Long-term gene–culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition

"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

the fundamental insight of anatma, the denial of ego-self.

repressed intuition "returns to consciousness in distorted form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and make ourselves real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course money.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

the value-system of money is supplanting traditional religions, as part of a profound secular conversion we only dimly understand

Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today

Figure 3.2 Consumption corridors changing over time

Figure 3.1 Why consumption minima and maxima are necessary.

Sustainable consumption scholars offer several explanations forwhy earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers falter when itcomes to translating their values into meaningful impact.

This must change. The voting-with-your-purchases narrative, al-though constructed for us, has found fertile ground because of thecombination of (a) a growing sense of urgency among many thatsomething must be done about the environment, and (b) a deepen-ing confusion about how one productively engages in “politics” and“structural change.” Together, (a) + (b) enable the prevailing story thatthe checkout line at the market is where we can do the most good forthe planet, and for those treated unjustly. Recent developments in-dicate that individuals and groups are increasingly challenging thisstory, however. Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and otherinitiatives are once again making environmental and social policy aquestion of political engagement. Let us join them in re-appreciatingand regaining our political power and capacities

The resulting focus on saving the world as a consumer, onegreen-lifestyle action at a time, blocks inspirational avenues to work-ing collectively as citizens toward the good life.

People cannot reason and weigh every consumer decision every timethey act. Most of the hundreds of small decisions we make are basedon daily routines. We simply would not be able to function otherwise.And our routines, in turn, are strongly infuenced by their social andmaterial contexts. Time, societal norms of comfort and appropriatebehavior, and fnancial structures, all play a role here. Breaking rou-tines and practices requires far more than the provision of informationabout products and product use. It requires a change in the institu-tions and structures supporting them.

Another is strate-gic coordination: a great many consumers must make the same productchoices at the same time, with persistence. But this requires a level ofdiligence, focus, conviction, and resistance to greenwashing that doesnot emerge spontaneously. It comes from collective action, most oftenpromoted and organized by civil society organizations.

The starkest danger of the “consumer in charge” narrative is that itdepoliticizes the challenges before us, at a time when a citizen politicsis most called for. With consumers in charge, only the softest and mostbenevolent policy interventions are required from governments, likeproviding consumers with information on the environmental and so-cial characteristics of products, and information on how to use theseproducts in a better (especially more effcient) way. For these reasons,the consumer sovereignty narrative is attractive to politicians, as itshifts responsibility away from producers, retailers, and those taskedwith regulating commercial activity

The advent of a consumer sovereignty/individual control narrativeparallels the re-emergence, in the early 1980s, of neo-liberalism, a po-litical and social philosophy that emphasizes individual responsibilityfor larger social conditions.

hese challenges demand an ethos not of technologicalcleverness, but of social prudence, of acting with humility and cautionwhen confronted by risk and uncertainty. The French philosopherHans Jonas calls this the “imperative of responsibility.”

more research and development dollars focus, for example, onnew medications for the pets of the affuent than for all African trop-ical diseases. And monies spent on innovations in the packaging anddistribution of bottled water for rich-world consumers dwarfs researchand development investments in clean-water systems for the poor inAsia and Africa

Although these approaches may differ, all of them concur onthree essential points:

Instead of weighing the balance of pleasure and pain,individuals tend to think about a good life in terms of their life beingmeaningful to them

We can no longer ignore the fact that the pursuit of the goodlife can impact the chances of others to live a good life.

Confronting ques-tions of what a good life consists of, how it can be achieved, and howit can be guaranteed for everybody entails exploring what really mat-ters to humans, individually and collectively. These questions thus canlaunch new societal debate, helping us recognize similarities ratherthan differences and serve cohesion over polarization. Most funda-mentally, a focus on the vision of a good life allows us, individuallyand collectively, to devise ways to escape the trap of “the more, thebigger, the better,” and to examine how our personal understanding ofthe good life interacts with that of others.

