10 - History of Technology

Summary

In Chapter 9, I hypothesized that a product of anthropogenic evolution (long cotton fiber) sparked the invention of machines that helped lead the Industrial Revolution. This chapter also explores ways in which evolution has affected technology, but it has a different goal. Here my purpose is to show how evolutionary history can help us identify understudied topics in existing fields, offer a new framework for analysis to existing fields, and benefit from applying insights developed by existing fields. We will use biotechnology and the history of technology as examples.

The next section describes how evolutionary history led me to recognize that it was important for historians of technology to study biotechnology, a topic that had received very little attention from that field. Then I will discuss ways in which evolutionary history helps us revise our understanding of the relationship between nature (here meaning organisms) and technology. Then I will reverse field to show ways in which insights developed in the study of other technologies can help us understand the history of biotechnology.

It took hard work to see how evolutionary history could intertwine with the history of technology, which is a comment on the feebleness of my imagination and on the strength of tradition in scholarly fields. After finishing my previous project (on the environmental history of war), I decided to make anthropogenic evolution the centerpiece of my next undertaking.