I am a product of your work I'm a product of the work of the people in 00:02:05 this room and watching this stream thanks to you to your actions your thoughts your memes I am Who I am today my learning and my capabilities have 00:02:16 been shaped but by what you've done

it is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all the business of evolution appointed without being asked if he wanted it and without proper warning and preparation what is more he 00:05:49 can't refuse the job whether he wants to or not whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth that is his 00:06:02 inescapable Destiny and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it the better for all concerns

But if you think in evolutionary models, randomness has a prominent role. (9)9 Without it, nothing progresses anyhow.

“what could we appeal to that is so strong, so compelling that it spurs the kind of collective action and coordination needed to tackle the dangers of exponential technology?”

Our core criteria follow the definition of CCE provided in Tomasello's quotation above. We suggest that the minimum requirements for a population to exhibit CCE are (i) a change in behaviour (or product of behaviour, such as an artefact), typically due to asocial learning, followed by (ii) the transfer via social learning of that novel or modified behaviour to other individuals or groups, where (iii) the learned behaviour causes an improvement in performance, which is a proxy of genetic and/or cultural fitness, with (iv) the previous three steps repeated in a manner that generates sequential improvement over time.

In contrast [to non-human species' cultural traditions], human cultures do accumulate changes over many generations, resulting in culturally transmitted behaviors that no single human individual could invent on their own.

In recent years, the phenomenon of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has become the focus of major research interest in biology, psychology and anthropology. Some researchers argue that CCE is unique to humans and underlies our extraordinary evolutionary success as a species. Others claim to have found CCE in non-human species. Yet others remain sceptical that CCE is even important for explaining human behavioural diversity and complexity. These debates are hampered by multiple and often ambiguous definitions of CCE. Here, we review how researchers define, use and test CCE. We identify a core set of criteria for CCE which are both necessary and sufficient, and may be found in non-human species. We also identify a set of extended criteria that are observed in human CCE but not, to date, in other species. Different socio-cognitive mechanisms may underlie these different criteria. We reinterpret previous theoretical models and observational and experimental studies of both human and non-human species in light of these more fine-grained criteria. Finally, we discuss key issues surrounding information, fitness and cognition. We recommend that researchers are more explicit about what components of CCE they are testing and claiming to demonstrate.

Hierbei handelt es sich um eine Sammlung von Notizen, die Luhmann vermutlich zwischen 1952 und 1961 angelegt hat (mit einzelnen späteren Nachträgen; Notizen insbesondere zum Themenkomplex Weltgesellschaft wurden allerdings noch bis ca. 1973 durchweg in diese Sammlung eingestellt). Die insgesamt ca. 23.000 Zettel verteilen sich auf die ersten sieben physischen Auszüge des Kastens sowie auf kleinere Registerabteilungen, die im 17. Auszug der zweiten Sammlung (physischer Auszug 24) stehen. Die Notizen sind im Wesentlichen in der Zeit entstanden, als Luhmann als Rechtsreferendar in Lüneburg bzw. als Regierungsrat im Kultusministerium in Niedersachen gearbeitet hat und dokumentieren seine Lektüre verwaltungs- bzw. staatswissenschaftlicher, philosophischer und zunehmend auch organisationstheoretischer sowie soziologischer Literatur.

Another way to widen the pool of stakeholders is for government regulators to get into the game, indirectly representing the will of a larger electorate through their interventions.

‘‘I think it lets us be more thoughtful and more deliberate about safety issues,’’ Altman says. ‘‘Part of our strategy is: Gradual change in the world is better than sudden change.’’

The technological revolution of past decades has led teaching and learning of evolutionary biology to move away from its naturalist origins.

"In the very long term, we suggest that humans are evolving from individual genetic organisms to cultural groups which function as superorganisms, similar to ant colonies and beehives,"

It’s possible, the researchers suggest, that the appearance of human culture represents a key evolutionary milestone.