At the same time, the vision of a good life for all integrates our in-dividual pursuit of this goal with an immediate concern for others.In other words, we can enjoy and exercise freedoms only to the extentthat doing so does not impinge on others. Achieving this vision under-lines both the crucial role of freedom but also the necessity of limitsfor this freedom to exist. Thereby, pursuing the vision of a good lifefor all has the potential of bridging current political divides, as it is avision that all people can adhere to.

Often, environmental and social analysts focus on threats, dangers,and damage. They highlight negatives, in terms of limited or non-renewable resources, or the impacts of excessive emissions or effuents.But what if one took the opposite approach and focused on the posi-tives that we want to strive for? We – the authors – believe that everyhuman being, that is you and us and everybody close and far away,wants to be able to live a good life, a life that is worth living. Giventhat the Earth’s resources are limited and distributed highly unevenly,the core objective has to be how everybody can live well within limits.

It requiresa deep and profound orientation toward the good life. It requires usto ponder what the good life is, what conditions must be fulflled forindividuals to live it, and what it takes to create these conditions.

By tying the question of limits to human needsand requirements for their satisfaction, they neither demand asceti-cism or renunciation, nor pursue unspecifed moral suasion in termsof “we should consume less.” Rather, they highlight the necessity –diffcult to pursue but rich in participatory rewards – to jointly defnethe conditions necessary to live a good life, and the subsequent stepsnecessary to make such a good life possible for all individuals. By pro-viding freedom to pursue the good life in an ecologically and sociallyfrayed world, these limits offer the beneft of ensuring that all otherindividuals living now and into the future can do so as well.

Can you imagine a world without limits? Having to navigate a citywithout any limits on how people drive, for example? Or no limits onwhat harm we may do to others? Societies need limits to allow thecommon pursuit of individual and societal wellbeing.

The concept understands humans tobe social beings and assumes that living within societies is associatedwith collective responsibilities, which includes the acceptance of cer-tain limits on individual freedoms.

Justice in the context of consumption corridorsmeans that every person deserves access to a defned minimum level ofecological and social resources necessary to be able to live a good life,solely because they are a human being (what scholars call a natural-law-based perspective on justice).

Integrating a focus on minima andmaxima is the basis for addressing questions of justice in a moreprofound and comprehensive way than a sole focus on the neces-sity of minima. Indeed, maximum consumption standards enforce apowerful message about justice, which is a central goal of consump-tion corridors.

How to satisfy these needs can be a question of personalchoice, as long as maximum consumption standards are not violated.In other words, “satisfers” do not receive the same kind of protec-tion via consumption corridors that “needs” receive

Theconcept of consumption corridors combines notions of human needs,individual preferences, and freedom as the basis for a good life for all.

Minimum consumption standards will ensure that individualsliving now or in the future are able to satisfy their needs, safeguardingaccess to the necessary quality and quantity of ecological and socialresources. Maximum consumption standards, in turn, are needed toensure that consumption by some individuals does not threaten theopportunity for a good life for others. The space between the foor ofminimum consumption standards and the ceiling of maximum con-sumption standards produces a sustainable consumption corridor.

Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological declineand planetary boundaries, this compact book instead offers a spir-ited explication of what everyone desires: a good life. Fundamentalconcepts of the good life are explained and explored, as are forcesthat threaten the good life for all. The remedy, says the book’s seveninternational authors, lies with the concept of consumption corri-dors, enabled by mechanisms of citizen engagement and deliberativedemocracy.

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.

Sustainability and a continuum of human unsustainability

human systems may have expanded beyond their ability to absorb energy and materials from the environment, and these resource constraints interacted with socio-political conflict to generate socio-ecological collapse.

Civilizations that may have experienced socio-ecological collapse in whole or part due to their over-extraction of resources include

There is reason to think that the effects of mortality salience are different in relational ontology. Contemporary Heathens are a particular sort of hybrid in living in modern society and emerging out of individualized ontologies, but forming incipient gift economies and expressing what I term a “gift ethic,” with an appreciation for what we receive from others, and desire to give in turn, sustaining social ecological systems as distributed networks of adaptive relations.

we also share an overarching and dominant individualized ontology that operates primarily in a logic of economization and consumerism. Economic metaphors and language dominate, and keep shifting our frame of reference back to economy. It is consumerism that is most often and consistently enacted in worldview defense when confronted with mortality salience in modern society.

