American Scientist

As you watch Michael Phelps swim the butterfly stroke, you marvel at the amazing coordination of his muscular arms, legs, and torso. These powerful motions seem to have been perfectly planned to outpace his rivals in what is the most demanding of all swimming strokes. What you may not appreciate is that the butterfly stroke was never planned. Nor, for decades following its debut, was it even an approved stroke in the Olympic Games.

Because of its striking suitability to specific situations, the butterfly stroke may appear to have been ingeniously and foresightedly designed. More often than not, however, this and many other creative acts actually arose “as if by design.” A deep dive into the history of this innovation provides a firmer grasp on the very nature of behavioral creativity. What emerges is an intricate web of causation involving three main factors: context, consequence, and coincidence.

By concentrating on the process rather than the product of innovation, behavior emerges as the very center of creative human endeavor—for it is truly behavior that produces the innumerable innovations that have captivated thinkers’ imaginations. Those most splendid theories, goods, gadgets—and swimming strokes—would never have come into being without the behaviors of their inventors.

We admittedly remain far from fully understanding how creative behaviors originate and evolve. But I firmly believe that we’ll gain ground far faster by abandoning fruitless fictions such as genius and insight, and by focusing instead on what can be observed and investigated.

As If by Design

Genius. Inspiration. Insight. Foresight. Without deeper inquiry, most people blithely accept that these are the dominant forces that foster game-changing innovations by highly celebrated heroes. That’s largely because it’s all too easy to tell tall tales without doing the hard work of exploring the factors that actually participate in advancing the human condition.

But, the insightful or eureka moment is a myth: an altogether naive and fanciful account of human progress. Innovations actually arise from an intricate web of historical, circumstantial, and adventitious influences.

However, don’t be intimidated by such complex determinism: A simple law of behavior is actively at work in the creative process. The law of effect inescapably and mechanically strengthens actions that have succeeded in the past over actions that have either failed or been maladaptive. The law of effect knows no bounds. It operates in all realms of human endeavor: sports, the arts, politics, science, medicine, and technology.

Originally formulated in the late 19th century by American psychologist Edward Thorndike, the law of effect debunks the myth of creative genius and closely parallels Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Indeed, this “selectionist” law is every bit as controversial as Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

From its naturalistic perspective, the law of effect asserts that the strongest creative forces lie outside rather than inside of us. Most pointedly, we don’t deliberately, foresightedly, and intelligently design our own behavior; rather, our behavior is shaped by our own past history and by the unique circumstances in which we find ourselves. That behavioral shaping process is often a haphazard, trial and error affair with no obvious end in sight; yet it can generate innumerable innovations that significantly advance the human condition and deceive historians into incorrectly interpreting them as due to flashes of creative insight or foresightful design.

Creativity lies at the heart of all adaptive action. Although we rarely appreciate it, each of us innovates every day as we adjust to life’s many trials. Large and small, those innovations enable us, as individuals and as a species, to thrive.

The law of effect generally promotes adaptive behavior, retaining successful actions and eliminating unsuccessful ones. Yet, this decidedly trial and error process is neither rational nor infallible. Whatever its limits and liabilities, the law of effect provides our best means of surviving in a harsh and uncertain world.

As a psychological scientist concerned with how both humans and animals adjust to the frequently changing demands of survival, I find it perfectly clear that the most creative of those behaviors have posed the greatest challenges to existing theories of learning and behavior.

Behavioral innovation is often said to be overdetermined: Even singular effects can be determined by multiple causes. Those causes can be boiled down to context, consequence, and coincidence. These three C’s may each participate in behavioral innovations, but to varying degrees in any individual instance: One size most assuredly doesn’t fit all.

Everything happens at a particular time and in a particular place: its context. This overall setting is frequently referred to as the prevailing zeitgeist—the defining character of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the period. But, that context is usually much more limited when we consider the circumstances in which individuals find themselves. Furthermore, individuals have their own personal experiences that they bring to the historical moment. Laboratory research tries to minimize such conspicuous idiosyncrasies, but history celebrates and respects the context of creation.