Here's why: Culture is group-oriented, and people in those groups talk to, learn from and imitate one another. These group behaviors allow people to pass on adaptations they learned through culture faster than genes can transmit similar survival benefits. An individual can learn skills and information from a nearly unlimited number of people in a small amount of time and, in turn, spread that information to many others. And the more people available to learn from, the better. Large groups solve problems faster than smaller groups, and intergroup competition stimulates adaptations that might help those groups survive. As ideas spread, cultures develop new traits.In contrast, a person only inherits genetic information from two parents and racks up relatively few random mutations in their eggs or sperm, which takes about 20 years to be passed on to their small handful of children. That's just a much slower pace of change.

human culture may be driving evolution faster than genetic mutations can work.

Humans might be making genetic evolution obsolete

As a consequence of sociocultural niche construction, humans have become a global force of nature – for better and for worse. It is only by embracing these sociocultural realities that we might shape better futures for both humans and non-human species alike.

Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality

Abstract

Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions

Why is it, then, that although publicly is far more common as the adverbial form of public than publically, the ratio of usage has diminished? Publically is becoming more common for the same reason that people write irregardless in place of regardless or write “diffuse the situation” instead of “defuse the situation” or “all of the sudden” rather than “all of a sudden”: evolution. Language is, in a sense, alive, and just as life itself evolves, so does language—but note that the primary definition of evolution is not “improvement”; it simply means “change.” And how does language change? The change is modeled: New words are coined, or new senses of existing words develop (or new spellings or new forms occur), because someone, somewhere acts to make it so, and the evolution goes viral.

TheSateliteCombinationCard IndexCabinetandTelephoneStand

For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.

“...the universe is individuating (in and through each of us) as the individual is universalising.”

understanding of the universe would not be found merely in the examination of ‘ parts ’ but in the recognition of ‘ wholes ’ and the observation of process.

Holism and Evolution by Jan Christian Smuts – a re- evaluation after 90 years

When threatened with the possibility of starvation, early humans developed a survival response which sent them foraging for food. Yet foraging is only effective if metabolism is inhibited in various parts of the brain.Foraging requires focus, rapid assessment, impulsivity, exploratory behavior and risk taking. It is enhanced by blocking whatever gets in the way, like recent memories and attention to time. Fructose, a kind of sugar, helps damp down these centers, allowing more focus on food gathering.In fact, the researchers found the entire foraging response was set in motion by the metabolism of fructose whether it was eaten or produced in the body. Metabolizing fructose and its byproduct, intracellular uric acid, was critical to the survival of both humans and animals.The researchers noted that fructose reduces blood flow to the brain’s cerebral cortex involved in self-control, as well as the hippocampus and thalamus. Meanwhile, blood flow increased around the visual cortex associated with food reward. All of this stimulated the foraging response.

Johnson suspects the survival response, what he calls the “survival switch,” that helped ancient humans get through periods of scarcity, is now stuck in the “on” position in a time of relative abundance. This leads to the overeating of high fat, sugary and salty food prompting excess fructose production.Fructose produced in the brain can lead to inflammation and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease, the study said. Animals given fructose show memory lapses, a loss in the ability to navigate a maze and inflammation of the neurons.“A study found that if you keep laboratory rats on fructose long enough they get tau and amyloid beta proteins in the brain, the same proteins seen in Alzheimer’s disease,” Johnson said. “You can find high fructose levels in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s as well.”Johnson suspects that the tendency of some AD patients to wander off might be a vestige of the ancient foraging response.

both evolution and learning must fit the same 00:10:33 formal regularities or so-called laws how does an organism know how to evolve okay so there must be some sort of process that requires that 00:10:46 it be unseen otherwise what you would have is the organism continuing to do what it does with its familiarness

around that same time i got a call from my daughter you know leave it to your kids and she said you know mom it's 00:03:48 just that all the problems we're dealing with in the world right now are insidious and um you know it came up last night siva was talking about the insidiousness 00:04:01 of the facebook problem and and this was an unlocker for me of what what does it mean for something to be insidious so i looked it up and i started to 00:04:14 explore and it turns out that insidious is defined and i think this is from the you know the oxford on the internet not the original but um that there's proceeding in a gradual 00:04:27 subtle way but with very harmful effects in other words there's something that's that's gathering combining in an unseen way that's leading to danger

I really highly recommend Robert Hazen's _Story of Earth_ [1] if you're into this sort of stuff. Highly knowledgeable and entertaining geologist argues that the geosphere and the biosphere should really be viewed as one co-evolving system, over deep time. There are thousands of species of minerals that can only exist because of the action of life, and those minerals in turn enable new forms of life, which enable new species of mineral, and so on in a complex and ever evolving system within which we exist for only a fraction of an instant.[1] https://www.amazon.com/Story-Earth-Billion-Stardust-Living/d...

