American Consequences - September 2017

W hat really changes everyday life is more mental than material – things you hold in your mind, not things you hold in your mitts. The most important innovations are ideas... The most important innovation in human history was the discovery and control of fire. Any dumb animal can discover fire... Say, if it falls into a volcano or if a lightning strike sets the forest ablaze. But control of fire – starting one, keeping one from burning down the tree you live in, putting one out – requires an animal with ideas, a humanoid. The same is true of tools. You can find a sharp rock... usually by stepping on it. Ouch. Or you can get the notion to make a rock sharp. Do you put it in the fire to make it sharp? No. Do you whack it on a tree to make it sharp? No. Do you strike one kind of rock against another, different kind of rock? That’s the idea! Ideas are the innovations that have had the greatest effect on human society. War is an idea... and a reminder that innovation is not necessarily a good thing in and of itself. Every innovation is a step forward. But you might step forward into a spear point. All primates fight – scratching and biting among themselves. But some humanoid had the innovative thought, “Instead of fighting each other, let’s fight someone else.” A band of Homo sapiens was sitting around, tired of making fires and running low on mammoth meat. One of them said, “The

band of Homo neanderthalensis in the next cave over has a fire going and lots of mammoth meat. Let’s get together and kill them and take their stuff.” Agriculture and the domestication of animals were other (better) ideas... Being a hunter-gatherer is a lot of work. One day a gatherer said, “I was wandering all over the savannah gathering grain from wild grasses. When I returned, I spilled some on the ground. Now there are more wild grasses sprouting right there. Instead of wandering all over the savannah, we could just sit here and watch the grass grow.” And they did. That’s agriculture in a nut (or fruit or grain) shell. Hunting is difficult, too. You have to find the roaming animals. Migrating wildebeest can roam as far as a thousand miles. You have to sneak up on the wildebeest. You have to make sure you spear the wildebeest instead of the wildebeest goring you. Then you have to drag the wildebeest meat back a thousand miles to your family. Hunting would be much easier if the hunters could get the animals to stick around... or be tied up in a barn so they can’t gore anybody. Maybe humans tried to domesticate the wildebeest, but its first name isn’t “wild” for

Every innovation is a step forward. But you might step forward into a spear point.

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