Novel behaviors must have consequences if they are to take hold. The odds are decidedly against the strengthening of novel behaviors. Take the analogy of the forward pass in football. Two out of the three possible things that can result are unfavorable: an incompletion or an interception. Only the completed pass is a favorable outcome. The same goes for novel behaviors. Nothing good or something bad is likely to follow. Only a good outcome will reinforce a novel behavior. It’s no wonder then that, under stable conditions, people respond in highly regular ways. It’s only when uncommon circumstances arise that routine responses falter and novel actions emerge.

Finally, chance may bring people and possibilities together. Good fortune is what comes from taking full advantage of those possibilities. Of course, you can’t plan on luck to get you out of a jam. Nevertheless, opportunities can arise from adversities. And, when they do, exploiting them makes the proverbial lemonade out of lemons.

Components of the Butterfly

Phelps is arguably the greatest Olympic athlete of all time. He is unarguably the most decorated. Over the course of his extraordinary five-game Olympic swimming career, Phelps earned a total of 28 medals: 23 gold, 3 silver, and 2 bronze. The butterfly was his signature stroke. In this particularly demanding event, Phelps individually earned six gold and two silver medals in the 100- and 200-meter races.

Those unfamiliar with the butterfly stroke are sure to find it baffling. The windmill motion of both arms, first flung upward and forward out of the water, and then thrust downward and backward into the water, coupled with the rhythmically undulating torso and powerful leg kicks, create a seemingly chaotic concatenation of strenuous bodily maneuvers. Perhaps because the butterfly has been called the most aggressively athletic of all swimming strokes, it’s rumored to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite, thereby flaunting his manliness.

No less baffling than the stroke’s peculiarity is its origin. As with most origin stories, the history of the butterfly stroke is a rather frustrating evolutionary tale to tell. The patchy story line involves a host of disconnected contributors, anecdotes of dubious authenticity, and a wealth of unresolved controversies. Further contributing to the story’s complexity is the fact that the two main elements of today’s butterfly stroke—the flying or over-the-water arm stroke and the fish-tail or dolphin leg kick—are historically unrelated. Finally, there is the fact that the full butterfly stroke did not suddenly emerge; it gradually grew out of the already familiar, but far less flamboyant, breaststroke.

As far as the double over-the-water arm stroke is concerned, many writers credit its invention to Sydney Cavill. This Australian swimmer emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, where he coached several competitors at San Francisco’s Olympic Club. Also adopting the over-the-water arm stroke was German swimmer Erich Rademacher, who competed in the United States in 1926 and 1927, as well as in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In some of these breaststroke events, Rademacher has been claimed to have incorporated a single over-the-water arm stroke as he approached the turns and at the end of the race. Occasional use of the over-the-water or “fly-away” technique is also credited to the Spence brothers, Wallace and Walter, both of whom trained and coached at the Brooklyn YMCA.

However, most often discussed in connection with the fly-away arm stroke is American swimmer Henry Myers of Brooklyn’s St. George Dragon Swim Club. Myers used the fly-away stroke for the entire breaststroke leg of a three-stroke medley race at a 1933 YMCA competition in Brooklyn. His success in that race and in later events convinced Myers—and his competitors—that this innovation could greatly enhance swimmers’ breaststroke speeds. Myers also perceptively suspected that this double arm motion might inspire much greater interest in this aquatic event, as even he found it rather unexciting to watch a breaststroke race. Adding the fly-away—with its spectacular splashing and violent arm motion—to the breaststroke might be more likely to spark fan fervor.

Other authors have been intrigued by the possible role that American Volney C. Wilson played in developing the underwater dolphin kick. Wilson is said to have explored its possibilities before beginning work on nuclear fission and the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. Wilson was a strong swimmer and an alternate on the 1932 Olympic water polo team, who was allegedly inspired to explore this technique by his informal studies of fish propulsion at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

Putting It All Together

All of that colorful history notwithstanding, the full realization of the dolphin kick and its successful integration with the over-the-water arm stroke is truly an Iowa story. The first public notice of Iowa’s contribution to this evolutionary tale came in the August 1936 issue of Esquire magazine. In “Frog, Butterfly and Dolphin,” G. Clifford Larcom, Jr., teased readers with a titillating subtitle: “Traditional strokes go the way of bloomer bathing suits as the engineers revise swimming.” He then proceeded to describe several current developments in swimming techniques. Most noteworthy among these developments were the dramatic modifications then underway in the breaststroke:

