Abstract

Open source decarbonization for a sustainable world

Highlights

Towards open source patents: Semi-automated open hardware certification from MediaWiki websites

Executive Summary

Equitable Research Capacity Towards theSustainable Development Goals: The Case forOpen Science Hardware

How AI could become an extension of your mind

Abstract

windfall taxes on excess profits could help to fund low-carbon investment, as well as progressive taxation in countries, including developing countries, which often under-tax rich citizens and companies.

tackling global poverty will not overshoot global carbon budgets, as is often claimed. Failure to address the power and privilege of the polluter elite will. These are related because reducing carbon consumption at the top can free up carbon space to lift people out of poverty.

While cross-country emission inequalities remain sizeable, overall inequality in global emissions is now mostly explained by within-country inequalities by some indicators.

The World Inequality Lab is co-directed by the influential economist Thomas Piketty

people on low incomes within developed countries are contributing less to the climate crisis, while rich people in developing countries have much bigger carbon footprints than was previously acknowledged.

The difference between the carbon emissions of the rich and the poor within a country is now greater than the differences in emissions between countries

We conclude that meeting the1.5°C goal is not plausible, although it is not impos-sible. The future scope and pace of social transfor-mations toward climate action would be crucial forattaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals

In the first edition of the Hamburg Climate Fu-tures Outlook published in 2021

CLICCS Plausibility AssessmentFramework

Social Plausibility Assessment Framework

Lacking thefeasibility of a robust probabilistic assessment, wehave developed an alternative framework to assessthe plausibility of climate futures (Chapter 2).

we have onlyvery limited capabilities of predicting emissions fu-tures due to the inherent complexities and contin-gencies of social dynamic

based on present knowledge of social drivers andphysical processe

Hamburg Climate FuturesOutlook

Among the many possible climatic futures, not allare plausible.

Anita Engels, Jochem Marotzke, EduardoGonçalves Gresse, Andrés López-Rivera,Anna Pagnone, Jan Wilkens

Philosophy of education is particularly well placed to make sense of this and to push back against the dualistic assumptions – between mind and body, the rational and the emotional – that pedagogical thinking has often inherited from philosophy.

It’s possible only with the help of others.

the human being is a rational animal, whose powers of reason are brought to actuality only through education

For us, the question ‘How should we live?’ is not decided by our biology but can always meaningfully be posed whatever constraints – physical, biological, historical, cultural – we may happen to labour under.

the manner in which knowledge is acquired, communicated and shared is internal to the nature of knowledge itself, and that the metaphysics of personhood needs to countenance the formation of reason if we are to understand how rationality and animality are united in the human person.

education is not a merely contingent addition to the human life-form. Education is reason’s vehicle.

human beings do not have a nature in quite the way that nonhuman animals do

hence these practices are not governed by natural norms, deviation from which constitutes ‘defectiveness’.

Human practices of food production, preparation and consumption show enormous variation across time and place, and any attempt to characterise them will take us swiftly into the history of horticulture, agriculture and animal husbandry, and into the cultural norms that govern what is consumed and how.

Since we are animals, natural-historical description of the human being should be possible. But can we, for instance, give a natural-historical description of what ‘the human being’ eats?

why exactly education should matter to philosophy. The reason is that education makes us what we are. Human beings do not enter the world with their rational powers ‘up and running’. Those powers are actualised in the child in a process of formation, or education in the broadest sense

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.”

Human infants need to acquire complex social skills, including language, empathy, morality and theory of mind, the researchers said. Successful development of these skills depends on information from adults: “Rather than requiring hard-wired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents,”

“The evolutionary goal of altricial species is not to become highly competent as quickly as possible but rather to excel at learning over time.”

extended altriciality creates opportunities for sophisticated social learning within the parent-offspring system.

This prolonged period of immaturity and helplessness – or altriciality – in human babies and other species, long thought to be a drain on resources, is actually an evolutionary advantage

human babies, as well as the young of many other species of mammals and birds, require months or years of care before they reach full mobility and sensory function, let alone maturity.

