What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of
life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don’t mean just human beings, but
animals which play and which can learn something from experiencelike cats. But at this stage each
animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal
[primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience
by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility
that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who
learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.
The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident
than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the
death of the learner or inventors?
So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at which learning was
increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned
by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race.
Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.
This has been called timebinding. I don’t know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here
[in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each
BASIC SCIENCE
Posted on February 16, 2014