THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY

                       THROUGH FOUR COGNITIVE RANKS


                            by David G. Hays

               Copyright (c) 1991, 1993 by David G. Hays
                      (c) 1995 by Janet Hays


                               Published
                                  by
                            Metagram Press               
       
                       25 Nagle Avenue, Suite 3G
                          New York, NY 10040
                          phone: 212 567-7305
                     email: jhaysnyc@earthlink.net
           

                      Table of Contents

          Forward
          Before We Begin
          Author Bio
          Publisher's Note

Chapter

     1    HISTORY, EVOLUTION, AND TECHNOLOGY
     2    RANKS, REVOLUTIONS, AND PAIDEIAS
     3    ENERGETICS
     4    INFORMATICS
     5    POLITICS, COGNITION, AND PERSONALITY
     6    INVESTMENT; with a life-cycle cost
          analysis of one individual human being
     7    APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
     8    THEY DID THE BEST THEY KNEW HOW

          BIBLIOGRAPHY           

          FIGURES                
          SOURCES for FIGURES







                       THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY

                       THROUGH FOUR COGNITIVE RANKS


                 (c) 1991, 1993 by David G. Hays


                            Foreword

     Since William L. Benzon came to the State University of New
York as a student in the 1970s, he and I have been thinking about
the ways human nature has changed during the last fifty thousand
years.  We have by now published some articles, which I shall
cite in the proper places, but this diskbook is the first survey
of a large collection of relevant facts from the perspective of
our collaborative theory.

     I began writing prose about the evolution of technology in
1989, when I first taught a course given by the New School
through Connected Education.  A preliminary edition of this
diskbook was released in January, 1991.  This first proper
edition benefits from reading since that time, and especially
from the comments and reactions of students who enrolled in the
1991 and 1992 sessions of the course.  Desta Elliot generously
commented in detail on the entire draft; Alan Gaynor was particu-
larly firm in requiring a more definite statement of the central
theory, and Graham Ray commented on several points.  And every
student who has enrolled helped me recognize weaknesses.  If I
did not make all of the changes that they would have made, they
cannot be blamed for the result.

     For the impatient, I have provided a quick way to tour the
book without reading it.  Get the Table of Contents on the screen
and activate the hyperlink for each chapter in turn. 
The first page of each chapter contains a brief summary.  The
[Back] button permits immediate return to the Table of Contents. 
Or, for a longer tour, go to the first page of each section for a
more detailed summary and return from each to the first page of
the chapter using the Table of Contents.

     I am unable to think of the reader finding this book in
some library of the future--the reader seems to me almost as
close as the student in a computer-network course.  The prose
style that I adopt is therefore conversational, informal, in fact
loose.  You may get the best result by imagining yourself talking
with me over dinner.  Afterward, if you find that you want to
_work_ on some of the points that have come up, you can come back
to them.


                                               David G. Hays
                                               New York, NY
                                               March 31, 1993








                       BEFORE WE BEGIN

     This book is about fire and the wheel, warm clothing for
small children and three square meals a day for everyone, nuclear
waste and computer conferencing.

     This book is also about a few famous inventors and a
great many other contributors to technological change.

     This book is also about the thinking that yields
technological accomplishment, about changing ideas but also
about changing ways of manipulating ideas.

     The facts are in many books.  The bibliographic note
( BIBLNOTE* ) tells about some good books for readers who
want to know more of the facts.

     This book recites some facts, but its main purpose is
to tell you about some concepts that are rather new.

     Now let's begin.

                       AUTHOR BIO 

     The late DAVID G. HAYS wrote of Cognitive Struc-
tures (New Haven, CT: HRAF Press, 1981) and
Introduction to Computational Linguistics (New
York: Elsevier, 1967).  He did his doctoral work in
Social Relations at Harvard and then spent a year at
the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and 
Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto.  After that he took a
post at the Rand Corporation where he did pioneering 
work in machine translation and computational linguistics.
He left Rand in 1969 to head the Linguistics Department
at the State University of New York at Buffalo. More 
recently, he served on the Editorial Board of the 
Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems.  He was 
a member of the faculty of Connected Education and 
The New School for Social Research's OnLine Program.

                    PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

     This book was originally prepared as a text to 
be used in a course on the history of technology which 
David Hays taught for the Online Program of The New 
School. In preparing this edition we decided to 
retain the informal tone which Hays adopted for 
this purpose.

     We also had to make more mundane decisions.  The text
was originally prepared for distribution on a primitive
ASCII-based hypertext system. Thus all of the formatting
in the original files has been done with blanks and
carriage returns. As the text contains many complex 
tables and charts we have decided to let it remain in
this relatively primitive state rather than attempt to
recreate these materials in different form. Finally,
the original hypertext format could not accommodate more
than a hundred paragraphs per file, forcing Hays to
organize the bibliography in several different files.
We have retained that organization.