Over 50% of people reported feeling powerless or helpless in the previously mentioned study.

The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

real-life situations can be much more complicated, the authors’ model allows for the exact 25 percent tipping point number to change based on circumstances. Memory length is a key variable, and relates to how entrenched a belief or behavior is.

“And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25 percent tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.

When a minority group pushing change was below 25 percent of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25 percent, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and quickly a majority of the population adopted the new norm.

06:06Weak Ties

25:13Complex Contagions

institutional capacity

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.

Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution opens on the story of a “scientifically curious protozoan” (protozoans are single-celled organisms) from half a billion years ago, living in a world of unicellular creatures some of which assemble at most into multicellular mats or threads with very limited structure.

is human evolution and our humans 00:41:49 a messed which we think they are

major competitive transitions

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

I have now visited John Ssebunya in Bombo, Uganda five different times, filmed five different documentaries

feral children

cobalt mine in Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains,

Coosa County, Alabama, express similar concerns over plans to mine graphite,

northern Nevada, where his group has joined a lawsuit against a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass

Mine proponents say Thacker Pass lithium could support more than a million EVs annually and would add jobs and tax revenue.

Twin Metals Mine near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness as another example. Here the target is nickel, another important EV metal mined in only one U.S. location. In a political tug-of-war, the mine’s long-held leases were denied renewal by Obama, reinstated under Trump, and then canceled under Biden.

Lange says that’s certainly the case in Alaska, where copper and cobalt rest beneath rolling tundra in the Ambler district south of the Brooks Range. Accessing it would require a 200-mile road through traditional Alaska Native lands, caribou habitat and Gates of the Arctic National Park, with gravel quarries dug every 10 miles. It’s something state leaders support but state and national environmental groups and several Indigenous communities oppose.

likely raise environmental concerns.

70% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 40,000 children as young as 6 work in dangerous mines.

Tribes, landowners and communities find themselves wrestling with the not-so-green side of green energy.

The IEA says meeting the Paris Climate Accord goals for decarbonization will require even more — far more — minerals: as much as four to six times present amounts.

while EVs are cleaner than gas cars in the long run, they still carry environmental and human-rights baggage, especially associated with mining.

double global mineral demand over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency

manufacturing EVs requires about six times more minerals than traditional cars.

Sustainability is measured under two broad areas; bio-physical and socio-economic.

Socio-economic indicators

Bio-physical indicators

Conclusions

Fig. 4

Fig. 3

Seaweed farming might hold the key to massive improvements in carbon sequestration, biodiversity loss and food security

if seaweed was to take up just one tenth of everyone’s diet, 100 million hectares of on-land production could be avoided

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 percent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,”

This is particularly the case in low-income countries where small cities and their catchment areas are home to almost two thirds of their overall population.

InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs)

existing InVEST software suite

Urban InVEST

Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division.

NUMBER THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

‘unlimited associative learning’ – the ability to link events and outcomes, and change behaviours accordingly

According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested on an individual level, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender or race – not their common concern for what it meant to be wise.

They just don’t think that education matters as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and moreover, they take a rather dim view of those of us who do.

Bio-physical indicators

Socio-economic indicators

a couple of years later, I decided to sign up for cosmonaut training in Russia as a backup to Charles Simonyi, the creator of Microsoft Word and also, as it happens, a trustee of the Institute since 1997 (and now Chairman). I told my parents about it over dinner in a restaurant in New York.

In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us.

The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Remembering Freeman Dyson

The author would not have to choose among alternative organizations; the reader could do that, choosing among the author’s different organizations and perhaps adding his own

Trying to communicate ideas requires selection from this vast, ever-expanding net.

That religious experience, the moment of my hand in the water, is with me always.  Always I see the profusion of relationships, of connections, of ideas, of possibilities, as a great net across the world, across every subject, across everything.   All my philosophical thoughts since then derive from that insight in the rowboat,

And how, you might ask, do I remember those floating swirling thoughts over sixty years ago?  Because these are matters I have thought about ever since, in thousands of different ways

we often went to a wonderful Chinese restaurant.

