An experimental study suggests humans can improve technology over generations without necessarily having a sophisticated understanding of it.
When we look back over the course of human history, it is easy to marvel at the ingenuity behind simple but incredibly effective technologies—like houses, boats or bows and arrows—which had such a profound impact on the lives of our ancestors.
"It is often believed that humans succeeded in producing complex tools and adapting to different environments thanks to their impressive brain," Maxime Derex, from the University of Exeter and the Catholic University of Lille, told Newsweek. "Yet the effectiveness of traditional technologies such as bows or kayaks depends on numerous parameters that remain difficult to understand and model, even for modern physicists.
The system consisted of a wheel with four spokes that traveled down a 1-meter-long inclined track. Each spoke had a weight which could be moved onto other spokes in different configurations to make the wheel move faster or slower. The researchers tasked the students with trying to make the wheel travel as fast as possible down the track using different set-ups.
The researchers found that, on average, each “generation” was able to make the wheel go faster despite that the fact that those individuals at the end of the chain had no more understanding of the physics behind the enhanced solution than their predecessors. Much like in the first portion of the experiment, each generation was able to increase the speed that the wheel traveled at a similar rate. But perhaps surprisingly, understanding of the physical system barely changed across the generations, according to the authors, despite the fact that the students could explain the theory to the next participant.
"Artefacts from hundreds or thousands of years ago do not necessarily show that their makers had a plan or a theory about how something would work,” Derex said.
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