Description
As humanity has evolved, innovations have been developed to modify its environment, but these technological innovations are having an ever-increasing impact on human behavior, biology, and society. Therefore, it is imperative to know how we should approach the world we have built. Over thousands of years, humans have developed ingenious inventions that have allowed them to control the environment - relatively speaking - the ability of humans to communicate, gather knowledge, build and invent has helped them change the environment. Innovation enables growth, but the trouble with innovation is that we don't go backwards; we are constantly inventing, building, and exploiting technologies to further modify the environment, and then modifying these innovations to deal with the consequences.
In Innovation and the Unintended Consequences of Evolution, Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson shed light on what would happen if our innovations were able to take us back to nature: How did humans evolve from hunter-gatherers to become what they are today in an increasingly complex and technological world? To answer this and other questions, the authors continue the discussion about the unexpected consequences of our distinctive evolution. What makes us who we are is the interplay between our inherited and evolved vitality and our ability to communicate complex ideas to learn and make things; diagnosis must precede effective treatment. At the same time, we can recognize that this is just the beginning of the next stage of our evolution that will take all of our genius to realize.