A proper parallel hypertext in a possible opening view.  The reader is able to read the full build (right), corresponding to this assembled book, or separate narratives and threads.  Visible beams of transclusion show identical content among separate pages (stories, threads, and full build).

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

1.5 degrees Celsius is the safe boundary this aligns with the intergovernmental panel on climate change with one difference we emphasize that this is a physical limit push it beyond that point 00:05:23 and we risk permanent damage on societies and the world economy

I think 00:58:06 that it means it's our choice it's our choice to make um to whether we will succeed to thrive and 00:58:18 um or we will be actually uh be the instruments of the next Extinction so um one thing I would like to say is that I know nobody likes to be told what to 00:58:33 do certainly nobody in this room and so but deep personal commitment comes from Individual choice and this is 00:58:45 another thing that you're talking about and deep personal choice comes from our finding the on switch button which each one of us only what we 00:58:57 know where it is so while I play something for you I would like all of you to consider to to think of where that switch is and 00:59:09 once you locate it make that choice thank you [Music]

I come from cop27 they were telling me that all the countries are heavily indebted so how are we going to become more indebted to conduct this transition 00:53:38 and we said why can't not change this and change that it has been contracted by countries Into Climate action so that resources budgetary resources 00:53:53 are free so that we can conduct adaptation and mitigation why don't we devalue Global debts this would entail a change of the power system why are the fiscal Havens 00:54:07 nowadays these weakened the funding of energy transitioned for instance all these issues would need a decarbonized capitalism but 00:54:21 this is not on the table nowadays and unless this is on the table we won't be able as humankind to move to a decarbonized economy and the consequences would mean that the current 00:54:34 capitalism is unable that could die with humankind decarbonized capitalism could become an illusion unfortunately maybe we start to move 00:54:49 towards extension unless as humankind we can act politically in a way that we can specifically reduce CO2 Greenhouse 00:55:02 emissions

Agreements are subjected to climate agreements and not the other way around that could be 00:53:10 an option

if we let the price system on the market to find a solution and to transition 00:51:35 from one energy to another clean energies are not yet proving that our work is more productive and therefore there's more profit and therefore individual capitalists won't go for a 00:51:49 transition unless this is proven and this may not happen within the time we have therefore we need to plan that state level at public level to change the profit of driving force and to have 00:52:03 the necessary planning so that we can go and carry out this transition a global level and this would mean that the cop meetings of we have nowadays should have a abiding power

the only way to stop the crime of Crisis is put an end to oil and coal consumption and zero emissions that's what science 00:50:35 is telling us and this means that Capital linked to oil coals and gas should lose its value

we have individual capitalists who try 00:48:45 to make the most profit and this is linked to their capital and productivity so to achieve more in less time and 00:48:57 productivity is linked to energy [Music] the only source of energy to increase profit is carbon oil and gas and this has resulted in a change in our 00:49:15 atmosphere we have to put an entities if we wish to live in our planet can our capitalism do this based on the current data we won't be able to do so 00:49:28 therefore perhaps we should do the following reflection if capitalism is unable to do so either Humanity will die with it or 00:49:42 Humanity will overcome capitalism so that we can live in our planet

that will be my second point and it's something that is not often mentioned capitalism the capitalism that we have known in the 00:47:54 last 30 40 years overcome the climate crisis that the capitalism helped create it's a rhetorical question but it also makes sense because if the answer is no 00:48:06 then we're wasting our time

I think that sometimes we have false 00:47:14 optimism and this turns into inertia and inaction and lack of political will because we do not wish to fulfill the obligations that we have to meet

