Homo sapiens' Adaptability is Our Greatest Adaptation

All tools are externalizations of originally integral functions. But in developing each tool man also extends the limits of its usefulness, since he can make bigger cups hold liquids too hot or chemically destructive for his hands. Tools do not introduce new principles but they greatly extend the range of conditions under which the discovered control principle may be effectively employed by man. There is nothing new in world technology's growth. It is only the vast increase of its effective ranges that are startling man. The computer is an imitation human brain. There is nothing new about it, but its capacity, speed of operation, and tirelessness, as well as its ability to operate under environmental conditions intolerable to the human anatomy, make it far more effective in performing special tasks than is the skull and tissue encased human brain, minus the computer.

What is really unique about man is the magnitude to which he has detached, deployed, amplified, and made more incisive all of his many organic functionings. Man is unique among all the living phenomena as the most adaptable omni-environment penetrating, exploring, and operating organism being initially equipped to invent intellectually and self-disciplined, dexterously, to make the tools with which thus to extend himself. The bird, the fish, the tree are all specialized, and their special capability-functioning tools are attached integrally with their bodies, making them incapable of penetrating hostile environments. Man externalizes, separates out, and increases each of his specialized function capabilities by inventing tools as soon as he discovers the need through oftrepeated experiences with unfriendly environmental challenges. Thus, man only temporarily employs his integral equipment as a specialist, and soon shifts that function to detached tools. Man cannot compete physically as a muscle and brained automaton — as a machine-against the automated power tools which he can invent while metaphysically mastering the energy income from universe with which evermore powerfully to actuate these evermore precise mass-production tools. What man has done is to decentralize his functions into a world-around-energy-networked complex of tools which altogether constitute what we refer to as world industrialization.

We extend ourselves through our tools.