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5)

unconscious motivations have not been eradicated by rational analysis.

Ritual practice embeds tacit knowledge. Its bodily actions enact meaning and operationalize values. The bodily motions of ritual actions, such as physically sharing drinks and food, and giving gifts, matters because of the reciprocal ideomotor effects of unconscious priming (Kahneman 2011:53). As Lakoff explains, there are connections between metaphoric meanings and bodily actions such that metaphoric associations are embedded in the structures of our brains. Compartmentalism, or “biconceptualism” in his terms, is physical in our brains, and frame shifts can be triggered through bodily movement with priming effects. “Going through the motions” of ritual will have some effects even for those who start off feeling silly for doing it.

interpretive drift is largely unconscious, not articulated, but brought on through practice (Luhrmann 1989:316). It involves more than a shift in the language people use (Luhrmann 1989:315, 321). It is not just cognitive, not just a new interpretive framework, but a shift in ontology and habitus, though Luhrmann uses the term “interpretive” drift. It is an acculturative process of change, but not an entirely passive internalization of culture. It is an interactive, though not necessarily conscious ongoing collaboration. We do this partly through imitation, but also growing skills in ourselves, as Michael Polanyi describes of tacit learning of personal knowledge.

Participation in ritual can change habitus and ontology through tacit learning. Luhrmann describes how “perception of [the practitioners’] world—what they noticed and experienced—altered, and the way they interpreted these perceptions altered …. They acquired the basic knowledge—common knowledge—and basic assumptions, sometimes explicitly articulated, other times implied, which affected the way they noticed and could observe the events around them” (Luhrmann 1989:11). Changes in practice generate changes in what people notice, pay attention to, their perception, sense of patterns, how they interpret events, and rationalize what they are doing. She observed that “Intellectual and experiential changes shift in tandem, a ragged co-evolution of intellectual habits and phenomenological involvement” (Luhrmann 1989:315). Interpretation and rationalization, through practice becomes personal knowledge, embodied knowledge acquired through tacit learning.

When entering an unfamiliar field we lack the knowledge of how to get along in it, but over time our perspective shifts to fit new parameters, recognizing new patterns, and we fit ourselves to the norms we find and begin to share in the shaping of them. Luhrmann describes this process as “interpretive drift,” and explains how the process can be initiated through ritual practice.

Sociologist Kari Norgaard, in her ethnographic study of climate change denial in Norway, indicates that people have “separate mental categories” (Norgaard 2011: loc 795)

Haluza-Delay’s description of informal and incidental learning sounds much like Michael Polanyi’s (1974) “practical knowledge.” Haluza-Delay discusses it as tacit learning, a term Polanyi introduced. From Polanyi’s description, much of tacit learning is initially conscious, but subsides into subsidiary awareness. People learn values in this fashion, but core values are picked up through imitation without conscious awareness.

If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled” (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

“increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” (Hoffman 2015:5).

The knowledge deficit hypothesis is closely tied to the idea of Homo economicus, an ontological model of the human as rationally self-interested. Historically in Western philosophy “ontology” refers to the study of being, the nature of human being, subjectivity, or what it means to be a self, epitomized in Descartes cogito. This individualized ontology has been extensively critiqued in philosophy and anthropology, but people keep arguing against it because these critiques have had little impact on the material world of economics and politics in which people are still routinely assumed to be rationally self-interested individuals. Edmund Husserl, and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed a highly influential phenomenological critique of the Cartesian subject and the modern self, which influenced Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), and subsequent models of the self in deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology (see Roszak et al. 1995 for an overview). Phenomenology also inspired work in intersubjectivity such as Martin Buber’s (1970) I-Thou relations, and Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969, 1998) understanding of ethical subjectivity, as well as Bruno Latour’s (2005) development of actor network theory. Latour’s writings have stimulated fruitful dialogues with anthropologies of Indigenous ontologies. Much of this literature is well known within the environmental humanities, but has had little impact more broadly in environment studies and environmental science, and less still in in politics and economics.

