Peter F. Drucker Boxed Set (8 Books) (The Drucker Library)

CHAPTER THREE

Work and Tools

MAN, ALONE OF ALL ANIMALS, is capable of purposeful, non-organic evolution; he makes tools. This observation by Alfred Russell Wallace, codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, may seem obvious if not trite. But it is a profound insight. And though made some seventy or eighty years ago, its implications have yet to be thought through by biologists and technologists.

One such implication is that from a biologist’s (or a historian’s) point of view, the technologist’s identification of tool with material artifact is quite arbitrary. Language, too, is a tool, and so are all abstract concepts. This does not ...