The latest breast stroke creation, a muscle devastating affair, is the dolphin stroke, modelled by Jack G. Sieg and tailored by Coach David A. Armbruster, both of the University of Iowa. Mr. Armbruster’s coach’s eye was caught one day by the sight of young Mr. Sieg rushing along under water with no other means of propulsion than the undulating, wriggling motion of a fish. Alert Mr. Armbruster incorporated this type [of] kick with the double overarm and the results were sensational for the good old breast stroke. . . .

The stroke completely junks the old breast stroke kick and eliminates the checking forces developed in the old method. . . . If sanctioned, it would correct the one factor that retards interest in the ordinary breast stroke—its slowness.

Contributing to the development of the butterfly stroke were the advanced facilities that were available to the University of Iowa swimmers. On October 25, 1925, the Iowa State Board of Education authorized construction of the world’s largest fieldhouse, including the world’s largest indoor pool. A 20-yard pool in the campus Armory was also available for conducting controlled swimming experiments. It provided facilities for underwater photography and motion picture recording. In and of themselves, those facilities might have given Iowa swimmers a modest edge in training. They might also have attracted some of the nation’s best swimmers to the Iowa City campus. But, it was Iowa’s famed coach that most surely contributed to swimming history.

David Alvin Armbruster, Sr., never participated in a competitive swimming race. Nevertheless, he was the University of Iowa’s first swimming coach, serving for 42 years (1916–1958) and compiling over 100 all-American honors. He coached 14 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) champions as well as both gold medal (Wally Ris) and silver medal (Bowen Stassferth) winners in the Olympic Games. Nevertheless, he is perhaps most famously credited with inventing the butterfly stroke—the most recent swimming stroke for national and international competition, joining the freestyle, breaststroke, and backstroke—as well as originating the flip turn.

Armbruster was widely recognized as the scientific “dean” of competitive swimming from the 1930s through the 1950s. He earned that esteemed reputation because of his careful and detailed studies of swimmers’ various techniques, stimulated in part by his colleague and occasional collaborator C. H. McCloy. America’s first giant in the bioscience of physical education and exercise, McCloy was a staunch advocate of strength training (which Armbruster adamantly rejected for his swimmers, believing that it would make them “muscle bound”).

At a 1911 swim carnival in Toronto, Armbruster saw George Corsan, Sr., (who went on to become one of his early instructors) demonstrate the fish-tail kick. Later, in 1916, Armbruster attended another of these swim carnivals, in which various entertaining stunts were performed involving imitations of animals. In it, Corsan performed a “butterfly” stroke by swimming the breaststroke kick and fluttering his hands at his sides on the surface of the water, not above the water. That stunt bore little resemblance to today’s butterfly overarm stroke, yet its name may have subliminally registered with Armbruster.

Most importantly, at a subsequent swimming exhibition, Armbruster witnessed a young boy perform what he called the Italian crawl: a double overarm pull combined with the standard breaststroke (frog) kick. Although unsanctioned by the Amateur Athletic Union, that arm motion was used in many later exhibitions and, after certification, in competitions. The seeds may thus have been sown for future breaststroke development.

While coaching at Iowa, Armbruster had empirically determined that performing the breaststroke with the butterfly pull and the orthodox frog kick proved to be a poor mechanical combination. The kick was actually a retarding action compared to the faster, more powerful action of the flying arms. To take full advantage of the increasingly popular overarm stroke, something had to change. But, what?

