ABSTRACT
It has often been noted that cultural evolution has become far more crucial for the human race than biological adaptation. Utilizing increased capacities for thought made possible by the gradual evolution of a large and powerful brain, Homo sapiens has gone on to extend biological functions and to alter nature itself to suit its needs (Dubos 1981). Science, language, technology, art, religion, and social tradition-it is through these brain-children called “extension systems” that much of human evolution now continues. As a consequence, human beings live simultaneously in two worlds-the small, unique, time-bound world of concrete, private experience and the much larger, timeless, symbolic world of shared experiences, pooled in cultural extension systems. In that, to borrow Aldous Huxley’s expression, humans are “multiple amphibians” (1962).
