Untamable curiosity, innovation, discovery, and bricolage: Are we doomed to progress to ever increasing complexity?

A trapper of eighteenth century needed a box of matches, a gun and a knife, and perhaps, a tent and a canoe or a dogsled to survive in the wilderness. Today, almost anyone of us would feel uncomfortable without, in addition, GPS, a mobile phone with internet access, a medicine-chest with at least aspirin, an antibiotic as well as a serum against snake bite, and a lot more to master the same situation as the backwoods contemporary of George Washington. Only a tiny time span, however, compared to human history has passed since the glorious days of trapper life, and nobody will seriously doubt that complexity of life has increased enormously since then. This essay is an attempt to combine messages from three sources: (i) a book on scientific innovation, society and the future written by Helga Nowotny [1], (ii) an article on a model for the evolution of technology by Brian Arthur and Wolfgang Polak [2], and (iii) François Jacob’s concept evolution and tinkering [3] that has been recently revisited, for example, by Denis Duboule and Adam Wilkins [4].