Why Having Friends with Curiosity Matters
- “Growing populations are associated
with progress; shrinkage has often
correlated with cultural decline.”
- Tazmanian decline from 34,000 BCE to
1800s CE
- 34,000 ya- people with
sophisticated tool making skills
arrive using land bridge from
Australia.
- 8,000 ya- land bridge submerged
by rising oceans
- 1840- arriving British find only
simplest technology; hunting
with rocks and crude clubs.
- Joseph Henrich- island’s population at
something below the level necessary for
complex skills passed from generation
to generation.
Implications for early Philippine scientific
development
- 50,000 ya first inhabitants arrive by land
bridge in Palawan and Batangas
- Next 40,000 years- simple tools and
weapons of stone flakes eventually using
sawing, drilling and polishing hard
stones, and metal smelting until killed
by cheap Chinese imports.
- The Spanish found numerous, scattered,
thriving, relatively self-sufficient
autonomous communities with simple
appropriate levels of technological
development, compared with Chinese
and Japanese, but sufficient for needs.
Pre-classical and Classical Science
- Egyptians
- Excellent at geometry but poor
in arithmetic and math, could
not do fractional computing.
(his was because of the annual
flooding from the Nile river)
- Astronomy- primitive, but
excellent calendars trying to
reconcile solar and lunar cycles,
established 365 day year and 24
hour day
- Medicine and surgery-
empirical
- Babylonians
- Excellent at math using
sexagesimal (base 60) system,
used algebra but poor in
geometry
- Astronomy- moon oriented
especially about eclipses
- Medicine and surgery-
empirical later used astrology
Waves of Technology
“Waves”?
- “Wave front analysis”: history as a
succession of waves of change. Where
will the “leading edge” take us?
- Waves are characterized by technology.
- Technology as a driving force for social
change
The First Wave: Agricultural Revolution
Timeline of Agricultural Development
12000 BCE
11000- 10000 BCE: Egypt and Mesopotamia
9000 BCE: Asia
8000- 5000 BCE: New Guinea
5000 BCE: Sub-Saharan Africa
4000-3000 BCE: The America
2000 BCE
1000 BCE
0 BCE
3500 CE
- Domestication- process of taming,
cultivating or controlling plants or
animals that were originally wild, e.g.,
by selective breeding
- Farming and irrigation- more
productive than hunting
- Use of “living batteries (people and
animals) and renewable sources
- What was the significance of the
invention and improvement of farming
implements?
- Who are the producers and consumers?
- How did these changes affect the
structure of society?
- Domestication→ food security→ leads to
population growth and formation of
settlements→ leads to waste, disease,
issues of resource distribution
- Land= basis of economy, culture, politics
(power)
 - Decentralized economy (with
exceptions)
- Artisans, guilds
- Stratification
- Work- labor, animal (horsepower)
- The elite are on top while the peasants,
slaves, workers, landless, uneducated,
unhealthy, etc. are at the bottom.
The Second Wave: The Industrial Revolution
- 18th to 19th centuries
- What caused it? Confluence of factors:
- Discovery of “new worlds”
- Population growth, movement
into new towns
- Pressure on timber forests
→ prompted more use of coal
- Invention of the engine
- “First wave societies lived off widely
dispersed sources of energy. Second wave
societies became almost totally dependent
on highly concentrated deposits of fossil
fuel”. (Toffler, 1980).
The factory= model of efficiency
- Mass production (standardization)
- Mass media
- Mass consumption
- Mass education
- How did the Industrial Revolution
change the environment?
- Scale of resource use and
pollution generation
- Concentration of people
The Second Wave: The Industrial Revolution
- How did the Industrial Revolution
change production and consumption?
- Differentiation (jobs, producers
vs. consumers)
Gap between owners of technology and
laborers: cotton industry in UK and US
- Cotton was labor intensive in picking
and in removing seeds
- In US: African slaves
- In Uk: Child labor
- 1793: Eli Whitney- Cotton Gin
mechanized the seed removal →
transformed industry, other tech
mechanized spinning
- Change: in the U.S., civil war which
killed 620,000
- In the U.U., social reform brought about
by social legislation
- Before this invention, it took one person
all day to process 900 grams (2 pounds)
of cotton by hand, a s;ow and inefficient
method.
- Whitney’s cotton gin machine could
process that much within a half hour
- Whitney (who died in 18225) could not
have foreseen the ways in which his
invention would change society for the
worse. The most significant of these was
the growth of slavery
- While it was true that the cotton gin
reduced the labor of removing seeds, it
did not reduce the need for slaves to
grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the
opposite occurred.
- Cotton growing became so profitable for
the planters that it greatly increases
their demand for both land and slave
labor
- In 1790, there were six slave states; in
1860, there were 15. From 1790 until
congress banned the importation of
slaves from Africa in 1808, southerners
imported 80,000 Africans
- By 1860, approximately one in three
southerners was a slave
● How did the Industrial Revolution
change education?
- In the west, raised the needs for
basic education; literacy and
numeracy
● “Overt curriculum” (basic reading,
writing, arithmetic, history, and others)
vs. “Covert curriculum” (punctuality,
obedience, rote, repetitive work)
The Assembly Line
- Measurements required precision
- A culture of discipline needed to be
cultivated
How did the industrial revolution change
families?
- Factories needed workers, especially
those willing to move from place to
place as needed.
- Thus, key functions of the family were
delegated to institutions:
 - Education → schools
- Care of the elderly → nursing
homes
- Hence: the “streamlined” nuclear family

Benefits of the Second Wave:

1. Nature as a resource to be exploited;
man in opposition with nature and
dominating it
2. Humans as pinnacle of evolution;
industrialized societies as superior