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eyal matsliah's Library tagged evolution →  View Popular

06 Aug 09

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent

  • another great article by kevin kelly - eyalnow on 2009-08-06
  • In contrast to these two, the third force is our free will to make individual choices of use, and collective policy decisions. Compared to all possibilities that we can imagine we have a very narrow range of choices. But compared to 10,000 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago, or even last year, our possibilities are expanding. Although restricted in the cosmic sense, we have more choice than we know what to do with. And via the engine of the technium, these real choices will keep expanding (even though the larger path is preordained).
  • Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the givens. But the choices we took.
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20 Nov 08

The Ninth Transition of Evolution - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

  • What Nova Spivack suggests here is that the path from random population to meta-individual is a path of increasing structure. The parts are more tightly bound in relationships, and as they gain in interdependence, the whole advances to the next phase.
  • Smith and Szathmary say that evolution is the continued, graduated progression in which smaller units form larger, higher level units, and then those new meta-individuals start to form a new group, where each meta-individual is a mere individual
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27 Oct 08

E.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism Tome

  • Could large groups of animals function together as a single entity with distributed intelligence? Did evolution work through such groups, selecting at the group level rather than the individual? The implications were staggering, not only for bugs but also for humans. Group evolution meant that altruism and self-sacrifice — i.e., morality — might be as much a part of our genetic heritage as hair and eye color.
01 Sep 07

Evolution as a Team Sport

  • Aristotle identified the narrative
    arc of linear drama: create a character or group we like, put them into
    danger, increase the stakes until the audience can't take it anymore and
    then provide a solution: salvation, a political ideology, or even, in
    the age of marketing, a product that relieves the crisis and saves the
    day.
  • Renaissance innovations
    all involve an increase in our ability to contend with dimension: perspective.
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