{"id":102,"date":"2014-05-19T15:49:04","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T19:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/?p=102"},"modified":"2014-05-19T15:52:01","modified_gmt":"2014-05-19T19:52:01","slug":"rube-goldberg-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/2014\/05\/19\/rube-goldberg-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Rube Goldberg Machines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rube Goldberg machines are named after the legendary cartoonist<\/a>. They were absurdly complicated machines designed to do something simple, like wipe a diner\u2019s mouth with a napkin or protect a pedestrian from a mugger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There was an element of satire in Goldberg\u2019s machines, illustrating the human tendency to fight against Occam\u2019s Razor and create the most difficult, rather than the least difficult, way to accomplish a task.<\/p>\n

Of course, like Occam\u2019s Razor, Rube Goldberg machines have also often been employed metaphorically, most notoriously by proponents of intelligent design like Michael Behe. Behe claims that many biological processes, such as blood clotting, are \u201cirreducibly complex\u201d like Rube Goldberg machines: remove a single element or step in the chain of reactions and the process will fail; therefore, that process couldn\u2019t have evolved in a stepwise manner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an argument that\u2019s ludicrous on its face, and is really just a sophisticated restatement of the Argument From Ignorance fallacy: \u201cI can\u2019t figure out how this process evolved, therefore it couldn\u2019t have evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most, if not all, of Rube Goldberg\u2019s machines couldn\u2019t \u00a0exist in the real world, even impractically. The anti-mugger machine linked to above, for example, depended on its user keeping a lit match above his head at all times. However, some versions of similar devices can be built, and their operation are often\u00a0a delight to observe. I\u2019ve compiled many of them here.<\/p>\n

For starters, there\u2019s the tabletop board game Mousetrap<\/a>, which combines Goldberg\u2019s sense of whimsy with some standard elements of these mechanisms, notably ball bearings and buckets:<\/p>\n