SITUATING ACTION .5. THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF BODILY SKILLS

How are we to understand the difference between evolutionary and histo rical change in the field of technical practices? One possible answer hinges on a certain interpretation of the notion of making things, acc ording to which making consists in bringing an object into conformity with a design that preexists in the mind of an agent. The history of t echnics thus is contingent upon a series of intentionally motivated de sign modifications, whereas in evolution these modifications are broug ht about, in the absence of a design agent, through variation under na tural selection. This implies, however, that at some point, history mu st have ''started up'' from a baseline of evolved capacities shared by all human beings, past and present. Considering the ways in which hum ans use their bodies in technical activities, it is commonly supposed chat they are universally equipped, by virtue of their evolutionary en dowment, with such innate capacities as bipedal locomotion and speech, but that these are ''topped up'' with acquired, culturally or histori cally specific content. The argument of this article, to the contrary, is that the distinction between innate capacities and acquired conten t is an artifact of our own analytic attempts to sift the general from the particular. What actually evolve are skills, regarded as properti es not of individual bodies but of the whole system of relations const ituted by the presence of the organism-person in its environment. To u nderstand the evolution of skill, we therefore have to focus on the wa y such systems are constituted and transformed over time. In effect, t he study of evolution becomes the study of how human beings and other animals, through their actions, establish the contexts of development for their successors. The implication of this argument, however, is to dissolve the distinctions not only between the innate and the acquire d, but also between biology and culture and, above all, between evolut ion and history.