I'd like you to share with us some of the ideas and changes you would like to propose both for Colombia as well as 00:46:17 for the global political community

you've had problems in your area where you tried to get legislation and the oil and gas industry came in and fought you right in my state same thing every piece 00:44:08 of pro-climate legislation at the national level the regional level the local level Municipal level the oil and gas industry and the coal industry they come in and fight it tooth and nail and 00:44:21 they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress the rest of us have to reform these International institutions so that the people of this world and including 00:44:34 the young people of this world can say we are now in charge of our own destiny we're going to stop using the sky as an open sewer we're going to save the future and give people hope we can do it 00:44:47 and remember that political will is itself a renewable resource

what do I say to these young activists that I train around the world when they come to me and they say are you okay with putting the the CEO of 00:42:38 one of the largest oil companies in the world in as the president of the cop is that really okay well it's not whether he's a nice guy or not or whether he's intelligent 00:42:51 the appearance of a conflict of interest undermines confidence at a time when climate activists around the world and I'm partly speaking for them right here on this stage have come to the conclusion that the people in Authority 00:43:04 are not doing their job there's a lot of blah blah blah as Greta says there are a lot of words and there are some meaningful commitments but we are still failing badly we need to have a super 00:43:17 majority process instead of unanimity in the cop we cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petrol States tell us what is permissible in the last cop we were not allowed to even discuss 00:43:30 scaling down oil and gas can't discuss it a lot of the ndcs weren't even called for are we going to be able to discuss face scaling down oil and gas in the next cop

you've got a climate denier in charge of 00:42:13 the World Bank so why are you surprised that the World Bank is completely failing to do its job

00:40:20 Line that the astronauts bring back in their pictures from space that's the that's the part of the atmosphere that has oxygen the troposphere uh and it's 00:40:32 only five to seven kilometers thick that's what we're using as an open sewer if you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds you get to the top of that blue line in five minutes and all the greenhouse gas 00:40:46 pollution would be below you we're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600 00:40:58 000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth that's what's boiling the oceans creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the 00:41:10 droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this Century look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian 00:41:22 trends that have come from just a few million refugees what about a billion we would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world

as the Secretary General said in His Brilliant speech earlier today we are not winning the crisis is still getting 00:39:56 worse faster than we are deploying these Solutions and we need to make changes quickly

all the new electricity generation installed worldwide 90 percent of it was renewable it's now the cheapest source of electricity in almost the entire 00:39:05 planet secondly electric vehicles for the transportation sector the penetration has reached the 10 percent level in multiple geographies that's the point where you often see an inflection 00:39:19 going much higher Norway is already at 50 percent all the auto makers are going in that direction business is leading

this crisis is much more than physical and environmental schisms we have a deeply 00:34:25 wounded Spirit as a people that is in desperate need of healing and restoration and we must look to our Almighty Creator to find our proper place in humanity our proper place as that one strand

we need to learn those lessons we are taught to look to science the scientific report heed that have the political courage to make those decisions do not look at 00:33:48 decisions as a cost of business look at decisions as human existence and our relative's existence for generations to come

since 1948 when the U.N Declaration on the rights of uh on human 00:32:06 on human beings was adopted the U.N declaration uh 12 million indigenous peoples have been murdered since 1948 40 million dispossessed of their 00:32:20 traditional lands in our lifetime

the first things that I think is important to understand from our perspective we've been taught Through the Ages that every life form on the face of the planet has its proper place as divinely ordained by our Almighty 00:31:03 Creator when one looks to the human body and the complexities every so has an importance and Chief Seattle taught us that all things are connected what we do 00:31:15 to the Earth we do to ourselves we are but one strand in a very complex Web of Life and our ancestors also foretold of a Day of Reckoning and we are in that 00:31:27 Day of Reckoning right now

you're a Native American and also president of the National Congress of American Indians

embedding indigenous knowledge in the conservation and restoration of Landscapes and one of the highlights of this report talks about how indigenous people are one of the best stewards of 00:29:43 nature they represent five percent of humanity but they actually protect eighty percent of Earth's biodiversity one third of all Earth's territories are owned or governed by indigenous communities 00:29:56 and locals and 91 of this land are actually in good or Fair ecological condition

so my earnest request to every business leader is start 00:28:35 believe you can take action collaborate I will share all the Technologies we have we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year develop developing them 00:28:49 you can have our technology for free but make a start because the alternative is both uneconomic eliminating emissions is great business 00:29:03 but it's also catastrophic if you do nothing today thank you

we have committed to spend 6.2 billion dollars we've made that public to give ourselves real Zero by 2030.

