Both researchers were trying to find a commonality of causes for extinction. Both of them found the same cause independently - extinction is
a consequence of over-specialisation. As you get more and more over-specialised, you inbreed specialisation. It's organic. As you do, you
outbreed general adaptability. So here we have the warning that specialisation is a way to extinction, and our whole society is thus organised .
. .
Man is a generalist. It is his extensions (tools and environments) which are designed, that help him to achieve specialisation. But by misdesigning
these tools or environments, we often achieve a closed feedback loop, and the tools and environments in turn affect men and groups
in a way that turns them into permanent specialists themselves. The potential of any device, tool, or environment can be studied before it is
structured or manufactured. In fact, computers now give us the ability to build mathematical models of processes, interactions, and systems
and to study them beforehand. The recent strides made in the social sciences are providing greater insights into that which is societally
valuable.
For thousands of years philosophers, artists, and designers have argued about the 'need for beauty', or aesthetic values, in the things we use
and live with. One only has to look out the window, or for that matter, back into one's own room, to see where this preoccupation with the
look-of-things has led us: The world is ugly, but it doesn't work well either ! In a world brought nearly to its knees by abject want, a
preoccupation with 'making things pretty' is a crime against humanity. But (as we have seen in our function complex in Chapter One) man
needs structures and devices that are enriched beyond the severely utilitarian.
Delight, balance, and that pleasing harmony of proportions that we project outward into the world and are told to regard as the Eidetic Image,
are psychological necessities for us. And not only a creature as sophisticated as man, but lower species as well, seem to need this aesthetic
and associational enrichment. Here is a description of this mechanism among birds, as quoted by a leading philosopher-naturalist:
Everyone knows that most birds build houses, and very efficiently, too. Although not usually artistic, their nests are careful and often
ingenious. The tailor bird puts nesting material inside a large leaf, then sews up the edges in a curve so that the leaf cannot unroll. The South
American ovenbird, which weighs less than three ounces, makes a nest weighing between seven and nine pounds, out of a hollow ball of earth
fixed to a branch. In Australia the rock warbler makes a long hanging nest and attaches it to the roof of a cave by spiders' webs; the reaction
of the spiders is not described. On the Malay Peninsula the megapodes build artificial incubators: piles of vegetation mixed with sand, which
gradually decay and keep the eggs warm. The birds themselves are not as big as ordinary fowl, but the nests can be eight feet high and
twenty- four feet across, composed of five tons of material scratched together from a radius of several hundred yards. The house martin builds
a neat little house of clay with a front door. A simple nest, like that of the redstart, means six hundred separate flights for material.
Some birds, however, go further, and build simply for aesthetic effect. These are the bower birds of Australia and New Guinea. They are
perching birds, between eight and fifteen inches long, which look rather like our own woodpeckers, but are more handsomely costumed. Their
speciality is unique. The males make clearings in the forest, and at their edges build elaborate arbors of grass and leaves. On the clearings and
in the arbors they set out decorations, carefully chosen and grouped: the heads of blue flowers, shells or brilliant objects such as pieces of
glass, cartridge cases, and even glass eyes (though these are harder to come by). The scientist who has studied them most closely, A. J.
Marshall, shows pretty clearly that this is simply a variation of sexual display intended to attract the little female, to mark off each particular