Wood, Waring, and many scholars in the field of evolutionary biology believe we are in the midst of another transition, one that has the potential to turn us into a “superorganism.

the Café Procope

Sure, it is not needed, we can always write things in a different way. As a matter of fact, with such an argument, hardly any improvement should be accepted.

Every coherent entity in the world is held together by some form of governance, whether it be an atom, a cell, your body, or a nation.

we are certainly special I mean 00:02:57 no other animal rich the moon or know how to build atom bombs so we are definitely quite different from chimpanzees and elephants and and all the rest of the animals but we are still 00:03:09 animals you know many of our most basic emotions much of our society is still run on Stone Age code

we've got to leave the bottom left-hand corner and that only gives you three other spaces to go to and I've already noted that one of those spaces may be a place that has a certain utility short-run 00:50:27 but don't try to build your culture there because you can't do it it's a place that you want to be in for a while but then you wanna leave so it really only gives you two places

I 01:00:30 think that a proper version of the concept of synchronicity would talk about multiscale patterns so that when you're looking at electrons in the computer you would say isn't it amazing that these electrons went over here and 01:00:42 those went over there but together that's an endgate and by the way that's part of this other calculation like amazing down below all they're doing is following Maxwell's equations but looked at at another level wow they just just 01:00:54 computed the weather in you know in in Chicago so I I I think what you know I it's not about well I was going to say it's not about us and uh and our human tendency to to to to pick out patterns 01:01:07 and things like but actually I I do think it's that too because if synchronicity is is simply how things look at other scales

this is a cancer uh approach that we work on which is to not to kill those cells but to force them to re reconnect to their neighbors and when they reconnect to the 00:31:24 neighbors they once again become part of the collective that's working on making nice skin nice muscle they stop being metastatic and they they go back

when we work on cancer what you see is that when when 00:30:18 individual cells electrically disconnect from the rest of the body they their cognitive light cone shrinks they're back to their amoeba tiny little e gos and as far as they're concerned the rest of the body is just environment to them

Eukaryotic single-celled organisms appear in the fossil record perhaps by 1.6 BYA (Knoll et al., 2006). Yet for a “boring billion” years of evolutionary history, they remain minor components in bacterial-dominated ecosystems before explosively radiating as large, multicellular species in an Ediacaran and Cambrian MST. Eukaryotes are obviously essential for this MST, as all animals, plants and fungi are eukaryotes. However, the initial appearance of eukaryotic cells seems insufficient for a MST.

Whereas MSTs happen to ecosystems, METs and MCTs happen to species.

We retain Szathmáry’s (2015) definition of Major Evolutionary Transitions (METs) as being Fusions and Information Leaps, and introduce the term Major System Transitions (MSTs) to describe large-scale ecosystem transformations that appear irreversible.

Emergence is how lifecreates radical change and takesthings to scale

A major evolutionary transition in individuality is defined by two conditions

How are the potentially selfish interests of individuals overcome to form mutually dependent cooperative groups? We can then ask whether there are any similarities across transitions in the answers to this problem.

multiscale competency architecture of life

gap junctions

ou certainly have a light cone that does not belong to any of your pieces

all intelligence collective intelligence

The consequences of our current choices bear not juston us. They bear on the continued evolutionary unfoldingof life in the universe. This marks the scale of our currentresponsibility

Julian Huxley

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

he wiring up of a civilisation of billions of people, which is itself some steps into a major transition towards complex sociality, faces similar questions

somewhere, somehow, through evolutionary iteration, a bunch of individual, independent, single-celled organisms stumbled upon governance principles that made them fitter together. Such “fundamental organizational changes in the history of life”1, known as major evolutionary transitions, had happened before — the eukaryotes that became multicellular are themselves held to be the result of symbiosis, and that’s not even the beginning — and have happened since.

f we want to go from something like a prokaryotic cell to a pod of killer whales 00:16:32 there has to be sort of increases in physiological morphological and in many cases behavioral complexity and all of these require say more knowledge or a diversity of 00:16:45 information and this information has to be stored and it has to be accessible to the organism as well so we can put this information into 00:16:57 various levels and so what we have done is we've kind of taken the the previous work by blanca and uh just taken it or added a little bit to the levels in our 00:17:11 own way

FollowingSimondon’s social theory [37] and our previous work [10 ], social systems are themselves individualsthat harbour in them preindividual forces of transformation. Therefore we do not see in the currentorganization of personhood, inasmuch as it seems unassailable, a final unchangeable state of affairs.