we cannot solve the climate crisis unless 00:22:59 we address the freshwater crisis and we have to look Beyond carbon and I do believe that there are many solutions out there and we play the role of facilitators to allow those Innovations 00:23:12 scale at speed

businesses are doing what they can but not what 00:24:19 they must to address the crisis

Net Zero

one of the central theme of this year's annual meeting is about interconnection interdependencies and one of the Great India philosophers Shanti Deva speaks about how to analyze 00:20:51 complex things recognize the network of causes and conditions that give rise to them and what he says is this everything is dependent on something else even that thing upon which each is 00:21:04 dependent is not independent

lone bio from Sydney Australia building a Next Generation fertilizer but it's not a fertilizer at 00:18:39 all actually it's mushrooms and when you plant these mushrooms with soybeans not only do you get crop yields to increase not only do you double the amount of CO2 that's being sequestered well you don't use the nitrogen that you're getting in 00:18:53 fertilizer

finally the boundary on air pollution on aerosols a boundary which we today have scientific evidence that it actually has 00:07:02 impacts on regulating the state of the atmosphere and the hological cycle pushing the monsoon systems in the southern hemisphere particularly into less rainfall

fertilizer use one of these boundaries that are today overloading and causing dead zones pollutants also 00:06:38 greenhouse gas massive implications on water quality and coastal zones we quantify here at the global level the maximum allowed loading of reactive nitrogen and reactive phosphorus used 00:06:50 predominantly in fertilizer systems

third boundary is on fresh water here we have two boundaries one is that 00:06:14 we have to keep at least 20 percent of natural flows and rivers intact for ecosystem services in aquatic systems the second is very basic on groundwater that extraction of groundwater levels 00:06:25 must be less than the recharge levels across the world on fertilizer use one of the

if we do nothing if we do the minimum at 00:12:23 this pivotal moment in our history then we and our children even if we are rich will live in the danger zone but if we if we business people if we 00:12:35 governments citizens cities if we take action today then we and our children will have a future worth looking forward to thank you thank you very much

there are amazing people worldwide that are working to protect the local to Global Commons the next step is to involve businesses 00:11:44 countries cities and people worldwide to accept Earth system boundaries and the just Transformations we need to live within these boundaries

we are today concluding that we're outside even of the just boundary on climate

within the next decade we are at risk of pushing ourselves outside of the safe 00:10:15 boundary of 1.5 degrees Celsius

on the biosphere we're also outside of the safe and just boundaries which is already recognized 00:10:27 in the Kunming in Montreal cbd15 of the necessity of halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity by 2030 which entirely aligns with the Earth commission's assessment that we now need to keep 50 to 60 percent of the Earth's 00:10:41 surface intact this means from now onwards zero loss of intact nature across the world economy

civilizations have risen and Fallen based on their ability to manage their 00:08:45 scarce Water Resources we are no different

the biosphere is a fundamental basis for all human well-being and we have two 00:05:36 boundaries defined for the biosphere the first one is the conclusion that at least 50 to 60 percent of intact nature must be remained on Earth to be able to 00:05:48 support the world economy and the resilience of the entire Earth system the second boundary is for all the managed land agriculture forestry urban areas that at least 25 percent of every 00:06:00 square kilometer has to have natural levels of fluorine fauna to be able to remain healthy and support the economy

we can 00:04:58 say with certainty that if we do not include Justice then we will all be living in the danger zone

can we quantify safe and just Earth 00:04:20 system boundaries or an earth system corridor in 2019 the Global Commons Alliance created the Earth commission to answer this question

we need in this Century a safe and just Corridor for all people to exit the danger zone but also to ensure that all people have access to basic needs rights 00:04:07 uh rights to a water food energy and infrastructure

if we continue with our greenhouse gas emissions then by 2070 as many as 3 00:03:25 billion people will live in uninhabitable zones and mostly in poorer countries and this basically means that these people who probably have the least contribution to the climate problem have 00:03:39 been the ones that are most exposed

