It is probable that when future historians of economic thought look back over this century, the thirties will appear as an era of rapid development i… - Kenneth E. Boulding

We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier...
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.

The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.

With the development of the human race (and perhaps a little earlier), a new structure emerges, which we can call know-what. This consists of the structures in the nervous system which presumably map into some kind of images in the of the 'mind', which also map into structure in the 'real world', whatever that is. Know-what is very different from know-how. The fertilized egg certainly has the know-how to make whatever organism it knows how to make, but it is very doubtful that it knows what it is doing. The remarkable thing about know-what is that it creates know-how, as we see with the fantastic burgeoning of human artifacts under the influence of a science-based technology. Science, fundamentally, deals with know-what and this enormously increases know-how.