Community Development: Reinventing the Square Wheel?

Fish and whales both evolved remarkably similar swimming devices (in the form of their shapes and the arrangements of their fins) even though their nearest common relative could not swim. The wings of birds and bats are aerodynamically very similar although their nearest common ancestor did not have wings at all. The eye is known to have evolved separately on numerous occasions. Evolution is not only about what you can inherit from your ancestors through genes. It is also about finding optimal solutions to problems of living in, and fully exploiting, a given environment. There are very few optimal solutions to the problems of swimming, flying or seeing so it is no surprise that the same solution has been hit upon separately by a number of very different species. In evolutionary biology this phenomenon is termed convergence.

We see the same tendency in the world of manmade phenomena. It is more than likely that the wheel was invented and reinvented on numerous occasions across different societies of the prehistoric world. Nothing rolls better than something round. Even if square – or oval or triangular – wheels were sometimes invented it would only have been a matter of time before someone discovered that round wheels work better. Round wheels would always tend to replace oval, square or triangular wheels and any society faced with a haulage problem in a relatively flat environment is likely to have stumbled upon the idea of round wheels without having had to copy the example from others. This seems to be true even for the non-mechanical: writing has been invented many times during our global history, for example.