Just a brilliant synthesis of knowledge. Just brilliant!
It never crossed my mind to think of knowledge along the same terms as life - struggling to evolve, and adapt.
Very few can preserve and move knowledge through time while billions don't bother.
But similar to life, knowledge probably also has a minimum external threshold needed to continue forward (life and knowledge doesn't have any self-imposed or innate plateau but a minimum external threshold to survive another moment in time). I hope we have almost infinite time to reach that minimum threshold.
All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain. From “Ouch!” to “Eureka!”. We go to universities because our distant ancestors felt pricks and pangs: one sort of knowledge led to the other after a brief period of time (by cosmic standards). A super-scientist might have seen it coming (“It won’t be long before they have advanced degrees and diplomas”). The point I want to stress is that this is a natural evolutionary process, governed by the usual laws of evolution–cumulative, progressive, opportunistic, gradual.
As species evolve from other species by small alterations, so it is with the evolution of knowledge; there is no simultaneous independent creation of all the species of knowledge. Knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, the a priori and the a posteriori, knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, science and common sense—all this stems from the same distant root (though no doubt supplemented). It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth). Knowledge of language came very late in the game and is not be regarded as fundamental. Epistemology is much broader than language. Knowledge has all the variety and complexity we expect from life forms with a long evolutionary history. Quite a bit of the anatomy of advanced organisms is devoted to epistemic aims–the eyes, the ears, the nose, the sense of touch, memory, thought, and so on.
Knowledge is not a negligible adaptation. Yet it must have comparatively simple origins. It didn’t arise when a human woke up one bright morning and felt a love of wisdom in his bosom. It arose from primitive swampy creatures trying to survive another day.
Knowledge, like life in general, is a struggle with obstacles. Survival isn’t easy, and nor is knowledge. In both there are obstacles to be overcome, resistance and recalcitrance to be fought, battles to win or lose. Knowledge is hard: you know it don’t come easy. It’s a difficult task. Those books about the history of science draw this lesson repeatedly—it wasn’t easy to figure out the structure of the solar system or the laws of genetics. But that is part of the very nature of knowledge as an evolved capacity—the struggle to be informed. The organism needs to know if it is in danger, so pain came along; we would like to know whether the Earth is the center of the universe, so astronomy was invented. Knowing is the overcoming of obstacles, like the rest of evolved life. Knowledge was born in pain and struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. This is epistemology naturalized.
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