Education is Reproduction

The interesting course 'evolution, ecology and behaviour' by stephen stearns @ yale included the fact that it is not enough to measure the offspring produced from a pair to compute their success. Total lifetime offspring can be high, but those offspring sickly, weak and frail, incapable of producing many offspring of their own.

One of the anxieties of university staff and other educated people is a fear of the loss of respect for education leading to die-backs of human knowledge. The fear is grounded in the fact that reproduction in our society is not complete until everything has been passed down and the new generations are as equipped or more to reproduce themselves in turn. It is true that engineering and medicine are the only disciplines we materially depend on, and that some (marketing, my old nemesis) are really injurious, but reality is a divergent field - the future contains much more than the past and any of the whole of human knowledge may prove central.

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