Do you believe in behavioural modernity?

[The Grand Nudger]

For a substantial part of history, the apprentice system was how complex skills were passed on. (Ignoring intra-familial education for the moment.) This emphasizes experience based knowledge (intuition) and tacit knowledge (knowing-how rather than knowing-that).

Which takes time, and is dependent upon not one but two people being free to do this as a "profession" if you will - something that isn't really a part of the narrative we currently hold about people in this time period, the dominant paradigm. They were better at things and had more time to get better at them than we supposed.

It's only been in recent ages that explicit knowledge, "knowing-that", has superceded tacit knowledge and experience, and then only among the very elite (e.g. the monastic system and the church).

No argument there, for all I know the proper shape and size was explained as a function of the fairy imparted in the working - if it was explained or understood at all. But regardless, they knew what worked, and again this takes time.

Moreover, differential reproduction which correlates with differential fitness is a part of the model, so there is no need to explain the convergence on positive mutations to the neglect of negative mutations or even spandrels. Evolution works in the biological realm, I don't see why it is such a hard sell in the realm of culture, memes, and technology.

I wouldn't call it a hard sell, but I'd mention that specifically in the area of technology there are some pretty crucial differences that can alter the landscape drastically either in favor of or against any given tech that don't have any correlarys in modern synthesis. Evolutionary biology, for example, doesn't hold preconceived notions that inhibit the adoption or modification of a new or existing "technology". Evolution does not have a conscious or directive force as it's driving mechanism.

I'm told that we couldn't build a World War II era battleship today if we wanted to do so, because the technology was only partially explicit; much of it was implicit, and that knowledge was lost; implicit knowledge doesn't provide the instrumental basis for self-conscious refinement of a technology.

If it's maintained in continuity it has the potential to. The knowledge being lost (if it was, or was accurately described in this way) is what robs it of this potentiality.

It may not be true of battleships, but there are countless historical examples of where it is relevant. Thomas Edison tried 10,000 different filament compositions and designs before finding the right one. He didn't design his light bulb from explicit knowledge of the properties of things.

We don't assume that this was how wooden darts arose either, in this case also we assume trial and error.

All that's necessary is change, provided by an inbuilt desire to explore and experiment, along with cultural transmission via strong intra-familial and intra-species social behaviors, and selective pressures. Incremental change with selective pressures works. I think you're underestimating its power.

No, not at all, but I think we may be having a discussion about the same object from two entirely separate angles, or two different discussions converging on the same object after reading this. A good discussion, by the way.

(An interesting example in reverse is that the gothic churches of the high middle ages often incorporated ratios that corresponded to ratios represented in the bible in its stories. Some church architects copied the same layouts in order to replicate the symbolic significance associated with those ratios. However, there's a danger in that the physical properties of structures and structural components do not always scale linearly, so some churches that attempted to recreate the same ratios on a larger scale ended up causing the structures to be flawed in terms of the mechanical engineering. There are churches in Europe still standing with enormous cracks in major structures and that are only able to continue existing by being buttressed by modern technology such as steel bands and girders. Explicit design of artifactual innovation is very recent.)

But the effort in production of those same objects and all that it entailed, and someone with the knowledge to arrange for that -by whatever means it was garnered- is not.

My point is a simple one, it isn't actually easy to make even that simple wooden dart, any process added to that would have made it more difficult, not less difficult - if it didn't directly relate to the production of the object. To learn a difficult skill, or to faithfully replicate something happened upon by accident (either way you approach it) you're starting to leave the territory of the current paradigm about who these people where, what they could accomplish, and how they spent their time. The idea even that a dart or javelin is a "simple technology" is shaky, simple to whom? Care to take a crack at manufacturing or utilizing this simple technology yourself? I did, just sharing my experience. It may be that I just didn't have a knack for it though, that somebody else is just naturally much better at it - but why would we expect those knacks to just continue appearing in the same populations over and over and over for generations? A spear design or shape, or set of practices is not a biologically inheritable trait (as far as I;m aware) - and that's where the comparison to evolution breaks down.