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Despite Lorenz who posits an innate human ability to ask questions, the evolutionary epic as told by McLuhan leads to the disappearance of this very faculty.  Such a plot allows McLuhan to state about another of his authorities:

One thing Hass overlooks is the absence of biological or psychological means of coping with the effects of our own technical ingenuity. (Laws of Media 95)

Hans Hass in The Human Animal sets the beginning of the development of what he terms "artificial organs" in a prehistoric anthropoid past.  With Emerson, McLuhan garners in his terms "a respectable age"  for the concept of extension itself and with Hass he gains an immense temporal span for the phenomenon to which the concept refers.  It is no coincidence that the 19th century Emerson bridge to the ancient Hesiod is discussed in a footnote just prior to the introduction in the body of the text of the 20th century Hass bridge to the prehistoric.  However, what McLuhan in his economical clipping fails to reap from either Emerson or Hass is precisely what he claims Hass overlooks:  means of coping.

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Hass indicates in The Human Animal that control is acquired and it rests partly with the brain (107).  The ability to produce tools and the control of this ability hinge on experience (108).  Experience is built out of the temporary nature of extensions.  Since "possession of artificial organs may be temporary" (106), the possibility of a comparative judgement exists.  It is this temporariness that enables experience to be built up, shared and judged.  Experience is comprised of a before, an after and a during.  This triangulation escapes McLuhan.  It is far too akin to a dialectic for his dichotomous formulations to accommodate it well.

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Experience is dialectically structured from out of moments whiled away with tools and those, without tools.  Furthermore it lives in expression:  experience communicates the differences between moments.  It mediates between the body and the mind.  It remains the great untheorized category in McLuhan's body of work.

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For Hass we are "the creature with artificial organs. Our intellect was crucial to this peculiarity, but so were our hands, our power of imagination, and our persistent curiosity.  Only the combined effects of all these enabled us to transcend the limitations imposed on our bodily organs" (108).  This statement implies that mere unconscious physical extension cannot by itself repeat the feat of this magnificent combination.  If transcendence of the limitations of parts of the body (note not the body itself) lies by way of this particular combination, it is noteworthy that this combination is taken up reflexively by humans as experience.  Given the temporal discontinuities and the complexity involved in the combination, the chances of repeating the combination seem slight.  Since Hass with his emphasis on combination is tending towards an ecological and systems theory framework, it is but a short step to introduce feedback (a term and concept alien though available to McLuhan) to explain, as Gregory Bateson does in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, social and psychological development.  This leads us to establish an axiom:  experience may not be repeatable but it is reapplicable.  Experience permits conscious reproduction.

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If the combination at the core of human evolution is not by substitution equatable to experience or by some means accessible to experience, then McLuhan's antirational pronouncements stand. McLuhan's setting the irrational at the heart of the human condition is perhaps clearest in his statements on biological reproduction.

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Theall reads the statements about sexuality and procreation, in particular about the pill, as instances where McLuhan's conservative Catholicism appears (Theall 44, 60, 226).  Although a technological product, the pill, a synthetic hormonal agent, poses problems for McLuhan's characterization of the extension of organs as the sine qua non of technological evolution.

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Catholicism aside, McLuhan's schema copes with a human product that is ingested rather than extended by reading the pill as a regression.  It is a technology, for him, that makes man into a 19th century machine (Culture is Our Business 176).  Earlier in a 1969 Dewline newsletter he is adamant:

The pill promises to turn all people into precise machines, absolutely guaranteed and determined.  It is not only a mechanizing force of 19th century intent, but promises to deprive us of one of our few remaining vestiges of humanity. (Dewline 17)

He was more ambivalent in 1967 when he discussed the pill in terms of its consequences for women.  He claimed that the pill made women into bombs:

Just as the Bomb instantly wipes out all the separating boundaries essential to conventional war, the Pill erases the old sexual boundaries in a flash.  The Pill makes woman a Bomb.  She creates a new kind of fragmentation, separating sexual intercourse from procreation.  She also explodes old barriers between the sexes, bringing them closer together.  Watch for traditions to fall. (Look 58)

The angst is cathected to a "new kind of fragmentation".  Syntagmatically in this text, fragmentation of sex in terms of erotic activity leads to the collapse of sexual boundaries in terms of gender.  The story could be told the other way:  challenges to gender result in a redefining of sexual activity.

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Whatever the direction of the narrative, this erasure of boundaries should be recuperated by McLuhan's usual rhetorical topoi as a return to a putatively primitive stage of society.  However, despite his knowledge of such anthropological works as Mead's Male and Female displayed as early as The Mechanical Bride (62), McLuhan in his neotribalism advocates in not so many words the maintenance of sex-role stereotypes.  The story he weaves is flawed.  He can not foresee the collapse of boundaries as a moment preceding the realization of greater and more equal unity and an overcoming of old fragmentation (gender roles).

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Although one may disagree with his initial description and the route his narrative takes, his stance is not internally contradictory.  It is traditions that fall.  It is tradition that cements the aural tribal culture.  It is tradition that 19th century machines threaten to undo, to fragment.

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