What caused life's Major evolutionary transitions?

t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

This is the vision of OP Sapiens Star—that human’s evolution is not finished, and that the hyperthreat provides the impetus for a quantum leap into a new way of being. Through achieving a galactically significant mission—saving Earth’s ecological integrity—the Homo sapiens species “stars” within the universe. Humans go from being a menace and fighting one another to being heroic, creative, and tolerant.    

The news outlet Business of Fashion wrote that the Gala “has earned a place amongst top-tier events like the Oscars and fashion businesses are harnessing the wattage of the annual spectacle to promote their own products and agendas”. Hence, previous sponsors of the Met’s bonanza have included designers like Gucci and Versace. But in more recent years they have come to include tech companies like Apple and Amazon.

The Costume Institute is the only curatorial department responsible for funding itself, and it does so with ease.

Brands that are firmly outside the fashion industry can still capitalize on the gala. For instance, IBM Watson made headlines last year by collaborating with Marchesa on a “smart dress” worn by Karolina Kurkova.

Despite these restrictions, brands still decide it’s worth the high price of admission. “Exclusivity amps up the night. There’s this element of voyeurism, seeing who is in and who is out,” Stone says. “Even for just those few hours, the designers, celebrities and brands get highlighted.” The consumers that brands are targeting obviously can’t afford the outfits on the red carpet, such as Rihanna’s renowned Guo Pei gown, which took two years to make. According to Au, many labels use the exposure to create goodwill for their off-the-rack collections. “These runway collections are a marketing investment, not a profit driver,” he says. “They create demand for the more affordable, mass-market lines of the brand. It’s a powerful halo strategy.”

many of you were brought up with the 00:03:57 idea of Enlightenment reason critical thinking an Enlightenment reason had a number of properties and it turns out that most of them are not true 00:04:10 Enlightenment reason is useful in many situations we'll talk about why it's useful and why it's been popular and so on but it's inadequate grossly inadequate for understanding what hew 00:04:22 means for human beings to understand the world and to think so what we're going to do is talk about real reason which is coming out of the neural and sciences and what the properties are so 00:04:36 there's a certain myth that comes out of enlightenment reason it says you know I think therefore I am says Descartes reason is conscious you know what you think it's just not true for most of 00:04:50 your thought it's unconscious mainly about 98% consciousness is a tip of the iceberg you know how do you get 98% there are two ways one if you look at 00:05:03 what you're conscious of versus what your brain is doing the roll is about fifty to one your brain is doing 50 times as much as you're conscious of and there's another way to look at it if you 00:05:15 take a sentence and you say what can the next sentence be in a paragraph and what do you have to fill in to understand all the possible next sentences the answer is that you need to fill in 50 times as 00:05:29 much as it's in that sentence roughly so it's about 98% unconscious you're not even aware that you're filling this in but you're not moreover consciousness could not in 00:05:42 principle in principle be you know you you couldn't have reason being conscious because most of your reason is done in parallel circuitry but consciousness is 00:05:55 linear so you have massively parallel circuitry but you're tracing out a linear path through it and that is means you can only be aware of a tiny portion of what you're thinking now

