Why Do Humans Innovate
Since the first Chinese edition of this book appeared, science and technology have undergone a dizzying succession of changes. Artificial intelligence has rapidly entered social life, while the life sciences, clean energy, space exploration, and digital technologies continue to extend the boundaries of human capability. At the same time, the risks, ethical dilemmas, and social divisions arising from technological innovation have drawn greater attention than ever. Against this background, the forthcoming publication in the United States of the second Chinese edition and the first English edition, based on that revised Chinese edition, is particularly timely. It invites us to return to a seemingly simple yet fundamental question: Why do humans innovate?
I came to know Professor Jielin Dong through academic exchanges on the history of science and technology and on innovation. After graduating from the Department of Physics at Sun Yat-sen University, she went to Carnegie Mellon University in the United States in the 1980s to pursue a doctorate through the China–United States Physics Examination and Application program (CUSPEA). She later became a writer, contributing to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. She also served as a distinguished professor at Soochow University’s business school and as an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University’s Research Center for Technological Innovation. Alongside her training in the natural sciences, she brings experience in business, social observation, and writing. She has also used scientometric methods to compile a chronology of scientific and technological discoveries and inventions from around the world. This academic and professional background gives her a distinctive perspective on the history of science and technology.
On behalf of the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology, I once invited her to Beijing to give a lecture entitled “Looking Back over Ten Thousand Years: How Science and Technology Have Met Human Needs.” She sought to explain scientific and technological invention through Maslow’s theory of needs. Those present did not necessarily agree with all her judgments, but they appreciated both her quantitative work on inventions worldwide and her effort to reconstruct the history of innovation around human needs. Science and technology are among the most cumulative and progressive of human endeavors. Data and quantitative methods can indeed reveal their long and complex history in new ways.
Over the years of our subsequent academic exchanges, I have watched Professor Dong’s outlook broaden. While continuing to affirm the value of scientific progress, she has become increasingly attentive to the social and cultural dimensions of science. She has read extensively in anthropology, religious studies, and the philosophy of science, reflecting on the relationships among early forms of thought, magic, religion, science, and different traditions of knowledge. She has also visited museums and ancient sites around the world and established the Database of Major Scientific and Technological Achievements. This book is the fruit of those years of accumulated research, wide reading, and firsthand observation.
Why do humans innovate? Why do they invent new technologies? Professor Dong approaches these questions through the history of human innovation. As humans emerged from the distant past, what characteristics distinguished them from other animals? Humans live in groups, form societies, and establish systems of governance: we are political beings, Homo politicus. Human sexual activity is not confined to a particular phase of the reproductive cycle: we are sexual beings, Homo sexualis. We think: we are Homo sapiens. We also make tools and create new things: we are Homo faber, the makers. Using tools to understand and transform the world is one of our most distinctive characteristics. Technology is a basic fact of human life, woven into its very substance. Without technological innovation, the human civilization we know would not exist.
It undoubtedly takes courage to address questions of such scope. Professor Dong makes imaginative use of Maslow’s theory of needs, treating needs and desires as important drivers of human innovation. This thread runs throughout the book. Maslow arranged human needs in ascending order: physiological needs, safety, social belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. In his later work, he also explored self-transcendence. Within this framework, technological innovation can be understood as humanity’s continuing effort to meet one or more needs.
The main body of the book broadly follows these levels of need, using needs as a clear thread connecting the history of technological innovation from the earliest times. Admittedly, assigning each innovation to a particular level inevitably leaves room for differences of judgment. Yet the classification is no arbitrary assemblage. It embodies the author’s sustained reflection on the relationship between innovation and human society. The Database of Major Scientific and Technological Achievements alone testifies to the effort she has invested. She writes with thought and feeling as well as with evidence and data.
Reading this manuscript has been a pleasure, often accompanied by moments of surprise. Professor Dong has a gift for observing and experiencing the history of invention from the perspective of those who use technologies, giving a broad historical narrative a vivid sense of everyday life. In “The Inventive World of Food Lovers,” for example, she connects innovations spanning ten thousand years and many different fields: agriculture, ceramics, food processing, cooking, alcoholic drinks, soy sauce, cheese, and vitamin C. Together, they form a historical panorama of innovation by countless people. In “The Cheap Revolution and the Secrets of GDP Growth,” she examines how new products stimulate or even create material wants, and how standardized production reduces costs and prices, bringing products into wider use and driving the growth of wealth. This line of inquiry connects innovations in product combinations, production management, electrification, standardization, and automation, which together form a technological picture of the Industrial Revolution.
In this narrative, inventions become material building blocks through which we can understand the history of civilization. The history of technology unfolds across scientific, social, cultural, and psychological dimensions. Readers see each invention’s place within a network of human needs and its connections with institutions, ideas, and ways of life, as well as its internal workings. This is one of the book’s most illuminating qualities. Beyond the flashes of inspiration of a few exceptional individuals, it brings into view the historical process through which countless people and groups have responded to the needs of survival, social aspirations, and spiritual pursuits.
Another valuable quality is the author’s willingness to revise her understanding through discussion. Scholars have long disagreed about the relationships among magic, religion, and science, whether science existed in ancient China, and why modern science did not emerge there. Professor Dong listens carefully to different views, studies the relevant literature, and reaches her own judgments. She has moved beyond treating magic simply as science’s opposite or as “superstition.” She understands it as a practice through which early humans sought to comprehend and respond to the world within particular worldviews, modes of thought, and systems of value. Her engagement with the work of anthropologists such as Frazer, Malinowski, and Evans-Pritchard reveals a scholarly disposition open to self-criticism, revision, and the continuing expansion of intellectual horizons.
Publication of the second Chinese edition and the first English edition in the United States has a further significance. Scientific and technological innovation has always developed through exchanges, competition, borrowing, and adaptation among societies. Telling a global history of technological innovation through human needs can help readers from different cultural backgrounds move beyond familiar geographical and disciplinary boundaries. They can recognize what human experiences share while also seeing how civilizations differ in their selection, use, and evaluation of technologies. At a time when science and technology are increasingly global and the world faces risks of division, this kind of cross-cultural historical writing deserves particular attention.
The book discusses an enormous range of innovations and inventions, covering almost every aspect of human need. No author could offer a final judgment on every invention across so long a history, nor is that the purpose here. The book is more like a thought experiment on a grand scale. With the theory of needs as its warp and technological innovation as its weft, it seeks to weave an overall picture of the evolution of human civilization. History offers no ready-made trajectory. Researchers give it an intelligible structure through evidence, questions, and theories, and that work must continue as new materials, new questions, and the experiences of new eras emerge. The revised Chinese edition and its first English translation mark a new beginning in this intellectual journey. I congratulate Professor Dong and am pleased once again to recommend this courageous, insightful, and creative work to readers in both Chinese and English.