Do you ever have the conversation or the thought about what might be the most important invention ever? I have a theory that the younger the person you ask, the more recent the invention. If you ask a child then the Internet is the most important. Or television. Or electricity. Never mind refrigeration, without which their food would spoil (or taste of salt). Never mind Ammonium Nitrate, without which there'd be about 4 billion fewer people alive today.
Even if you ask older people—those that remember getting along just fine without Google and on-demand porn—then their answers will still be skewed by personal experience. Water-treatment facilities, proper sewage systems, these are all the things that helped get us out of the mud and in to the life of relative luxury. And they're decent nominations for Best Invention Ever.
But do you know what I think deserves a mention? Something that's never given consideration? Glasses. Now I don't wear glasses—not very often, anyway—but I know that one day I will and I'll need them and I'll very grateful for them.
It's an unfortunate consequence of evolution that our brains have evolved much faster than the rest of us. They've matured us as a species to to point where we can communicate, cooperate and thrive; living to ages that evolution did not prepare our bodies for. We used to die at about 25 years old. If you had an underlying medical condition in those days then it didn't matter. Brain tumour? Schizophrenia? High blood pressure? Not an issue. We all died young.
One condition that all early humans would have developed anyway is called Presbyopia. If you're over 40 and you need glasses to read, this is what you've got. It's caused by a natural deterioration of your eyes. As sure as you're going to have wrinkles and grey hair one day, you're going to have this.
But this shouldn't come as a surprise. Not unless you believe God created you. If that's the case than you should be given pause to wonder why he installed your eyeballs upside down, back to front and in steady decline. Anybody that understands how evolution works needn't be shocked. Back in the Pleistocence—or the Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness, as it's sometimes called—survival didn't depend on reading. Certainly not at old age.
But with discoveries and breakthroughs—sometimes insightful and sometimes painful—our species began to grow. We stretched far beyond the meagre age of 20 and began living to riper years. By this point though we had stopped evolving. Our adrenaline glands weren't going to get any smaller, our pre-frontal lobes weren't going to get any larger and our thumb/forefinger opposition wasn't going to improve. The die had been cast and these were the bodies we were stuck with.
Fast-forward to today. We live in societies that have been and continue to be enriched by the written word. We write to communicate with others, we read to learn about the world and we use our eyesight to navigate a world that would have been alien to our ancestors.
Now imagine a world without glasses. Once you get to 40 it's game over. You can't read, you can't write, you completely lose touch with the world and you are left behind. We should all be so thankful that there is no longer a clock hanging around our necks, counting down the number of days that we can continue to learn from books, or write our thoughts down so that in years to come people might know we were here.
You might think this is just a moot point; glasses were always inevitable. "There's no point in imagining a world without them because they'd have been invented by somebody sooner or later." As far as I'm concerned, this just underlines their importance.