Knowledge about problems on this scale brings paralyzing guilt, fear, and a sense of helplessness

Talking about climate change makes us aware of the fact that we are going to die, and social psychological research in the area known as “terror management theory” finds that this mortality salience prompts psychologically defensive strategies that are significantly counterproductive to environmentalism. However, rituals of giving thanks and the felt experience of gratitude they engender through tacit learning may be effective in generating pro-environmental behaviour.

the more we are presented with this information, the less likely we are to act on it

Abstract

Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality

The central question of the Anthropocene, why did behaviorally modern humans gain the unprecedented capacity to change an entire planet, cannot be answered by genetic changes in human behavior. To explain why human societies scaled up to become a global force capable of changing the Earth and why there are so many different forms of human societies and ecologies shaped by them, explanations must be sought beyond the theories of biology, chemistry or physics. Here I introduce a new evolutionary theory, sociocultural niche construction, aimed at explaining the origins of human capacity to transform the Earth 3. As will be seen, this theory also explains why behaviorally modern human societies came to transform ecology in so many different ways over the past 50,000 years as they expanded across the Earth.

Abstract

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

Ads, Andrew and James discuss where the the climate movement is right now, how deep time plays into the effects we are having on the planet, when good people do bad things because of poor systems and what happens next if 1.5C fails.

Although Virgil, MM and others like them certainly possess a rudimentary form of vision, decades of visual deprivation may never be completely redeemable. The human brain has an amazing capacity for plasticity, but there are some things that it cannot do. MM will likely never see the way that we see.

MM's visual capacities continue to improve, but he also remains somewhat uncomfortable with his new sense. As a blind person, MM became extremely proficient at skiing, with the help of a guide to give him oral directions. After his eyesight was restored, skiing frightened him. The trees, snow, slopes, people -- everything whizzed by him, chaotic and uninterpretable. After much practice, he is now a moderate sighted skiier -- but when he really wants to go fast and feel confident, he closes his eyes.

There is a window of opportunity in youth, often called a critical period, during which the brain can best form neural connections that correspond both to retinal images and to practical experience. During the critical period for the visual cortex, normal visual input is required to wire everything correctly. If input is missing during this period, the brain's links will probably not be built correctly. In fact, brain tissue ordinarily used in visual processing might even be taken over by other systems, perhaps tactile or olfactory systems. Some of MM's visual abilities lend further support to the theory that he missed a critical period of visual development. He is quite good at visual tasks that involve motion. Tasks that stumped him at first often became solvable if motion was incorporated into them. He became able to detect the circular patterns in random noise if the patterns were moving. And he began to see the "square with lines" as a cube if the lines moved, and the cube appeared to be rotating. At the end of their evaluations, the researchers saw some patterns emerging in MM's visual abilities and deficiencies. His ability to detect and identify simple form, color, and motion is essentially normal. His ability to detect and identify complex, three-dimensional forms, objects, and faces is severely impaired. The researchers have a tentative explanation for these variations in visual skill. Motion processing develops very early in infancy compared with form processing. By the time MM lost his eyesight in the accident, the motion centers in his brain were probably nearly complete. So when he regained some eyesight in his forties, those connections in the brain were ready to go. The parts of the brain that process complex shapes, however, do not develop until later in childhood, so MM's brain likely missed its chance to establish those particular brain connections. The authors also propose that our brains may retain the ability to modify and refine complex form identifications throughout life, not just throughout childhood. New objects and faces are continually encountered throughout life, and our visual processing centers must be able to adapt and learn to see new shapes and forms. MM's brain never had the chance to learn.

his problems didn't seem to be vision deficiencies so much as visual interpretation deficiencies. And deficiencies of this sort lie not with the retina's ability to perceive light and color, but with the brain's ability to process the retina's signals correctly. We usually do not think of the above problems as involving interpretation, because we have performed these interpretations so many times, and from such a young age. But since MM lost his sight at an early stage of development, since he had no visual input into his brain after age three, the researchers suspect that the visual centers in his brain did not develop normally -- and now, they likely never will.