Humans are especially good at filling new ecological niches “because we have the capacity to learn how to survive in new environments,” Goldstein said. “Once your parents learn an adaptive skill, you’ll learn from them. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

while I was listening to all of you and to our wonderful scientists 00:57:28 I thought of something that the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson wrote shortly before he died he said he believed that 00:57:40 the speed of cultural Evolution the speed of cultural evolution is now faster than the speed of biological evolution so 00:57:53 what does that mean to me it's something very simple it means that we now hold our destiny in our hands and that's what you're all talking about

Our double task is now to preserve and foster both biological evolution as Nature designed it and cultural evolution as we invented it, trying to achieve the benefits of both, and exercising a wise restraint to limit the damage when they come into conflict. With biological evolution, we should continue playing the risky game that nature taught us to play. With cultural evolution, we should use our unique gifts of language and art and science to understand each other, and finally achieve a human society that is manageable if not always peaceful, with wildlife that is endlessly creative if not always permanent.

In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

The discoveries of Svante Pääbo show that as early as fifty thousand years ago the transition from biological to cultural evolution was already far advanced. Biological evolution, as demonstrated by Kimura and Goodenough, accelerated the birth of new species by favoring the genetic isolation of small populations. Cultural evolution had the opposite effect, erasing differences between related species and bringing them together. Cultural evolution happens when cousins learn each other's languages and share stories around the cave-fire. As a consequence of cultural evolution, biological differences become less important and cousins learn to live together in peace. Sharing of memes brings species together and sharing of genes is the unintended consequence.

the cultural evolution of creative new societies requires more elbow-room than a single planet can provide. Creative new societies need room to take risks and make mistakes, far enough away to be effectively isolated from their neighbors. Life must spread far afield to continue the processes of genetic drift and diversification of species that drove evolution in the past. The restless wandering that pulled our species out of Africa to explore the Earth will continue to pull us beyond the Earth, as far as our technology can reach.

In each case, a small population produced a star-burst of pioneers who permanently changed our way of thinking. Genius erupted in groups as well as in individuals. It seems likely that these bursts of creative change were driven by a combination of cultural with biological evolution. Cultural evolution was constantly spreading ideas and skills from one community to another, stirring up conservative societies with imported novelties. At the same time, biological evolution acting on small genetically isolated populations was causing genetic drift, so that the average intellectual endowment of isolated communities was rising and falling by random chance. Over the last few thousand years, genetic drift caused occasional star-bursts to occur, when small populations rose to outstandingly high levels of average ability. The combination of imported new ideas with peaks of genetic drift would enable local communities to change the world.

The contribution of genetic drift to cultural evolution remains a speculative hypothesis.

As a result of cultural evolution, a single species now dominates the ecology of our planet, and cultural evolution will dominate the future of life so long as any species with a living culture survives. When we look ahead to imagine possible futures for our descendants, cultural evolution must be our dominant concern. But biological evolution has not stopped and will not stop. As cultural evolution races ahead like a hare, biological evolution will continue its slow tortoise crawl to shape our destiny.

Wells's biggest work is Outline of History, published in 1920, a picture of cultural evolution as the main theme of history since the emergence of our species.

Cultural evolution had its beginnings as soon as animals with brains evolved, using their brains to store information and using patterns of behavior to share information with their offspring. Social species of insects and mammals were molded by cultural as well as biological evolution. But cultural evolution only became dominant when a single species invented spoken language. Spoken language is incomparably nimbler than the language of the genes.

