look really hard at all of
mankind's
inventions, and you'll find that there's not all too much
innovation after all.
let me clarify. man has made a shitload of really cool discoveries. one cursory glance at a calculus or physics or chemistry textbook will verify that. but when you examine everything that Homo sapiens has made, the vast majority of it is stuff that was already here, and wasn't quite as cool.
hence, "the wheel's an extension of the foot". the printing press (easily the raddest invention of the past 1000 years) is no more than an extension of the hand and its pen; the car's just an extension of the wheel; even the computer's just a really stupid, really fast extension of the left brain.
there's a handful of building blocks we've made over the years, shit like the sundial and the electromagnet and the wing. they're few and far between, but they expose what is perhaps mankind's greatest talent: using what's here.
(the line "the wheel's an extension of the foot", incidentally, is from a Minutemen song.)