Scientists and surgeons are slowly learning how to remove constraints on the eye's ability to see; unleashing the brain's ability to see is another story.

By far the most difficult tasks for MM involve three-dimensional interpretation of his environment. When an image is projected onto the retina, it is two dimensional, because the retina is essentially flat. When we are very young, our brains learn to use depth cues, such as shadows and line perspective, to see the three-dimensional world. Eventually, incorporating these cues into a coherent picture of the world becomes involuntary. Our ability to judge size correctly is one example of the brain's reinterpretation of two-dimensonal images. When a person walks away from us, the image of her becomes smaller and smaller on our retina. We know that people do not actually shrink as they move away, however. The brain combines the shrinking retinal image with perspective and depth cues from the surroundings, and we "decide" that the person is moving away. When MM lost his sight when he was three years old, his brain probably had not yet constructed the connections that incorporate separate perceptions into one combined perception. When a person walks away from MM, he has to remind himself that the person is not actually shrinking in size!

solve infoglut/FOMO, nothing could, but for a while, for me,

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the flip side of infoglut. We expect that we should be able to sanely monitor more than we actually can

Information overload, once called infoglut, remains a challenge. We’re all flooded with more channels than we can handle, more conversations happening in more places than we can keep track of.

Abstract Environmentalists have long warned of a coming shock to the system. COVID-19 exposed fragility in the system and has the potential to result in radical social change. With socioeconomic interruptions cascading through tightly intertwined economic, social, environmental, and political systems, many are not working to find the opportunities for change. Prefigurative politics in communities have demonstrated rapid and successful responses to the pandemic. These successes, and others throughout history, demonstrate that prefigurative politics are important for response to crisis. Given the failure of mainstream environmentalism, we use systemic transformation literature to suggest novel strategies to strengthen cooperative prefigurative politics. In this paper, we look at ways in which COVID-19 shock is leveraged in local and global economic contexts. We also explore how the pandemic has exposed paradoxes of global connectivity and interdependence. While responses shed light on potential lessons for ecological sustainability governance, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the importance of local resilience strategies. We use local manufacturing as an example of a possible localized, yet globally connected, resilience strategy and explore some preliminary data that highlight possible tradeoffs of economic contraction.

We adopt the ‘3 Is of justice’: interspecies justice and Earth system stability; intergenerational justice (between past and present, and present and future); and intragenerational justice (between countries, communities and individuals). These principles derive from the seminal work of Weiss on intergenerational and intragenerational equity64, with additional focus on interspecies justice. In interspecies justice, we include justice that promotes Earth system stability to prevent the collapse of conditions of life for all species. We fold intercommunity, interstate and interindividual justice into a broad category of intragenerational justice, which includes concern for intersectional justice.

Within the Earth Commission, we aim to propose ‘safe and just Earth system boundaries’ (ESBs) that go beyond planetary boundaries as they also include a justice perspective and suggest transformations to achieve them3.

Our concept of ESJ assumes fair sharing of responsibilities among different actors, ensuring that those who are most responsible and capable do the most. For example, the Earth Commission has developed principles for sharing responsibilities for cities and companie

Just transformations challenge power politics, which are often based on vested interests, cost-effectiveness and cost-recovery principles. Addressing deforestation through forest policy may not be adequate to counter agricultural policies that promote land use change to ensure more production and higher gross domestic product (GDP). Carbon markets may be captured by entrepreneurs seeking profit and may not be equitable or effective and can allow pollution to continue. In ‘allocating policy responsibilities’, it is important to not only understand and challenge dominant discourses on increasing GDP at all costs, but also ensure that solutions do not reproduce, redistribute or increase injustices.

The above proposals for just ends need to be subject to wide discussion to further refine our proposals and better meet principles of procedural justice and to analyse the transformations that will achieve this. Just means include ensuring that different knowledge systems are represented in assessments and collective action that challenges dominant sociocultural norms and assumptions about misrecognized groups.

