What can I say?... I don't think you understand how embedded is your lack of insight into an act of genius that you think all-and-sundry simply dream up the notion of a circle as a matter of course during their routine hunting-and-gathering, or whateverelse.TallDave wrote: People probably conceptualized the wheel thousands or millions of times before actually making the first one that did real work.
There is something so quantised about an act of inventive genius that unless you practice trying to see it, you never will....... nor will you ever be involved in, or initiate, an act of inventive genius and, quite likely, never recognise it when it is happening either.
Another example – who invented the plate? Did the food bowl come before the plate? You could see how someone 'stumbled' upon the idea with, say, putting food onto a big leaf.
And in your blasé attitude that presumes such things are self-evident – I guess because of your cosseted existence in a modern world that already provides these things - OK, then, why don't monkeys use plates for their food?? Someone, at some given moment in time, with intellect greater than a monkey, has formed an idea in their head that if they use something flat and put their food on it, then it won't get grit all over it when they leave it on the floor. That is an act of genius, no less by any degree than the invention of the rocket motor.
Who invented the pipe? Who invented the wire? Who invented the washing bowl – and then put a plug in it. The spoon, the bucket, the shoe, clothes, the stool/chair, string, the nail, the screw, the house(enclosed dwelling). All of these might have come about by some sort of accident, but still, even then, it still takes the ability to recognise that an inventive step has occurred. You may think that is easy, but it is not so at all. You can force a monkey to watch you eat with a plate, or make and use any of the above things, but why doesn't he then go on to use those things for himself? Sometimes, you can get experimental subjects that do exactly that – but you seem to think this would come easily. It clearly doesn't.
It is the state of things that our modern world that we are so well provided for by a mass of genius engineering before us that we've caused to be reverse-evolved new ape-like humans (particularly males between the ages of 13 and 18, it seems!!) that shuffle around and decry everything as boring and pathetic, as they punch the buttons on their ipods not giving a moments thought to any of this. And you imply these things are so obvious...... yet they are surely hidden from direct gaze by their very proliferation.
I do not believe that anyone who thinks the above examples are 'obvious' has the capacity to see the potential of a new inventive idea. I feel sorry for the first human who, sitting around in their cave/hunting group, pulls a big leaf of a tree and puts food on it. How they must have laughed at him/her 'why are you doing that!!' (in whatever grunts were used at the time). But that first human must've been prepared to go against the mass opinion and persist in using it, the bravery of engineering caught in that singular defiant act of not doing what was always done before. At some stage, a few more must have seen the value of it and copied it, until only then did it become 'obvious'.
).