Counterintuitive Facts (8): Most of Humanity's Greatest Achievements Are Evolutionary 'Waste'

I. You visit a Gothic cathedral in Europe. You'll notice some exquisite triangular areas where the dome meets the walls. Covered with paintings of angels, saints, biblical stories. You marvel: "The designer was genius, specifically designing this space to display art."

II. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould tells you: you're overthinking it. That triangular area is called a Spandrel. It wasn't designed for painting. It's a geometrically inevitable gap created when mounting a round dome on square walls. If you want to build a dome, you must have this gap. It's a pure byproduct. People only painted on it later because the space was there anyway.

III. Gould used this architectural term to attack "panadaptionism" in evolutionary theory. We always assume every feature on organisms evolved precisely fo