Tools
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. — Marshall McLuhan
A human is not very special. Throw one into the middle of the jungle and they probably wouldn’t last too long. They’d try to eat some delicious poisonous plant or a baboon would beat them to death with an unripe banana. If you’ve ever watched Naked and Afraid, you know how pathetic we are in these situations.
But give this human a few simple tools — maybe a machete and a lighter — and their chances increase dramatically.
Now give them a car, a knife, a gun, and an iPhone with access to YouTube videos on how to hunt and kill an Amazonian wildebeest, and they’re likely to be the King of the Jungle in no time.
We are very weak on our own. But we accessorize extremely well.
We are slower than cheetahs and weaker than chimps. Our vision is worse than that of owls. But we have external help — we have cars, bikes and motorcycles to make us faster, machines, pulleys and levers to make us stronger, and glasses, binoculars, telescopes and night-vision goggles to help us see. We don’t need to take on animals from up close — have spears, swords, guns to kill them from afar.
All other animals have all their tools built in. Thankfully, a shark has its teeth and that’s about it. If they could build underwater heat-seeking missiles, or if a bear could build and operate a cannon, we’d likely be in more than just a little bit of trouble. Fortunately, animals can’t accessorize like us.
But we somehow learned to cheat the evolutionary system. Tools are our cheat codes.
Evolution of tools
When you ask to borrow your brother’s toolkit, you’re probably expecting more than this:
But this is all that existed for the first 3 million years of human life. 3 million years is one hell of a long time and we couldn’t think of anything better — our brains simply were not able to conceive of any tools more complex than these. Just as I can’t teach my dog to play cards no matter how hard I try (despite what certain paintings will try to tell you). They just aren’t built with that capacity.
But then humans made a bet. We traded some physical traits for extra brain capacity. Over the next 2 million years, our brains doubled in size. This made us vulnerable: our brains consume 25% of our energy intake. Childbirth was made harder.
This was neat and all, but we were nothing special. We foraged more than we hunted. We were like many of the animals we see today.
Then something happened. Probably the most important event in the history of the world. A ripple in evolution, a genetic mutation. We have genetic mutations all the time, but this one was so beneficial it quickly spread throughout the homo sapiens species. It was so powerful that homo sapiens developed at the expense of all other human species; at the time there were 6, the last of which perished not long before the time Homer was composing the Odyssey. It may be that this mutation occurred in a single human and over time was spread genetically to produce all of us today. We come from a very small group of people; you’d find more genetic variation amongst a random group of 55 apes than across all 7 billion human beings.
This mutation was probably the capacity for language — our most powerful tool. We think using language. This gave us the ability to think about our own thoughts. We invented communication, not between us and other humans, but with ourselves. Speech came later, and with it the ability to think about the thoughts of others. Nobody is quite sure how this came to be. But we had become homo sapiens (“man the thinker”).
Most of the evolutionary development of our brains happened in the frontal lobe. This gives us our capacity to imagine things that don’t actually exist. Most animals do not have the capacity to understand the concept of the future, but human beings developed this ability which was key to their evolution. With it came abstract thinking, symbolic conceptualization, and planning — all fundamental to the success of the human race and the development of society. In fact, scientists have recently argued that the ability to contemplate the future is the single most important development that sets us apart from animals.
“All great Acts of Genius began with the same consideration: Do not be constrained by your present reality.”
Leonardo Da Vinci
This all happened around 100,000 years ago and we didn’t waste any time using this new tool to dominate the earth — we quickly spread out from Africa, destroyed all other human species, rendered several other big game species extinct. Art started to appear about 50,000 years ago (a little after speech) and we became behaviorally modern. We were pretty much the same then as we are now.
And we started building more complex tools.
We have a particular set of skills…skills we’ve acquired over a very long career
These important evolutionary developments helped us learn to extract the essence of what we saw, harness it and make it our own.
We’ve taken the essence of vision and put it into cameras, hearing into recorders, memory into silicon chips and our voices into microphones. We saw the flight of birds and put it into planes, the swimming of fish and put it into submarines, and the speed of animals and put it into cars. We took the shelter of caves and built homes. And now we’ve taken the intelligence of humanity and given it to computers.
We observe complexity and model it to break it down into simpler parts, extract those that have a certain value, manipulate those parts, amplify that value and transform and implant and combine them into other things.
We invented numbers and words to model and represent the world. We model natural phenomena using mathematics: geometry, trigonometry, algebra, calculus. We describe the natural world using science: chemistry, physics, biology, thermodynamics, electromagnetism. We illustrate the social world with economics, statistics, sociology, psychology, history, and organize it using oligarchy, dictatorship, communism, capitalism and democracy.
We deduced the properties of matter, the principles of economics and the peculiarities of physics; we figured out gravity, relativity and space-time.
We’ve broken down matter into atoms and molecules that we generalized into elements and isolated and combined them. We’ve broken down life and mapped the genome and are now extracting, understanding and even editing it.
But the line between us and our tools is increasingly blurring. Our phones are practically attached to our hands and our screens are practically glued in front of our eyes. What was once external could soon be a built- in part of us.
That will change the very nature of humanity.
