Planes would come back with massive amounts of bullet holes in the fuselage, wings and fuel system.
Naturally, they assumed that planes were getting shot most often in these areas.
Assuming the bullet holes should be randomly distributed, he noticed that there were very few bullet holes on the engines of the returning planes.
His recommendation was to maximally armor the engines.
Planes that took too much damage to the engines simply *weren’t making it back*
The areas with the most bullet holes were actually the noncritical ones.
Our brains are notoriously unreliable on intuition alone. The continuity of a species only requires the meets-minimum effective functionality for a given environment.
Evolution has no intentionality.
That’s one of our advantages.