![]() Despite an objectively recorded long-term decline in certain fish populations, each generation of scientists seemed to be accepting the lower abundance and diversity they studied as their "baseline". One day, the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly looked around at his contemporaries, and noticed something curious. One of the first times this particular type of generational amnesia was observed was back in the 1990s – to describe an effect afflicting researchers who studied fish. ![]() ( Read more: Social cryptomnesia: How societies steal ideas)īut if the most recent generation is forgetful about the positive steps and changes handed to them by their forebears, then so too can they fail to notice how those predecessors have damaged the world too. It wasn't always the case that universal suffrage was seen as uncontroversially right, yet this fact is rarely remembered. New generations also have a habit of collectively forgetting how positive social change comes about through the dogged activism of minorities once shunned, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes' campaign for women's right to vote. If Cleopatra or Elizabeth I were to time-travel to the present day, they would marvel at a world we take for granted, with its vaccines and antibiotics, and a flushing toilet and fridge in every home. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them."Īs a result, the average person today lives a life with advances and luxuries that even the most privileged generations of the past could only dream of. As the writer Douglas Adams once pointed out: "We no longer think of chairs as technology we just think of them as chairs. Some inventions are so ubiquitous that we've totally forgotten that they even are technologies. One computer scientist once quipped that technology should be defined as "anything that was invented after you were born". The current generation's idea of technology means smartphones, cryptocurrencies or the internet, but it wasn't always so: technology was once centred on pneumatics or steam, rather than silicon.
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