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The Growth of Competence 171

away, off the coast of Marseilles, two divers, Albert Falco and Claude Wesley,
entered Conshelf i, an undersea habitat designed and operated by the French
research organization office Française de Recherches Sous-Marins under the
direction of Captain J. Y. Costeau. Conshelf i was a two-person dwelling, 17
feet long and 8 feet high, anchored a few feet above the sea floor at a depth of
40 feet near the island of pomègues. Falco and Wesley lived and worked at a
depth of 10 meters for seven days. in conjunction, these two pioneering efforts
demonstrated that human beings could live and work underwater.
A decade later, space explorers made the same point for the very different
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environment of near space. on May 14, 1973, the national Aeronautics and
Space Administration (nASA), the U.S. space agency, launched Skylab, the
first successful, manned space station. The three astronauts Charles Conrad Jr.,
paul J. Weitz and Joseph p. Kerwin stayed in Skylab between May 25 and June
22, thus becoming the first humans to live and work in space and to return
safely to Earth.
our hunter-gatherer ancestors cannot have bequeathed to us any genetic
adaptations for flipping around 30 meters below the ocean surface with SCUBA
tanks, and none for exiting from an airlock to repair a telescope in freefall.
Although the human species is subject to natural selection, the speed with
which we colonize unfamiliar environments shows that people do not primar-
ily adapt via alterations in the genome. Skills are learned, not inherited. our
species-characteristic adaptation is not any particular behavior, or repertoire
of behaviors, but our superior ability to change our behavior.
The cost of this survival strategy is that each new generation has to acquire
the necessary skills anew. Human babies are born with almost no capacity for
effective action, but a normal day in the life of, for example, a white-collar
worker in a Western city requires an astonishing range of skills: cook break-
fast; drive to work; use cell phones, word processors and copiers; communicate
via e-mail and fax; transform numerical data into graphs and figures; master
the tango or the violin; arrange a successful birthday party; care for the fish
in the tank and keep upright on the mountain bike. Although the execution
of an acquired skill might be quick and effortless, the acquisition of that skill
requires both time and effort. Alone among mammals, a human being requires
15–20 years to become a competent member of the species, and a 20-year-old
future professional faces yet another decade of training before he has mastered
the skills needed to excel in a complicated, typically high-technology work
environment.
once mastered, skills remain in flux. task environments change due to
their own internal causal dynamics as well as in response to externalities and