Diversity

The rich and bewildering diversity of life forms inhabiting the earth has intrigued humankind for centuries. Why should living things appear as paramecia and hummingbirds, as sequoia trees and giraffes? For many centuries the answer to this question was provided by the creationists. They claimed that the diversity of life was a result and expression of God's bountiful nature: In the fullness of his power and love he chose to create the wonderful variety of living things we encounter on our planet.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, the religious explanation of diversity was challenged by a scientific one. According to this new interpretation, both the diversification of life at any given moment and the emergence of novel living forms throughout time were the result of an evolutionary process. In support of Darwin's theories, biologists have proceeded to identify and name more than 1.5 million species of flora and fauna and have accounted for this diversity by means of reproductive variability and natural selection.

Another example of diversity of forms on this earth, however, has been often overlooked or too readily taken for granted — the diversity of things made by human hands. To this category belongs “the vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the physical world, to facilitate social intercourse, to delight our fancy, and to create symbols of meaning.”

In this chapter, examples from economics, anthropology, and history illustrate a wholly different set of explanations for the emergence of technological novelty. Of these new explanations, the ones based on socioeconomic factors are the best known and the most fully developed. Their popularity and advanced state of development stem from their connection with economic theory and the Marxist interpretation of historical change. Despite the sophisticated theories and empirical findings that can be marshaled in support of socioeconomic explanations, their drawbacks become evident under critical scrutiny. Therefore, in the end we turn to a broad-based interpretation of innovation that stresses cultural attitudes and values.

Making Things by Hand

“All imitation,” writes social anthropologist H. G. Barnett, “must entail some discrepancy.” No matter how dedicated a copyist is faithfully duplicating an original, the copy always differs from its model. This is true even when the copyist and the original maker are one and the same person; the mindset, materials, tools, and working conditions are all slightly different and that makes exact reproduction impossible. When more people are involved in the copying process, the number of deviations from the original are even greater.

The impossibility of imitation without discrepancy also holds true for mass-produced artifacts. Random variations are admittedly quite small, but they do exist despite the rigid controls employed by modern industry.

The process by which a novel artifact is selected for replication and inclusion into the life of a people involves various factors, some more influential than others. The previous chapter concentrated on economic and military necessity as selecting agents but in the case of the waterwheel, nuclear reactor, and supersonic transport other forces, notably social and cultural ones, were clearly at work. Ancient and medieval religious beliefs, a bias toward the acceptance of advanced technology, and Utopian energy myths each played an ancillary role in the selection of these innovations. In this chapter the social and cultural factors governing selection will be raised to a position of central concern and examined with the aid of cross-cultural comparisons.

Technology and Chinese Culture

The influence of cultural values and attitudes on technological choices is more readily apparent in examples drawn from remote cultures than from those that share our Western outlook. Technology is so intimately identified with the cultural life of a people that it is difficult for an indigenous observer to gain the objectivity necessary for critical appraisal. Fortunately, Chinese history contains a wealth of material on technology and culture, much of which has been studied by modern Western historians. Therefore, it is of Chinese civilization that we first ask the question, How may culture affect the selection and replication of technological novelties?

This book presents a theory of technological evolution based on recent scholarship in the history of technology and relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. The organization and content of its chapters are determined by the nature of the evolutionary analogy and not by the need to provide a chronological account of events in the history of technology. However, because this study is primarily historical, not an exercise in the philosophy or sociology of technology, historical examples are used throughout to elucidate and support the theoretical framework. Major developments in the history of technology, such as the invention of the steam engine or the advent of the electrical lighting system, are introduced simultaneously with the unfolding of an evolutionary explanation of technological change.

The opening chapter announces three themes that reappear, with variations, in later sections of the work: diversity — an acknowledgment of the vast number of different kinds of artifacts, or made things, that have long been available; necessity — the belief that humans are driven to invent artifacts to meet basic biological needs; and technological evolution — an organic analogy that explains both the appearance and the selection of these novel artifacts. A close examination of these themes reveals that diversity is a fact of material culture, necessity is a popular but erroneous explanation of diversity, and technological evolution is a way of accounting for diversity without recourse to the idea of biological necessity.

Introduction

A large segment of the modem public believes that technological change is discontinuous and depends on the heroic labors of individual geniuses, such as Eli Whitney, Thomas A. Edison, Henry Ford, and Wilbur and Orville Wright, who single-handedly invent the unique machines and devices that constitute modern technology. According to this view inventions are the products of superior persons who owe little or nothing to the past.

The smaller scholarly community that concerns itself with issues in the history of technology and science rejects this explanation as simplistic because it reduces complex technological developments to a series of great inventions that precipitately burst upon the scene. However, some historians have offered more sophisticated formulations of the discontinuous explanation that do not rely upon the contributions of heroic inventors. Such theorists take their cue from the supposed revolutionary nature of scientific change.