Since minimum access levels for the poor cannot be met within the ESBs without substantial reallocation of resources, we propose minimum access levels for all people. These levels provide the floor or foundation of a corridor, while the ESBs constitute the ceiling (Fig. 6). If resources, responsibilities and risks are allocated in a just manner (Fig. 1), we consider this a ‘safe and just corridor’.

The black line in Fig. 5 shows that redistribution is not enough; if everyone’s emissions are equalized at escape from poverty levels, then we would still overshoot the climate boundaries

intragenerational justice

We find that meeting such access needs for the billions in poverty may lead to crossing ESBs unless resources are reallocated from the rich to the poor28, in line with limitarian and sufficientarian justice37,73.

Preserving ecosystem area is sometimes critiqued as ‘fortress conservation’ by environmental justice scholars, limiting access for poor or Indigenous people68. An ecosystem area boundary therefore requires careful consideration and involvement of the local communities, for example by not demanding that intact areas preclude human inhabitation and sustainable use and/or recognizing the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in already protecting these areas.

the SDGs provide a mandate to address issues of access to water, food and other basic needs and for reducing inequality, but the large number of targets and lack of detail on justice and social drivers hamper their implementation

Safe and just ESBs aim to stabilize the Earth system, protect species and ecosystems and avoid tipping points, as well as minimize ‘significant harm’ to people while ensuring access to resources for a dignified life and escape from poverty. If justice is not considered, the biophysical limits may not be adequate to protect current generations from significant harm. However, strict biophysical limits, such as reducing emissions or setting aside land for nature, can, for example, reduce access to food and land for vulnerable people, and should be complemented by fair sharing and management of the remaining ecological space on Earth4.

joint knowledge to identify safe and just ESBs

Raworth and colleagues have pushed for social issues and equity to underpin the planetary boundaries by highlighting the social foundations in ‘doughnut economics’27. We build on these ideas (Fig. 1) to propose the concept of Earth system justice

Planetary justice scholarship goes further than global justice to call for radical or profound changes to justice understandings in the Anthropocene, critiques anthropocentricism and calls for greater engagement with the non-human world1

Rawls’ conception of justice

Some scholars argue that in the Global North, the view tends to be ‘no humanity without nature’, while in the Global South, the focus is on ‘no nature without social justice’

It provides a discursive shift to reframe environmental science and policy to pay attention to distributive justice6.

Cape Town’s notorious unfinished freeway finally gives way to Foreshore development

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans.

Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'--and his followers'--links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

The process began much earlier.

When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science.

When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture.

there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I'm not attacking them personally; I'm attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it. By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.  Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture--alongside the rest of humanity--to see Europe for what it is and what it does.  To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all other "isms" is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine.  This leads me back to address those American Indians who are drifting through the universities, the city slums, and other European institutions. If you are there to resist the oppressor in accordance with your traditional ways, so be it. I don't know how you manage to combine the two, but perhaps you will succeed. But retain your sense of reality. Beware of coming to believe the white world now offers solutions to the problems it confronts us with. Beware, too, of allowing the words of native people to be twisted to the advantages of our enemies. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.  A culture which regularly confuses revolt with resistance, has nothing helpful to teach you and nothing to offer you as a way of life. Europeans have long since lost all touch with reality, if ever they were in touch with who you are as American Indians.  So, I suppose to conclude this, I should state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don't think I'm trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a "leader," in the sense that the white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. That is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am." 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Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture--alongside the rest of humanity--to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.

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.

In the new collection, The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, activists and scholars address the deeper problems that EA poses to social justice efforts. Even when EA is pursued with what appears to be integrity, it damages social movements by asserting that it has top-down answers to complex, local problems, and promises to fund grass-roots organizations only if they can prove that they are effective on EA’s terms.

Despite the liberating intentions of many of its advocates, EA is, irredeemably conservative.  It favors welfare-oriented interventions that increase countable measures of well-being and both neglects and diverts funds from social movements that address injustices and agitate for social change, particularly in marginalized communities both in the US and in the Global South.