Wells saw that we happen to live soon after a massive shift in the history of the planet, caused by the emergence of our own species. The shift was completed about ten thousand years ago, when we invented agriculture and started to domesticate animals. Before the shift, evolution was mostly biological. After the shift, evolution was mostly cultural. Biological evolution is usually slow, when big populations endure for thousands or millions of generations before changes become noticeable. Cultural evolution can be a thousand times faster, with major changes occurring in two or three generations. It has taken about two hundred thousand years for our species to evolve biologically from its or

Motoo Kimura, author of the book, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, published in 1983, more than a hundred years after Darwin's masterpiece.

After the discovery of the structure of DNA molecules by Crick and Watson in 1953, Kimura knew that genes are molecules, carrying genetic information in a simple code. His theory applied only to evolution driven by the statistical inheritance of molecules. He called it the Neutral Theory because it introduced Genetic Drift as a driving force of evolution independent of natural selection.

Sewall Wright, then 98 years old but still in full possession of his wits. He gave me a first-hand account of how he read Mendel's paper and decided to devote his life to understanding the consequences of Mendel's ideas. Wright understood that the inheritance of genes would cause a fundamental randomness in all evolutionary processes. The phenomenon of randomness in evolution was called Genetic Drift. Kimura came to Wisconsin to learn about Genetic Drift, and then returned to Japan. He built Genetic Drift into a mathematical theory which he called the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.

In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

Biological and Cultural Evolution Six Characters in Search of an Author

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

A re-evaluation of ‘Holism and Evolution’ by Jan Christian Smuts after 90 years.

Like many people, I’d always been baffled by the occasional, undeniably ‘Lamarckian’ passages in On the Origin of Species, bearing in mind Darwin is generally credited with having discredited such thinking.

Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage.

But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.

Kropotkin’s actual argument is far more interesting. Much of it, for instance, is concerned with how animal cooperation often has nothing to do with survival or reproduction, but is a form of pleasure in itself. “To take flight in flocks merely for pleasure is quite common among all sorts of birds,” he writes. Kropotkin multiplies examples of social play: pairs of vultures wheeling about for their own entertainment, hares so keen to box with other species that they occasionally (and unwisely) approach foxes, flocks of birds performing military-style maneuvers, bands of squirrels coming together for wrestling and similar games

We all know the eventual answer, which the discovery of genes made possible. Animals were simply trying to maximize the propagation of their own genetic codes. Curiously, this view—which eventually came to be referred to as neo-Darwinian—was developed largely by figures who considered themselves radicals of one sort or another.

Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe.

We believe that we have demonstrated the use of abstract marks to convey meaning about the behaviour of the animals with which they are associated, on European Upper Palaeolithic material culture spanning the period from ~37,000 to ~13,000 bp. In our reading, the animals integral to our analytical modules do not depict a specific individual animal, but all animals of that species, at least as experienced by the images’ creators. This synthesis of image, mathematical syntax (the ordinal/linear sequences) and signs functioning as words formed an efficient means of recording and communicating information that has at its heart the core intellectual achievement of abstraction.

Our analytical groups are: aurochs, birds, bison, caprids, cervids, fish, horses, mammoths, rhinos. Because of exceptionally low numbers we exclude snakes and wolverines. We also omitted sequences associated with apparent human depictions, or images in which such were part, in order to treat these separately at a later date.

Symbiocene

at some point in human history, culture began to wrest evolutionary control from our DNA. And now, they say, cultural change is allowing us to evolve in ways biological change alone could not.

he concept of cultural evolution began with the father of evolution himself, Waring said. Charles Darwin understood that behaviors could evolve and be passed to offspring just as physical traits are

cultural evolution can lead to genetic evolution. "The classic example is lactose tolerance," Waring told Live Science. "Drinking cow's milk began as a cultural trait that then drove the [genetic] evolution of a group of humans." In that case, cultural change preceded genetic change, not the other way around. 

But nowadays, humans mostly don't need to adapt to such threats genetically. Instead, we adapt by developing vaccines and other medical interventions, which are not the results of one person's work but rather of many people building on the accumulated "mutations" of cultural knowledge. By developing vaccines, human culture improves its collective "immune system,"

The longer it prevails, the more likely we will suffer catastrophic failure as a species here on earth. While this would be a tragedy of huge proportion for humans, we will take thousands, perhaps millions, of other species down with us.

