This is what I came up with one evening.
Throughout the human history, individuals have been dealing with various everyday tasks and activities necessary to stay alive and reproduce. Everybody who passed their genes knew how to perform the activities that guaranteed their survival and reproduction. Many of those tasks were both consciously and subconsciously divided between men and women, old and young, strong and not so strong. Before the first civilizations were formed, people in small groups had to manage their everyday activities pretty much by themselves without getting advice or competent help from anybody else. There was a need for food, security, fire, preservation, healing, shelter – thus the special skills were needed in order to survive and pass the genes. This way a primitive human acquired every kind of knowledge about different tasks of everyday activities. People learned from their mistakes and from mistakes of others and kept on evolving.
Twenty-four-hour cycle has always been a limiting factor for individual to perform all necessary daily activities needed in society. Activities like hunting, sailing, fishing, constructing, defending, handcrafting started to require a skill of certain kind and committing to those activities different professions started to evolve. Simultaneously with the beginning of first human civilizations an understanding was born that it is often more reasonable to perform certain activities in groups in order to do it more effectively. Groups of people with different daily professions started to develop their skills thereby developing the civilization and society overall. One aspect of critical importance of group work and civilization is a development of social and communication skills which are determining much of success and status of individual in society.
In order to build good sailing raft the builders had to communicate and take into account the problems of the past and an advice from sailors. With some acquired experience a shipbuilders knew more about building a ship than any other group of builders or constructors. One of the builders may have understood the different aspects shipbuilding and the whole concept of sailing on water faster and better than his peers. In such case the person, who gained the trust and respect of the others, was accepted by society as someone with special knowledge – an expert. Those people started leading projects of their profession as well as to teach the profession to their siblings which in turn developed their communication and literacy skills. This was the era of mastery of single discipline per person or group.
At one point of human history some of the people decided to start finding answers to the questions that had risen in their minds and in minds of their fellows. This was induced by well-functioning cooking techniques, food processing and storage capabilities. In somewhat developed society it was possible for one person to work less to survive than in conventional small-group lifestyle. There was enough leftover energy in the body for brain development as it was much easier to digest processed food than raw food. It can not be neglected that free time is also essential for a human to start thinking about deeper questions of mankind. Questions that came to the surface of human mind after certain level on development, needed to be answered. Weather it be a process of evolution or Zeus himself, the inborn interest towards the life was the driving force which further enabled the development of intelligence.
People who tried to explain the world, nature and cosmos rationally and logically were called philosophers. They were universal scientists who were active in several different natural sciences. Those philosophers were the first conscious inventors and scientists of truly interdisciplinary knowledge. Some other group of people focused in explaining the functionality of human body and learned surgical techniques. Although many of those great innovators were slaughtered, the evolution gave birth to more of such people who were interested and capable of new knowledge. New discoveries and inventions of all kind were helping to get along faster and better, putting the basis to constant improvement in nearly every area of life. This was the starting point of explosive development of human kind.
It can be understood that many great achievements and inventions of human kind can be credited to knowledge and experience of individuals with broad field of understanding. Such understanding can be acquired only by being interested and open to several fields of science simultaneously and to see, as well as to try to understand, the Big Picture. That means it has been necessary for the philosophers of the past to be active in different disciplines concurrently in order to get us so far. Nowadays the questions and activities that are covering more that one field of research are referred to as interdisciplinarity but sometimes also called multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity or crossdisciplinarity.
Rando Pikner
Rando Pikner
