Human potential

Necessity is the mother of invention and through trial and error you can accomplish alot of stuff

You have it in you to figure out a toaster. I'm no electrician, nor am I an engineer or a scientist and I could assemble a rudimentary toaster just using some steel bits and pieces, a car battery, and some trial an error.

If some cosmic force were to wipe out every scientist, doctor, and engineer on the planet and just leave us "dummies" we would revert back to a level of technology where we would be able function (which IMO would be surprisingly well) then begin the long process of building on that foundation which would probably occur sooner than later provided that cosmic force didn't wipe out the accumulated knowledge stored in books or computers.

Depending on how inquisitive you are and your penchant for study or research you'll find that you can teach yourself a great many things.

Actually, while some general principles of Lamarckian evolution have been accepted and even incorporated into the current theory of Darwinian evolution, the central distinguishing characteristic of Lamarckian evoution compared to Darwinian evolution is that Lamarck believed it was actual organisms that evolved to adapt to their environment and they could then pass those adaptations to their offspring. Darwin believed that biological features acquired by parents are not passed onto offspring: that offspring themselves contain natural variations which make those offspring either more or less able to succeed in passing those predetermined characteristics to future generations. Lamarck hasn't been seriously considered a viable theory of evolution since it was displaced by natural selection.

There has been evidence that a pseudo-Lamarckian inheritance can occur in some situations related to gene expression and inhibition, but that doesn't really qualify as resurrecting Lamarck.

Actually, unless this cosmic force also wiped out books, instruction manuals, the internet and such... Well, I don't think it would take the world all that long to get back up to speed.

Oh sure, 20 years down the road we may not be as technologically advanced as we would have been, but I am pretty sure we'd probably be back at par to where we were.

It would be more interesting if the Cosmic Force tweaked Physics a bit. For example, iremoving the bandgap energy of Silicon would make almost all electronics pieces of junk. Changing the rules we live by would cause more havoc than getting rid of all intelligent people and would be far more interesting in the long run. Of course, changing the rules every few years would be the most effective.

Yeah..... and here we are in a computer game forum. I guess that makes it clear which group we're in.

Missing the most important part of my post, just. Nothing wrong with various stress relief activities. Would be interesting to see how many forum posters are Active and how many are Non-Active.

You might kill yourself before learning that you can't effectively make the heating elements from steel, and if you get lucky you may run out of batteries before you realize you're shorting all of them out too quickly.

You would probably be better off using some steel bits and pieces and a car battery to make a lighter and toast your bread over a fire.

You could lose the scientists and engineers and work with the remants of what you have: you'd still have mechanically inclined people to make it work.

You'd tolerate the loss of every physician on the planet less. Civilization would survive for a while, just with less people, but then you run the risk of very serious things getting out of control that currently are controlled by the current modern health care system in most of the world: mass immunization would be difficult under those circumstances, and with that gone general epidemics would return.

You cannot simply reinvent twentieth century medicine from reading books in a short amount of time. Vast amounts of knowledge and skill exist primarily or solely within the minds of living physicians. Even where things are written down, it often takes trained physicians to know where to look, and what to read and what to ignore.

Depending on your definition of "engineer" there would be some significant side effects of losing literally all of them simultaneously. They include people running things that aren't designed to operate without them indefinitely: the national power grid, nuclear power plants, chemical processing facilities, etc.


Reinventing technological civilization, even with documentation, always tends to sound easier than it actually is, because so few people are aware of all the tiny details that are critical to making it all work correctly. Real scientists, engineers, and doctors know when the books are misleading or wrong or incomplete. Most people will not, and it will be costly in many ways to discover. Its not that its impossible, its more a question of how many human beings would be left alive by the time we figured it out, and also whether we would all collectively put enough effort into actually doing it. We're not really marshalling humanity's best efforts to combat global climate change even though the potential downstream effects could be catastrophic. Is it automatically true that humanity would marshal its best efforts to preserving, and then reproducing modern technology if they were told all the people who used to do it are now gone and this will have a potentially serious impact at some indetermined future date.

That's the sort of problem humanity historically has a very poor track record on.

I think you just hit on an idea for yet another Discovery Channel series: "Life after smart people".

LOL, fine. Let's say it's all the masters of the hard sciences that suddenly disappear. All of the doctors, physicists and engineers who perform all the research, run all the experiments, and create the designs. That will still leave you with the people who know how to maintain all systems that are already in place, but who would not necessarily know how to improve on them or create new ones....

...until they also disappear!!!

Then the plot thickens.

Naw, I'd get my leafspring toaster to work! I've enough burned wrenches to support my idea

Bah, and disregard all those 9 volts and steel wool lying around

Maybe I should have been a bit more wordy in my previous reply, its not that I would expect modern civilation to go on without a hiccup or revert to something say at the technological level of the early 20th century (then again maybe they could - simple inventors were able to devise and build internal combustion engines), but if all the brainy types were to disappear, I also dont think we would be in nearly as bad a shape as you suggest. Yes, brain surgury, limb grafts and keeping the local nuke plant from putting on a helluva light show would be problematic, I certainly expect society to become more insular but given the common pool of knowledge most people have been exposed to, some things that have plauged humanity even as late as the 19th century (maternity wards using common supplies and tools as they delivered babies leading to high mother and infant mortality rates compunded by the use of lead pipes) would be avoided. We know enough about general sanitation to better protect ourselves from some of the events in the past that wreaked havoc when it came to some particulalry devastating epidemics and so on.