An interesting excerpt from Collapse by Jared Diamond, about the native intelligence of New Guinea highland farmers, the utility and longevity of that knowledge:
New Guinea is the large island just North of Australia…lying almost on the equator and hence with hot tropical rainforest in the lowlands, but whose rugged interior consists of alternating ridges and valleys culminating in glacier-covered mountains….The terrain ruggedness confined Europeans to the coast and lowland rivers for almost 400 years, during which it became assumed that the interior was forest covered and uninhabited…It was therefore a shock, when airplanes chartered by biologists and miners first flew over the interior in the 1930’s for the pilots to see below them a landscape transformed by millions of people previously unknown to the outside world…..we know now…that agriculture has been going on there for about 7,000 years–one of the world’s longest-running experiments in sustainable agriculture.
…their farming methods are sophisticated, so much so that European agronomists still don’t understand today in some cases the reasons why New Guineans’ methods work and why well-intentioned European farming innovations failed there. For instance, one European agricultural adviser was horrified to notice that a New Guinean sweet potato garden on a steep slope in a wet area had vertical drainage ditches running straight down the slope. He convinced the villagers to correct their awful mistake, and instead to put in drains running horizontally along contours, according to good European practices. Awed by him the villagers re-oriented their drains, with the result that the water built up behind the drains, and in the next heavy rains a landslide carried the entire garden down the slope to the river below. To avoid exactly that outcome, New Guinea farmers long before the arrival of the Europeans learned the virtues of vertical drains under highland rain and soil conditions. (page 280)
My observation is that the knowledge of the European and the New Guinea highlander were different in one very crucial way: the way that the knowledge was acquired. The knowledge that the New Guinea highlander had was acquired over many generations, iteratively, through trial and error. Such knowledge could be called evolved knowledge, because it evolves, good replacing bad, and no overall theoretical framework is required to advance such knowledge. It also had a unique relation to the site at which the knowledge was acquired.