So to the people listening or watching this, what kind of closing thoughts do you have to summarize what we just talked about and to leave them to think about or apply to their own lives? 01:17:49 Simon Michaux: So I would say to them that they're in better shape than anyone before, even as scary as it is and the unknown we're walking into. And there is no one plan. So like diversity of species in a jungle environment is a strength for the long-term survival of that jungle, diversity of ideas have the same strengths. 01:18:13 So we need them all for our long-term survival. We can't face one consensus, it's just like a broad brush direction. So we've got to put these ideas out there and discuss amongst ourselves. And understand that this is very, very challenging, and none of us actually know what we need to do. 01:18:37 Even though our skills are not necessarily what we need. We're almost like a blank canvas in terms of skills. But in terms of our self knowledge and our ability to think, our opinions mean something. We believe in human rights. We have education. Men and women are educated now. So we are in better shape now than we've ever been. 01:19:04 Instead of banging on about the problems and our past failings, we should probably try to face the future with open hearts, and actually think positive with the understanding that this is going to be rough.

what our work is showing is very soon it can't. And so it's going to go through a death throws and any organism it will fight to survive. And so yes, there will be pushback and resistance. And so what I'm proposing is a plan, whether that plan gets carried out or whether it's 00:37:22 allowed to be carried out, that's a different matter.

Humans didn’t evolve to thrive in frictionless social networks with high fanout and velocity, and arguably we shouldn’t.

The only diagram or image in The Origin of Species, a tree depicting divergence (source)

This is one compiler’s approach to keeping a commonplace book.

evolution of my processes.

There was no awareness that any kind of coherent history of the periods before the development of writing was possible at all. In the words of the Danish scholar Rasmus Nyerup (1759–1829): Everything which has come down to us from heathen-dom is wrapped in a thick fog; it belongs to a space of time which we cannot measure. We know that it is older than Christendom, but whether by a couple of years or a couple of centuries, or even by more than a millennium, we can do no more than guess.

Out of our cleverness has emerged something almost more importantthan the cleverness itself. Out of it has come learning about how to share ideasand pass down skills and knowledge. Out of it has come education.

this course considers at the very end the question of the essence of thereligion: Through all this change, does anything remain constant?

nd the way in which these cate-gories changed, some being dropped out and others beingadded, was an index of my own intellectual progress andbreadth. Eventually, the file came to be arranged accord-ing to several larger projects, having many subprojects,which changed from year to year.

The Evolution of Human Consciousness and Linguistic Behavior

ow many sounds do you need to have a language well 00:30:33 think about a computer what can you say on a computer anything right I mean you can type anything that's why people get addicted to Facebook and everything but how many letters does a computer have it 00:30:44 has two zero and one you have a binary digit language and those I would like to call the sounds of the computer zero and one that's how it interprets everything or that's how it presents information 00:30:58 that is interpreted by the program that was created by a person with language you don't really need more than two sounds

let's just 00:29:52 talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus 00:30:05 would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they 00:30:19 couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language

the greatest technology ever invented was language

Unable to process all this material, we let our cognitive biases decide what we should pay attention to.

if cultural evolution is sufficiently rapid, it may act to pre-empt and slow genetic evolution. That is, in solving adaptive challenges before genetic evolution takes place, cultural inheritance may reduce the opportunity for natural selection on genes and weaken the adaptive value of information stored in genetic inheritance in the long term. This process is the opposite of genetic assimilation, in which a plastic trait becomes genetically encoded. We call this mode of GCC cultural pre-emption.

Far beyond simply altering human evolution, this evidence suggests that human cultural inheritance is of global evolutionary significance.

human long-term GCC is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group).

Describing himself as a “messenger from the past”, Berger says that this discovery destroyed the preconceptions of a progressive, linear development of humans from apelike ancestors to what we are now. H. naledi is now dated at between 236,000 and 335,000 years old and was, therefore, a contemporary of Homo sapiens at that stage, which proves that a small-brained hominid was living side by side with its large-brained cousin, who is supposed to represent the apotheosis of sentient beings.

