The Oil Drum

The first is the "low-hanging fruit" theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I've noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older," he says. "That's a sure sign it's taking longer to innovate." The other alternative is to specialise -- but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we're progressing, but it will be an illusion.

That quip about "we have to specialize" is where I beg to differ with Mr. Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times Magazine.

The Renaissance Age was not one driven by men of specialized interests, but rather by those who had chosen to buck the system and become learned in many fields at once.

Mother Nature does not divide herself up into sub-specialities like "petroleoum geology" and "thermodynamics". These are fictions that we human beings have contrived as part of our devotion to the religion of Adam Smith.

Was it not Sir Isaac Newton who humbly said, "If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants"?

We need to teach our children to stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants rather than in the casting rooms of Hollywood Moguls.

Instead of dumbing down our school texts with politically correct appeasements to the "Intelligent Design" crowd, we need to go to war against their head-for-caveman mentalities.

It was in 1890 (I think) that the Commissioner of Patents for the US government told the President it was time to shut down the Patent Office because "everything that can be invented, has been invented".

It was wrong headed then.
It is wrong headed now.
There still is hope.
For those who have the courage to fight.

We have become weak in the face
of the lies laid on us by the corporate manipulators.

Now is the time to rise in arms.
Call them out for what they are.
Point the greed glow lamps at them and make them wilt in the dung heaps on which they stand.