Codex HTML    Sir Peter Medawar    Ethology and Human Behavior

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I am puzzled why Medawar didn't instance any of many fairly well-known examples of losses of skills with changing social conditions. The most obvious one is that city-dwellers have never learned how to identify many different sorts of plants and animals that their ancestors could. Again, there are many traditional skills in construction and iron-working which have become extinct, or nearly so, over the last two centuries (for a fascinating discussion of this, as it applies to traditional Catalonian crafts, see Robert Hughes' Barcelona). [CRS]