Munroe, though, assumes the opposite: liberty, in this case the freedom of speech, is an artifact of law, only stretching as far as government action, and no further. Pat Kerr, who wrote a critique of this comic on Medium in 2016, argued that this was the exact wrong way to think about free speech: Coherent definitions of free speech are actually rather hard to come by, but I would personally suggest that it’s something along the lines of “the ability to voluntarily express (and receive) opinions without suffering excessive penalties for doing so”. This is a liberal principle of tolerance towards others. It’s not an absolute, it isn’t comprehensive, it isn’t rigorously defined, and it isn’t a law. What it is is a culture.

Although there is more than one way to implement a Zettelkasten system, the essential elements are always the same: brief summaries on cards, organized into categories.

This is not an attempt to arrest the evolution of the language, but to correct mistakes.

The use ofhyphens in compound words is becoming less frequent exceptwhen essential for clarity of meaning. The customary prac-tice is to write such words as coordinate with the dieresisrather than the hyphen.

interacting with other ideas and remaining part of ourtrain of thought.

By rejecting the idea that the stone provides useful evidence of a creator, Paley avoids the oversimplified argument that the existence of anything proves God’s existence. But the watch provides something different: evidence of purpose.

species that live near each other are more likely to share a family tree

New DNA technology is shaking up the family trees of many plants and animals.

The very shift from bounded objects to boundary-forming processes became a new playground and my whole perspective gained anextra dimension of freedom.

The very notion of thinking aboutlife (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already asymptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. Thereare voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that lifehas no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if notentirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is sub-jugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not onepurpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover,the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because theyare subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as suchis open-ended.

In one of his videos he talks about "approaching the mind of god" or something similar, in a way I can't entirely tell whether he is paraphrasing an early-modern note-taker or saying that's what he thinks he is doing himself. I don't really care whether he's religious or not, unless it compromises the system he's building.

fly·wheel/ˈflīˌ(h)wēl/ Learn to pronounce nounnoun: flywheel; plural noun: flywheels; noun: fly-wheel; plural noun: fly-wheelsa heavy revolving wheel in a machine that is used to increase the machine's momentum and thereby provide greater stability or a reserve of available power during interruptions in the delivery of power to the machine.

The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

so that your human,fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best.Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.

As long as all the states on the planetwere equally weak, a certain balance prevailed. But from the momentthat several European states developed a significantly greater fiscal,administrative, and military capacity, a new dynamic emerged.

evolution works on a much longer time scale right than than 00:35:09 any given life and so we need to we rely pretty heavily on helpful social norms right these cultural norms that actually teach us the right way to engage with each other and that can transcend any 00:35:22 one generation um and you know we worked really hard um in the west you know not just i mean this has happened everywhere but it you know we're where we're from um to acquire norms from from that we would 00:35:35 have called you know liberal democracy right that tolerance and respect and and these things and individual rights and you know it you see those things start to erode now and you start to see some of that base 00:35:48 nature taking back over the tribalism and the seeing the other as the enemy um the outgrouping of people and it we know from history it doesn't end well there right like the erosion of these norms 00:36:02 not only will continue to exacerbate collective illusions they i i think they're the biggest threat to free society that we face in a very long time yeah yeah you made a very convincing case for that

Wilson might have been accused of racism by people like my own Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin (I don’t know about that, though), but they never adduced evidence for that.

The use of physical location, even in an imagined environment, as a memory aid likely arose as a result of the fact that so much of the essential information stored in memory can be linked to foraging-type behaviours.

A spike in fears about new immigrants and newly emancipated black people reproducing at higher rates than the white population also prompted more opposition to legal abortion.

solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.

Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

While it was once regarded as a low-level, “primitive” instinct, researchers arecoming to recognize that imitation—at least as practiced by humans, includingvery young ones—is a complex and sophisticated capacity. Although non-humananimals do imitate, their mimicry differs in important ways from ours. Forexample, young humans’ copying is unique in that children are quite selectiveabout whom they choose to imitate. Even preschoolers prefer to imitate peoplewho have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent. Researchshows that while toddlers will choose to copy their mothers rather than a personthey’ve just met, as children grow older they become increasingly willing tocopy a stranger if the stranger appears to have special expertise. By the time achild reaches age seven, Mom no longer knows best.