Summary of Readings Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Summary of Readings - Essay Example Regular prayers and devotions were part of the Christian religious processes for the welfare of the faithful and it was this formed the basis of the development of timekeeping technology and its dominance of our current capitalistic societies. It was not that time keeping was not there earlier, but the development of the clock as an expression of new timekeeping technologies removed the vagaries of nature that inhibit regulatory and order in the pervious time keeping technologies. Starting from the fourteenth centuries clock towers emerged in cities and towns to dominate life the life of their citizens (1). Other technologies may have come and may also lay claim to be all pervasive in human civilization, but there is no technology that has pervaded every niche of human presence and dominated the activities of humankind. The orderly punctual existence brought on by the mechanical clock is not in keeping with basic nature of humankind and yet, modern civilization remains a slave to the chimes of the mechanical clock. The regular chimes of mechanical time in seconds and minutes are in disharmony with the irregular nature of the human body, yet in modern civilization, basic human organic functions are controlled by this mechanical time. Humankind lives, works, and exists now in keeping with tunes of the tool of time keeping technology in the form of the time keeping clock (1). Biology in the Evolution of Technology In Chapter 3, History of the Seventh Kingdom in his book â€Å"What Technology Wants†, Kevin Kelly 2011, opines that the seventh kingdom of technology is not merely an invention of humankind, but has its origins in life itself, and continues to evolve as living organisms have done so from the time life dawned on planet Earth. The six kingdoms of living organisms have evolved and adapted over several hundred millions of generations in an unbroken link, and also learnt to build and evolve external structures. Structures to live in are the most commo n of these external structures. Such shelters of an animal are extension of the animal itself, and in this manner technology is the extension of humankind. This is visible in all the technologies developed and used by humankind, such as even the clothes that we wear. Technology in essence represents an external repository for human ideas (2). An evaluation of the evolution of human technology demonstrates a number of similarities with the evolution of genetic organisms. The manner in which a particular species of technology evolves over time is very similar to that of genealogical blueprint of species evolution, with the difference that in technology it is the expression of ideas and not the work of genes. Different branches of technology combine to create new products, just as evolution in organisms evolves through mating. Evolution in technology is parallel to evolution of nature. An example of this lies in the transformation of simple alphabets into books, which are the storehous es of human knowledge. This is similar to the transformation of DNA into cells and organisms (2). Yet there are differences too in the manner in which technology differs from living organisms. Organisms can be long-living while many technologies are short-lived. Innovations in organisms are passed down from parent down to the offspring vertically, while innovations in technology