So to sum things up what caused life's major evolutionary transitions the answer is cooperation major transitions begin when a group of organisms join forces to better survive and reproduce if cooperation continues long enough a new super organism may Emerge one that can then go [on] to reproduce and evolve as a whole and 00:07:42 The pathway that led [to] animals along with humankind [at] least three major transitions have been identified resulting in four layers of Life within your own body

in 00:05:44 1998 researchers set up a mini Ecosystem with small mouths protists and single-celled algae the protists could easily swallow individual algal cells But had trouble eating cells that happen to stick together after reproducing in less than just 20 generations the algae evolved multicellular cooperation they form groups of eight tightly connected cells that could not [be] eaten by the protists [a] 00:06:10 similar experiment on single-celled yeast in 2011 Showed that [just] 32 days after multi-celled colonies evolved clear division of labor also evolved giving rise to unique cell types specializing in different tasks these two experiments show us how multi-celled organisms may have first evolved, but what about mitochondria and their permanent merger with eukaryotes In a long-term study ending in 2008 a protist that normally eats Bacteria was seen swallowing a species of algae 00:06:41 Apparently on accident that it was not able to digest Inside the protists the algae was able to grow and reproduce when the protists reproduced as well both daughter cells contained algae after several years and many many generations researchers found that when Bacteria was scarce Protists containing algae were much more likely to survive than those without They avoided starvation by feeding off the waste products the algae produced This was the start of a [Brand-new] relationship 00:07:14 Strikingly similar to what we find between [our] [cells] and the mitochondria [that] live inside

Each new layer of Life is the result of what scientists call a major evolutionary transition? What was the cause of these transitions the answer is? Cooperation a Major Transition starts when free living creatures team up to form a cooperative group in the early stages of cooperation Participants are free to come and go as they [please] [if] a group sticks together long enough however 00:04:51 Division of labor will often evolve different participants begin specializing in different tasks as time goes on Individuals may become so specialized that they can no longer survive on their own [if] the entire group becomes locked into cooperation Depending fully on one another to survive and reproduce a new super organism has been forged and they made your evolutionary transition is complete 00:05:16 From this point on the entire group will evolve together as one Models describing natural situations that might promote the evolution of major transitions have been put forth by scientists such as John Maynard Smith [fior] Sonck Mary stuart West and w d hamilton using these models Researchers have been able to Mimic natural scenarios in the lab Allowing us to directly witness the beginnings of major transitions [evolved]

Today we tend to shrug this off as common knowledge, but think how amazing this is you are a Colony

we want to focus on how humans fit into our category goal framework here and we'll use this figure as a roadmap 00:42:18 starting with the center section looking that looks at how events that affect the species and clay level and so what stands out here for humans is our 00:42:28 complex spoken language which greatly enhances our communication and has long been thought of as a met due to leaps in the way that we transmit information between individuals 00:42:40 but this met really wouldn't have been possible without a major competitive transition so the specific regions in the brain that are associated with greater cognition and language ability 00:42:52 and also our larger brain size which is correlated with functionality and our spoken language allows human societies to gather greater amounts of level 3 or learned 00:43:07 information than would ever be possible within any one individual's lifetime and this really turns up the dial on the magnitude at which cultural evolution affects us as a 00:43:19 species and allows us to adapt and construct our environments in different ways cultural innovations are also not dependent on random beneficial mutations but can 00:43:32 arise intentionally and this has major impacts for how quickly and at what level we can affect our ecosystems 00:43:43 so when we come back to the figure and we've layered on complex spoken language now we can look at the level of ecosystem change that's occurred because of this and see if it's enough to bring 00:43:55 us to a major systems transition and here we argue that the answer is no if we would have just stopped at spoken language our global impact would never have reached the level 00:44:07 that it takes to drive an mst but we do argue that this spoken language was actually a facilitating evolutionary transition for events that directly paved the way 00:44:19 for an mst so human spoken language is a facilitating transition for symbolic representation of instructional information so the met and the mechd that make up 00:44:33 complex spoken language are actually a fit for being able to write things down and being able to write things down onto abiotic mediums allows us to increase the amount of information that 00:44:47 we can store the accuracy of the stored information and the efficiency of transmission and this has an especially high impact for oblique transmission because 00:44:59 being able to inscribe information can potentially immortalize it and then individuals far in the future can build upon it and so being able to build upon 00:45:12 uh generations of information through symbolic representation of language is really a key for the expansion of technological innovations that have expanded the realized niche of humans so 00:45:25 we have spread across every continent made major impacts on most ecosystems and a part of what has allowed us to do this is the technology that we've designed uh based upon large amounts of 00:45:39 inscribed language and some of these technologies actually allow us to manipulate or avoid the processes of natural selection and some of the those examples are listed here 00:45:53 and so when we go back to our figure and layer on the potential to inscribe language and then re-look at ecosystem level changes we think that here due to due to the 00:46:06 technological innovations and global expansion that's come with being the only species to store this much level three information that the answer is now yes 00:46:19 and when an mst occurs the context in which this entire cycle takes place completely shifts because now the global ecosystem is playing by a modified set of rules that are 00:46:33 set forth by the mst so this brings us to the question are humans the last mst or are there other mets and mechs forthcoming that will drive a new 00:46:45 major systems transition