Science, Technology, and Revolution

Recent scholarship in the history and philosophy of science has tended to favor the discrete character of scientific change. This outlook derives ultimately from the study of the emergence of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since the French Revolution, the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton has been described by the term revolution, a political metaphor that implies a violent break with the past and the establishment of a new order.

The political metaphor was applied not only to the arrival of a new way of studying nature but also to any substantial change within a science.

Introduction

Because there is an excess of technological novelty and consequently not a close fit between invention and wants or needs, a process of selection must take place in which some innovations are developed and incorporated into a culture while others are rejected. Those that are chosen will be replicated, join the stream of made things, and serve as antecedents for a new generation of variant artifacts. Rejected novelties have little chance of influencing the future shape of the made world unless a deliberate effort is made to bring them back into the stream (Figure V. 1).

If these remarks recall the notion of evolution by natural selection, they are meant to do so. There are, however, crucial differences between artifactual and organic evolution that must be mentioned before any further use is made of the selection analogy.

Central to organic evolution is the variability that arises from mutation and from the recombination of the parental genes in sexual reproduction. The resulting variant offspring are subject to natural selection, which permits some, but not all, of the variants to survive, reproduce, and pass on their genetic information. The offspring, which have the potential to move in many different evolutionary directions, are selected by the totality of conditions — environmental, biological, social — that prevail at the time of their appearance.

Introduction

The diversity that characterizes the material objects of any culture is proof that novelty is to be found wherever there are human beings. If this were not the case, strict imitation would be the rule, and every newly made thing would be an exact replica of some existing artifact. In such a world technology would not evolve; the range of material goods would be limited to the first few naturfacts used by the earliest men and women.

If we accept the proposition of universal artifactual diversity, we must acknowledge that a greater variety of artifacts is available in some cultures than in others. At one extreme there is the United States that currently issues about seventy thousand patents annually and at the other extreme are the Australian aborigines or the native inhabitants of the Amazon basin whose meager stores of tools and utensils have changed very slowly over many centuries.

How can we account for differences in the rate of production of new kinds of things? And how can we identify the sources of novelty in any culture? Answering these questions is no small task. The study of innovation is filled with confusing and contradictory data, theories, and speculations. Because there is no consensus on how novelty emerges in the modern Western world, we cannot expect to find reliable guidelines to an understanding of innovative activity in our own past, let alone in the histories of cultures radically different from ours.

In the preceding chapter it was maintained that the O. A.P. A. 1861 did not explicitly permit therapeutic abortion but that this did not prevent the performance of the procedure by medical men: abortion was openly induced according to indications established not by the law but by the profession. When these indications expanded, so too did the performance of abortion, even though the law remained unchanged in its apparent restrictiveness. Only in 1938, after the law was challenged by a member of the medical establishment was legal theory unequivocally brought more into line with the realities of clinical practice. It is apparent, therefore, that medical men exerted a significant influence not only on the restriction of the law in the nineteenth century but also on its subsequent relaxation. Did the profession exert any significant influence on the more recent relaxation of the law by the Abortion Act 1967?

The Act came into force on 27 April 1968. It represented the culmination of a campaign led by the Abortion Law Reform Association (A.L.R.A.) to make abortion more widely available. The history of that campaign has been adequately documented elsewhere. It is the aim of this chapter to consider, against this background, the views of the representative medical bodies on the reform of the law and their influence on the Act as it finally emerged from the legislative process.

The 1967 Act placed therapeutic abortion on a statutory footing. Previously, it had been regulated by case-law in the form of the summings-up in R. v. Bourne (1938), R, v. Bergmann and Ferguson (1948), and R. v. Newton and Stungo (1958).

This chapter focusses, against the background of the common-law offence of abortion, on the enactment of the first statutory prohibition of abortion in Lord Ellenborough's Act 1803 (43 Geo III c. 58).

Abortion and the common law

Abortion and the ecclesiastical courts 1200–1600

Whether the common law prohibited the destruction of unborn life has been, and remains, a controversial question, an exhaustive examination of which would be beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it will be contended here, pace Professor Means, that the weight of available authority supports the view that the common law prohibited abortion, at the latest, after the fetus had become ‘quick’ or ‘animated’. Animation was believed to occur when the fetus ‘quickened’ in the womb. An incident of the second trimester of pregnancy, quickening marks the first maternal perception of fetal movement. In associating the origin of life with quickening, the law betrayed both pragmatic and metaphysical influences. The former concerned the need to prove, in any prosecution for abortion, that the woman had been pregnant and that the fetus had been killed by the abortifacient act. Evidence of quickening would clearly facilitate prosecution. The metaphysical influence upon the law was the popular theory, originated by Aristotle and perpetuated by Galen, that human life began at the point of ‘animation’.