The Ascent of Drones

“The March of Progress.” Bored? Just show this image to your favorite evolutionary biologist and ask them why it annoys them!

We’ve probably all seen this image, which purports to show how knuckle-dragging chimpanzees turned inexorably into fully-evolved men who look just like Buff Abraham Lincoln. I suspect that a lot of people assume that the history of all drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle) technology follows the same simple, linear pattern as the “March of Progress” illustration does.

If you drew an analogous picture of drone history, like I’ve done in the middle row above, you’d probably start with the Wright Brother’s wobbly contraption flip-flopping around the beaches of Kitty Hawk, move to a little red biplane piloted by the Red Baron, jump to some sort of badass zippy fighter jet with Tom Hanks in it, drop in a grim grey Predator drone, and finish up with a tiny white camera-carrying quadcopter. You’d end up with something aesthetically pleasing, easy to understand, and also — just like the “March of Progress” — massively, ridiculously oversimplified.

The chimp-to-man progression you see above represents the old-fashioned hypothesis of orthogenesis, which states that all organisms are imbued with an innate tendency to evolve in a certain direction, towards some sort of final complex goal. Today, the orthogenesis hypothesis is totally obsolete. We now realize that the evolutionary pattern of living things looks much more like a spindly branching tree than it looks like an inevitable march in a single direction. A more accurate visual representation of human evolution looks something like this:

Image from the Smithsonian’s Human Origin’s project.

A reasonably accurate visual representation of drone evolution would also look a lot more like an badly-pruned tree than like a line.While drones obviously aren’t biological, there are quite a few resemblances between how organisms evolve into different stuff, and how technologies evolve into different stuff. Just as human beings didn’t actually descend directly in an unbroken line from chimpanzees, that DJI Phantom drone you bought at the camera store did not actually descend directly from the General Atomics Predator drone that…