our fourth point is that for something like eukaryotes and others where there is no immediate major system 00:25:30 transition we're really sort of saying is that they perhaps are critical to such a transition but not at the time necessarily that they have evolved so in essence we want to amp we want to bring in a new 00:25:43 term which we call facilitating evolutionary transition so it makes it is part of a major system transition but it clearly needs other 00:25:55 evolutionary events to go along with it and the final sort of point is that there are perhaps catalysts that are involved in this process and one of the major catalysts that may 00:26:12 have had effects throughout evolutionary history are viruses so viruses may have been key actors to help the transition from 00:26:23 rna to dna they may have uh produced or helped produce the nucleus in eukaryotes and we'll talk about a little bit later about the key role that viral genes play 00:26:36 in making sexual reproduction possible and even in placental mammals the evolution of a placenta so without viral genes being moved across 00:26:47 horizontally species some of these major transitions could never have happened so now we have sort of the complete integrated process of of our diagram and again the question 00:27:02 that we're really focusing on oftentimes is that last one yes when how and why do we get to a major system transition and how do nets mechs uh 00:27:15 fets and catalysts all play a role in these various transitions

you are looking at major 00:12:17 evolutionary transitions so one can start with the idea that initially what has to happen is individuals kind of have to tolerate each other so in other words competitors 00:12:31 have to be willing to form into those simple groups and those groups have to have some kind of benefit for their existence and continuance then berkshire said well the next step 00:12:44 in this transition is what can go from formation to maintenance so if you go from a simple group to society again there are there are rules there are maybe individuals that belong to certain 00:12:56 societies and rather than sort of a fission fusion kind of uh coming together going apart these societies maintain themselves these groups maintain themselves over 00:13:08 longer periods of time and there are more benefits and there may in fact be more conflicts that have to be worked out to keep the societies to maintain the societies 00:13:19 finally there would be the step into this group transformation again what what what kuala and strassmann might have called organismality so now that the groups subsume their kind of 00:13:32 individual goals into a collective goal for all of them and again the idea here is that that that one has to happen is conflict has to be somehow managed and reduced 00:13:44 such that the groups can actually transform into this coherent whole single individual and some of the key points in in in burke's sort of 00:13:55 pathway to to to transformation is that the first two steps are can truly be bidirectional in other words uh societies can go back to being simple groups and simple groups can go 00:14:10 back to being competitive just competitors so in other words those aren't sort of absorbing states but the argument is that once once you sort of get to that group transformation that last blue arrow you 00:14:23 have transformed in a way that it is hard or impossible to really go backwards and what burke argued is that that process those those various steps and 00:14:34 particularly that last transformative step is strongly driven often by inclusive fitness kin selection so in other words going back to that continuum 00:14:46 of the types of groups that they can form fraternal groups are much more likely to to transform into these higher level organisms than 00:14:58 uh egalitarian groups

so what kuller and strasman then basically were trying to kind of in a way define or look at was how you transition from being a group 00:11:28 to an actual individual organism so at what point at what point do the individuals sort of meld into something that you would call just one individual what they call 00:11:41 organismality

Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

Giampaolo Ferradini 1st degree connection 1st President and Ceo at Kjuicer.com Srl, CEO at Green Gap Srl

an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog. It provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment. It is created during the Sprint Planning meeting. The Sprint Goal gives the Development Team some flexibility regarding the functionality implemented within the Sprint. The selected Product Backlog items deliver one coherent function, which can be the Sprint Goal. The Sprint Goal can be any other coherence that causes the Development Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.