{"id":12018,"date":"2015-07-29T15:31:21","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T15:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/just-because-mans-need-for-tools-is-so-obvious\/"},"modified":"2015-07-29T15:31:21","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T15:31:21","slug":"just-because-mans-need-for-tools-is-so-obvious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/just-because-mans-need-for-tools-is-so-obvious\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Just because man\u2019s need for tools is so obvious, we must guard ourselves against over-stressing the role of stone tools hundreds of thousands of years before they became functionally differentiated and efficient. In treating tool-making as central to early man\u2019s survival, biologists and anthropologists for long underplayed, or neglected, a mass of activities in which many other species were for long more knowledgeable than man.<br \/>\nIn any adequate definition of technics, it should be plain that many insects, birds, and mammals had made far more radical innovations in the fabrication of containers, with their intricate nests and bowers, their geometric beehives, their urbanoid anthills and termitaries, their beaver lodges, than man\u2019s ancestors had achieved in the making of tools until the emergence of Homo Sapiens. In short, if technical proficiency alone were sufficient to identify and foster intelligence, man was for long a laggard, compared with many other species. The consequences of this perception should be plain: namely, that there was nothing uniquely human in tool-making until it was modified by linguistic symbols, aesthetic designs, and socially transmitted knowledge. At that point, the human brain, not just the hand, was what made a profound difference; and that brain could not possibly have been just a hand-made product, \u00a0since it was already well developed in four-footed creatures like rats, which have no free-fingered hands.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p>Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development [<a href=\"http:\/\/philosophersbunker.blogspot.com\/2011\/12\/reading-excerpt-lewis-mumford-myth-of.html\">x<\/a>]<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been re-reading a bunch of Lewis Mumford lately, triggered by <a>stoweboyd<\/a>\u200b\u2018s recent <a href=\"http:\/\/finalbossform.com\/post\/121110959425\/the-most-powerful-dehumanizing-machine-is-not\">posting of a Mumford quote on megamachines<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>While most of my reading has concentrated on the command + control bits of Mumford\u2019s work, the bit above was just too lovely not to share.<\/p>\n<p>Related: all of this has coincided with a presentation I\u2019m currently researching, tentatively titled \u201cSkynet Is Already Here And It Looks Like Fandoms\u201d<\/p>\n<p>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/finalbossform.com\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">kenyatta<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just because man\u2019s need for tools is so obvious, we must guard ourselves against over-stressing the role of stone tools hundreds of thousands of years before they became functionally differentiated and efficient. In treating tool-making as central to early man\u2019s survival, biologists and anthropologists for long underplayed, or neglected, a mass of activities in which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-37Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}