But 150 alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Other numbers are nested within the social brain hypothesis too. According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.

to avoid alienation or tensions, city residents should find quasi-villages within their cities.

Cities exchange people, energy and goods with their local and global hinterlands9,10. Companies work with others across their value chains, near and far. Both interact with each other. We found that the top 200 cities with the largest greenhouse-gas emissions host the headquarters of 360 of the top 500 emitting companies. More than 50% of these cities and companies are in water-stressed areas, including Mexico City, Santiago, Beijing, Madrid, New Delhi, Rome, Istanbul in Turkey and Phoenix, Arizona.

Yet few cities and companies currently have such targets.

future work should calculate the Planetary Boundaries globally for each ecosystem first, and then downscale them by country.

By synthesizing knowledge around these questions, we aim to reveal the obstacles that still prevent the application of these important concepts at wide scale in the real world. Such insight also helps to identify ways to overcome the obstacles.

and even at smaller scales

Highlights•Downscaling seven of nine planetary boundaries indicators to the city scale-level.•Extended-Environmental Input-Output analysis is used to estimate cities’ footprints.•The Planetary Boundaries framework is a controlling tool for cities footprints.•City-level carbon footprint is higher than the national-level by 17%.

HOW CAN CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ALLOW THEMSELVES TO TELL THE TRUTH?

IPCC’s mind-bogglingly complicated 7-year review and reporting structure. Though designed to be thorough, this has no chance of keeping up.This modus operandi was established at their inception in 1988 but, as Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard science historian says, the IPCC ‘set the bar of proof too high’ for their vital advisory role.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environment and energy correspondent, recently confessed he is ‘scared’ — because he has listened for years to scientists telling him things were far worse than they could say officially and this is evident in today’s climate extremes.

underestimates by scientists have potentially devastating consequences for humanity’s efforts to react to this threat to our survival.

People know it’s bad but not how bad. This gap in understanding remains wide enough for denialists and minimisers to legitimise inadequate action under the camouflage of empty eco-jargon and false optimism. This gap allows nations, corporations and individuals to remain distracted by short-term crises, which, however serious, pale into insignificance compared with the unprecedented threat of climate change.

We design a Digital Gaia, a digital twin of the Earth to support and accelerate global regeneration through an online platform that would facilitate coordination and learning between the thousands of organisations, projects and project finance. Everybody on board, act, share, reward and get rewarded for regenerative action.

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

warfare

“Consider a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

all the data about how people how much 00:30:19 people ask for the values become creates a ranking of values according to the culture to the people so if you're from korea from taiwan from uk 00:30:32 from from italy uh it's different and so this is a periodic table of values where the values are organized in a hierarchy based on how people collect them 00:30:44 and and and then the values become of course words and this is a calligraphy of values that result from the process of using eeg

in korea during uh idea 2019 and at the end of the process what you 00:29:00 have designed the 3d model uh you you get you get a qr code and you cannot have it on a wallet and it's registered on the blockchain and so you can start trading 00:29:12 so just imagine that you trade happiness you trade love anarchy art autonomy peace purity you trade them as values becoming value 00:29:24 having a value and so people can decide by battering swapping them if you want if you want peace and love for power

the public is invited to use eeg headband and this is a show in a in taipei mocha taipei and they have to give 00:28:08 shape to human abstractions and even to human values so to give shape is not giving shape by designing but giving shape by assessing the shape 00:28:20 so is the appreciation of the shape according to a concept a human concept

in china in 2005 was cosmopolis we invited the the people from shanghai chengdu and beijing to watch cities 00:26:20 from around the world and to create by the collective retinal memory uh another kind of city that is a cosmopolis that reached something like 10 000 00:26:31 visitors a day every day

i'll ask now maurice to tell us a bit about his work

we start 00:15:48 two new big projects sponsored um with a lot of money to study art in the real world here in vienna

psychophysiology

psychology of aesthetics that aren't in the museum

even in everyday life somehow beauty of an object that is accepted as a category in aesthetics determines 00:15:10 how people direct their looks in their everyday life so beauty buy-ins longer looks

