Reverse engineering

Claudio Gutiérrez

The expression "reverse engineering" means the attempt to discover the design starting from the machine, in contrast to engineering tout court which is rather the attempt to produce the machine starting from the design. Typically, it is a concept born out of spying, relative to the situation, say, of a war plane which falls on enemy territory and is thoroughly examined by experts with the purpose of reconstructing its blueprint. It is an interesting concept, since it admits generalization: that of applying it to science itself, to be considered as reverse engineering to discern the design of the universe (natural laws). In particular, Daniel Dennett (DENNETT 95) applies it successfully to biology, which he interprets as the concerted effort to find the design of organisms, starting from the observation of their anatomy and physiology, i.e., their structure and behavior. It is a lucid interpretation of biological evolution as germane to the R&D processes of big industry, except for the absence of conscious designers: in the case of evolution the production of organisms is determined by an automatic algorithm, namely, natural selection.