Beginning in 1932, Armbruster began to put the pieces together. In a 1935 article coauthored with Sieg, Armbruster described the way he went about connecting and integrating the overarm stroke with the dolphin kick:

One day in a moment of relaxation and play, [I] saw Jack Sieg go under water, lie on his side, with his arms trailing at the sides, imitating a fish, imitating the undulating movement with his head. I have often seen boys do this in water but never saw anyone derive the speed that Sieg was able to attain from it. We then tried it with the body face down, and the result was even greater. We then had him do it for speed against some of our best flutter-crawl kickers—no one could beat him. This was very impressive, to say the least. He then tried the double over-arm recovery of the breast stroke using this kick with it for several strokes. The leg rhythm was a natural movement and adapted itself perfectly to the rhythm of the double over-arm recovery. We then started to train for longer distances and adjust the breathing in order to cover one hundred yards. Several weeks practice brought results of greater speed, but at the cost of greater energy output. The stroke is an exhausting one.

The team of Armbruster and Sieg eventually called the innovative merger of these two techniques—the butterfly overarm recovery plus two dolphin kicks—the dolphin butterfly breaststroke. But, their work was far from finished. Because the entire kick is performed underwater, Armbruster conducted additional mechanical analysis with the aid of slow-motion pictures, taken both from five windows below the surface of the water and from above the Armory’s smaller 20-yard pool. Further experimentation produced several additional refinements, which in turn yielded still greater boosts in speed while better conserving the energy of the swimmer.

Going Mainstream

The new butterfly stroke generated considerable controversy because it did not comply with prevailing breaststroke rules, leading to its painfully slow acceptance by the competitive swimming community. By special permission, the full butterfly stroke was first used in the medley relay in a dual swim meet with the University of Wisconsin on February 25, 1935. The Iowa team included Dick Westerfield swimming the backstroke leg, Sieg swimming the butterfly in place of the standard breaststroke, and Adolph Jacobsmeyer swimming the freestyle. Sieg’s time was some five seconds faster than the best previous 100-yard breaststroke!

By concentrating on the process rather than the product of innovation, behavior emerges as the very center of creative human endeavor.

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Soon thereafter, Armbruster attempted an even more persuasive demonstration. At the 1935 NCAA meet at Harvard University, Armbruster staged an exhibition for the Rules Committee of what he then called the dolphin breaststroke. Sieg impressed the committee members with his demonstration of the new stroke, but they did not alter the NCAA rules to allow for the breaststroke variation. Armbruster’s efforts over the ensuing years continued to be unsuccessful. Only in 1952 did the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) sanction the butterfly stroke as a new event. Finally, in 1956, it was added to the Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, as a separate competition.

Over the years, swimmers and coaches have continued to refine and develop the butterfly stroke. It is now the second fastest stroke in the water after the freestyle. And, to many swimming fans, it is the most exciting.

While Armbruster and Sieg were developing the butterfly stroke, they were also experimenting with a new and faster turn, which they called the tumble or flip turn. In 1938, the pair believed they had perfected the maneuver and used it for the first time in the NCAA Championships at Rutgers University. Their innovation is still the fastest turn in the water; it is currently used by all speed and distance swimmers.

In a 1968 letter to Buck Dawson, executive director of the Swimming Hall of Fame, after being named the 1966 Honor Coach, Armbruster confessed that, “As I ponder over all of [my] awards and thrills, I will choose the creation of the Dolphin Butterfly stroke and the ‘flip’ turn as giving the greatest source of satisfaction. These two creations will live long, and beyond my time in the swimming world.”

In the 1936 Esquire article, Larcom made a point that should be stressed: namely, how these important evolutionary changes in swimming actually came about.

These latest in streamlined swimming strokes are developing out of their incipient stages. Speed becomes greater because waste motions have been discovered and eliminated and the strokes have been polished to smooth precision. [Although other strokes have continued to evolve] it is the breast stroke . . . that has had the most universal development.

As in countless other areas of human endeavor, trial and error assumes center stage in the unfolding of behavioral innovation. No one—not even Armbruster or Sieg—could have envisioned the final result of their extensive aquatic experiments. Today’s butterfly swimmers—including Michael Phelps—may have little knowledge of the stroke’s origins. But, if we are to gain a proper appreciation of this significant sporting achievement, its history is essential. Given that extended history, it is obvious that today’s butterfly stroke is no ”stroke of good luck”!

This article is excerpted and adapted from As If by Design: How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve, published by Cambridge University Press, © 2021 by Edward A. Wasserman. Reproduced with permission of the licensor through PLSclear.