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Although a hammer is a useful tool, it's obviously not that advanced of a tool. As soon as you have an 'advanced' tool that can automate things or do things fo
by guybedo 2y ago
Although a hammer is a useful tool, it's obviously not that advanced of a tool.
As soon as you have an 'advanced' tool that can automate things or do things for you better/faster/with less efforts, you don't need to learn that skill anymore, why would you ?
It doesn't mean the capacity is lost forever and the skill can't be learned anymore, but it's gonna be less and less frequent at the population level.
Nowadays, how many people can:
- make fire without a match or a lighter ?
- add large numbers or do math operations without a calculator ?
- reach a destination without a gps ?
- learn history dates, lists of cities / states / etc...
In the end, it's a bit similar to how species evolve. When a function isn't needed anymore, the organism tends to evolve without it.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoGiven that a hammer is a primordial tool, a first tool, you'd think that that switch would be the most striking at that moment. We went from having no tool at all to a tool. I think you're mixing definitions of things. We don't lose any capacity at all, we just lose the need for a skill in our day to day life. We haven't evolved away from the ability to create fire, we just don't need that knowledge at this moment. I don't know how to hunt a gazelle, but the hunter didn't know how to drive. Both "evolution" and "capacity" seem to be incorrect words to describe this phenomena.