we've tested people varying portable eye 00:14:11 movements here along the dono canal the danube channel a big park in the center of vienna and we had people walk um for 300 meters wearing these glasses that recorded what they saw 00:14:23 and where they looked at

if you're exposed to a scene depicting two people different slightly in level of attractiveness or don't even if they differ not at all 00:13:32 and we measure eye movements then the more eye movements people that that we can find on a certain object it's not only true for faces also other objects but in phases particularly 00:13:44 and here you see the more red the more eye movements landed in the face of in this case a white person and this is a clear indicator that this person here found more beauty in the right than in the left face and that's very reliable

beauty determines how we perceive the world because beauty binds looks

a number of various aesthetic emotions that can range from well 00:07:16 interesting i like it to while this is moving um up to even sometimes rarely a visual art but sometimes transformative experiences

to guide you through this 00:06:24 model very quickly was first published in 2004 it's a lot cited in the field of empirical aesthetics it tries to explain how we process artworks by claiming that there are perceptual analyzers followed by 00:06:38 implicit memory integrations or familiarity aspects then explicit classifications where the perceiver in his perception perceives the style or the content 00:06:51 and then followed by later stages that we called cognitive mastering

dr chantal echen felder who is head of education and digital 00:03:37 collection at the stadl museum in frankfurt and she has been collaborated with collaborating with cognitive scientists for the last years

professor maurice benayun and so professor in the school of creative media at the city university in hong kong maurice is a new media artist curator 00:03:24 and theorist and his work has tried to involve the viewer in different ways for example by using brain computer interfaces

cognitive scientists can also provide museums and artists with a specific understanding of how the interaction between artworks and viewers can operate 00:02:34 so to discuss potential applications of cognitive sciences to museums and art

Water-Food-Energy Nexus in Global Cities: Addressing Complex Urban Interdependencies

graphene aerogel particles for efficient water purification

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

Holism’s father, Jan Christian Smuts, named that process of inner discovery, 'developing inwardness’.

Einstein declared after he studied ‘ Holism and Evolution ’ that two mental constructs would direct human thinking in the next millennium* his own theory of relativity and Smuts> of ‘ holism ’ .

)he most important result of the idea of the whole is the appearance of the concept of creativeness.

)he whole is not resolvable into parts & putting together parts will not producewholes or account for their character and behaviour

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.

keynote address in !" at the #entenary $eeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. %n this occasion he suggested that the fundamentalstructure of the universe was not matter but action

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

hyper objects are viscous molten non-local phased an inter object if

tectonic 00:00:26 plates global warming nuclear radiation evolution these are hyper objects entities that are massively distributed in time and space at least relative to human scales

morton suggests our worlds are perforated there they're not 00:03:54 complete in them in and of themselves so this sensory screen actually has holes in it and the worlds of others are also perforated and they these worlds are 00:04:07 constantly leaking into and out of one another so it's not that the sensory screen isn't there it's not that the ego isn't projecting but the screen has 00:04:17 holes in it and we're all inextricably bound up our fragile worlds are constantly overlapping with one another bumping into one another

Morten will talk about the 00:02:49 severing that occurred he says during the Agricultural Revolution and that this this trauma of the severing continues to repeat itself even in our 00:03:03 own day and age

let this dot here represent the transcendental 00:00:26 ego or subject and this circle will represent the limits of this transcendental egos phenomenological experience so in Morton's terms well 00:00:39 refer to this is the sensory screen

we're running 21st century software on hardware last upgraded fifty thousand years ago or mor

if mankind does not put an end to war war will put an end to mankind

progress creates problems that are or seem to be soluble only by further progress

myth is an arrangement of the past whether real or imagined in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations

the victorian ideal of progress

the future of everything we've accomplished since our intelligence 00:06:55 evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years

The most telling real-world results came from the final stock count. For example, no Felix product is more beloved than its best-selling meatballs, yet with customers encouraged to make decisions on climate value, they remained on the shelves, whereas Felix’s new, plant-based meatball alternatives had sold out. Shoppers had learned that the classic dish they had eaten since childhood might not, after all, be the best option for their own children’s future.