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DEVOLUTION
By Jane Freeman
I'm thinking today about those Ascent of Man pictures, the ones where we start off as hunched apes and gradually evolve into an upright, walking humanoid. I've never understood why these diagrams don't finish with a picture of a woman. After all, women are:a) less hairy, b) have interesting breasts, c) have frontal lobes that are comparatively larger, d) the word "man" in this context is a generic term, isn't it? All that aside, however, I'm beginning to think that it may be time to reverse the diagram, anyway. When I look around, I see that that Western man (in the generic sense) is no longer evolving but rather losing her skills. In centuries gone by, many human beings would have known how to grow, hunt or harvest his or her own food. These days, apart from the odd fanatic with a vegie patch who insists on deluging you with tomatoes just when they're really cheap in the shops, people don't grow their own food. Then there's making clothes (or knitting, crochet and embroidery). Even in my childhood, women still made clothes. This enabled my mum to dress all three daughters in matching outfits occasionally (although, fortunately, she never went for the mother-and-daughter look, perhaps because the idea of mother and three daughters in clone clothes was too much to contemplate). Nowadays, people would be lucky to know how to sew on a button. Cooking is another skill that's becoming extinct. In the world of take-away, ready-made and Asian simmer sauces, a cooking writer like Delia Smith can make a television show about how to boil an egg and it's deemed a hit. And look at cars. In our dad's days, men fixed cars. Now people can't fix cars and wouldn't want to even if the things weren't so electronically complicated. We now own a car that has all the engine bits that "you, the driver, need to bother about" coloured in yellow. So handy for knowing how to leave the rest alone. And that's just a few of the skills that are vanishing. Think about how to make a bed (remember hospital corners?) or how to write a thank-you note or how to use a manual toothbrush or how to walk over to the television to change the channeL These days, if someone loses the remote control, it's a major state of emergency: Oh no! Entire television set now unusable! Even more skills will start disappearing pretty soon so we should farewell them. Handwriting is on its way out. Already we type; soon we wiil use voice recognition. You need never scribble a note again, just mutter into your Batwatch and send an e-memo to yourself, your mum or the boss at work.
Soon, most people won't know how to mow a lawn, fold a nappy, remember a phone nurnber, make jam, put up a tent, read a book or concentrate for longer than three minutes.
This is a scary thought. Not only are we destined to crawl upon this planet like blind, nude, helpless babies, unable to feed, clothe or care for ourselves but we also know that all these skills are destined to start appearing on television lifestyle shows.
Because it seems that even if we don't have them any more, we get a warm glow from watching the freakish few who do.
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