Version 2.62, dated March 2025, is now available for download from our Articles page.
In his biography of Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Robert Coram observed that when, after some 4 years of intense research and editing, “Destruction and Creation” finally appeared in September 1976, it had “a specific gravity approaching that uranium. It is thick and heavy and ponderous, filled with caveats and qualifiers and arcane references that span theories never before connected.” (323). Yet, everybody who has studied Boyd agrees that it is fundamental to Boyd’s body of subsequent work.
It was to make this masterpiece (for that is what it is) comprehensible to human beings that one of Boyd’s closest associates, Franklin C. (Chuck) Spinney, created a briefing entitled Evolutionary Epistemology. To illustrate Boyd’s ideas, Chuck chose the field of cosmology, how our knowledge of what’s going on above our heads has changed over time. For thousands of years, nothing much happened. Then in a space of less than 500 years, the Earth has gone from the center of all creation to just one minor hunk of rock circling a nondescript star in an unremarkable galaxy. Evolutionary epistemology.
Cosmology provides an accessible framework for illustrating the fundamental ideas in “Destruction and Creation.” I mean, stars, planets, the sun — things we all see every day, unlike perhaps, charm quarks, muons, and Z bosons (although the standard model of particle physics is a contemporary example of evolutionary epistemology).
My hope, and I’m reasonably sure Chuck agrees, is that by opening up “Destruction and Creation” to a wider audience, Evolutionary Epistomology will not only make a dense scholarly work more accessible but will provide you with a new set of tools so that, to quote Boyd (Conceptual Spiral, 38), you “can comprehend, cope with, and shape—as well as be shaped by—that world and the novelty that arises out of it.”
Chuck has kindly provided the following set of comments to this edition:
The only significant change is the addition of Slide 4 in this version, which is a kind of historical vector diagram showing my understanding of the evolutionary sequence of Boyd’s thinking.
Taken together, slides 4 and 5 place the role of “fighter pilot” in a perspective for those who claim (incorrectly) that his ideas are the tactical idea of a fighter pilot. His paper “Destruction and Creation” placed him on a totally different intellectual pathway. The addition of Slide 4 to the EE briefing reinforces Chet’s point in Slide 5 — which is an accurate and imaginative way to portray the intellectual sourcing of John’s thinking.
First, in D&C, John focused on the evolution of hard scientific/engineering knowledge. John was trying to understand how he and Tom Christie synthesized Energy-Maneuverability Theory in the 1960s. E-M theory revolutionized ideas for designing fighter aircraft. This was new and very important, particularly for the front-end conceptual design level. Ironically, E-M started off as a way for uncovering the best air-to-air tactics for dogfights between two dissimilar aircraft, but then it morphed into a way for identifying the crucial tradeoffs in a conceptual design of a new aircraft. John and Tom won all sorts of scientific and engineering awards for this latter achievement.
John was obsessed with trying to understand why he uncovered this revolutionizing idea when far better scientists and engineers had not. At the time, he had no idea where this effort in his D&C paper was taking him, other than trying to understand how he created such a novel and effective way of looking at a long-standing design problem. Some of his closest long-time friends thought his musings were crazy.
I am quite certain of this, because we talked about the fact that he had no idea where his D&C research was taking him. Ray Leopold, John, and I talked about this continuously when I first met John in 1973. At the time, Ray and I were only 28 years old, and having technical backgrounds, we were both fascinated with his research.
Chet was in the D&C picture then, but Ray and I did not know him yet. Chet’s chart, Slide 5, can be thought of as an evolutionary caricature or, more accurately, a synthetic portrait, of where John evolved the ideas that underpin his ideas for the OODA loop — particularly with regard to his OODA sketch and its subtle relationships to the nature of competition, learning, and ultimately the creation of novelty as expressed in his Conceptual Spiral briefing [Note: Also available on our Articles page].
The Appendix is for an unstructured informal “classroom style” discussion on how Boyd’s ideas might be used in a general sense to relate to some known military campaigns. I used it from time to time in classroom discussions with military officers in a variety of low-level to high-level DoD schools.
Slightly East of New 