will show the most of these letters are not in a strong striking position (home row struck by the strong first two fingers of each hand). All the vowels ion QWERTY, in fact, are removed from the strongest striking positions, leaving only 32 percent of the typing on the home row. Only about 100 words can be typed exclusively on the home row, while the weaker left hand is required to type over 3,000 different words alone not using the right hand at all. Another check of the keyboard reveals the alphabetic sequence (minus the vowels) DFGHJKL. It appears that the original key arrangement was just a straight alphabetical sequence, which made sense in early experiments before testing was done to determine a faster alignment. The vowels were removed to slow the typist down, to prevent key jamming. This problem was eventually remedied, but by then QWERTY was so entrenched in the system (through manuals, teaching techniques, and other social necessities) that it became virtually impossible to change. Unless the major typewriter and computer companies, along with typing schools, teachers and publishers of typewriter manuals, and a majority of typists all decide to change simultaneously, we are stuck with the QWERTY system indefinitely.

Gould's biological version of this process is what he calls the 'Panda Principle': "The complex and curious pathways of history guarantee that most organisms and ecosystems cannot be designed optimally." Extending this principle to technology we might call it the QWERTY principle: "Historical events that come together in an unplanned way create inevitable historical outcomes" ~ Page 220