we are now facing something deeper mass extinction air pollution undermining ecosystem functions really putting Humanity's future at risk 00:03:02 this is a planetary crisis w

green and ice sheet accelerated melting warming four times faster than the planet as a whole releasing cold fresh water slowing down the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic pushing the whole Monsoon 00:02:24 system down further south causing droughts and forest fires over the Amazon rainforest one more tipping element system locking warm surface or water in the Southern Ocean accelerating the melting of the West Antarctic ice 00:02:36 sheet the North Pole is connected to the South Pole in regulating the stability of the entire Earth system

16 tipping elements the large biophysical systems that we have scientific evidence that the regulates 00:01:23 the state of the entire climate system on Earth nine of these 16 are showing signs of instability push them too far and they will shift over from supporting Humanity 00:01:34 to starting to undermine Humanity four of these are showing scientific evidence of now being at risk already at 1.5 degrees Celsius

we're taking colossal risks with the future of civilization on Earth We're degrading life support system that we all depend on we're actually pushing 00:00:57 the entire Earth system to a point of destabilization pushing Earth outside of the state that has support civilization since we left the last ice age 10 000 years ago this requires a transformation to safe 00:01:11 and just Earth system boundaries for the whole world economy

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.

Our species faces two great tasks in the next few centuries. Our first task is to make human brotherhood effective and permanent. Our second task is to preserve and enhance the rich diversity of Nature in the world around us. Our new understanding of biological and cultural evolution may help us to see more clearly what we have to do.

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.

In the long-range history of life, the transition from biological to cultural evolution was an event of transcendent importance. We became aware of its importance only recently, as a result of the discoveries of Svante Pääbo and his colleagues. The transition caused a reversal of the direction of evolution from diversification to unification, from the proliferation of diverging species to the union of species into a brotherhood of man. We see a small-scale example of this transition in the recent history of racism. Until recently, racism was a force of nature favoring the diversification of species. Humans traditionally hated and despised people of a different skin color. The natural evolutionary consequence would have been the division of our species into three new species, one pink, one black and one yellow. Only in the last few centuries, a strong reaction against racism has emerged, inter-racial marriage has become respectable, and the cultural unification of our species has pushed us toward biological unification. This is a small step in the long history of the transition of human societies from incessant warfare to brotherhood.

developed the technology for sequencing ancient DNA degraded and contaminated with modern DNA. They have succeeded in sequencing accurately the genomes of our Neanderthal cousins who lived in Europe about fifty thousand years ago. They also sequenced genomes of our own species who lived in Europe around the same time, and genomes of a third species, called Denisovans because they were found in Denisova cave in Siberia. He published the story of the sequencing and the surprising results in his book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, in 2014.

In the final chapter of his book, Dawkins turns his attention away from biological evolution to cultural evolution and introduces another innovation to our thinking about human behavior. The new idea is the meme, the cultural analog to the gene. A meme is a unit of cultural behavior, just as a gene is a unit of biological behavior. Examples of memes are ideas, customs, slogans, fashions in dress or in hair-style, skills, tools, laws, religious beliefs and political institutions. Memes spread through human populations by social contact far more rapidly than genes spread by sexual contact. Just as our behavior at the individual level is controlled by selfish genes, our behavior at the social level is controlled by selfish memes.

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.

Nature is forcing genetic drift to move faster in mating systems than in other bodily functions. If this is generally true, as Goodenough observes, it means that genetic drift in mating systems must have a special importance as a driving force of evolution. She proposes a general theory to explain the facts. In the big picture of life evolving over billions of years, established species with large populations evolve slowly and have a mainly conservative effect on the balance of Nature. The big jumps in evolution occur when established species become extinct and new species with small populations diversify. The big jumps, made by new species, are driven by genetic drift of small populations. For small populations to form new species, they must become genetically isolated. Rapid change of mating systems is a quick road to genetic isolation. Goodenough concludes that the rapid mutation of mating-system genes is Nature's way of achieving big jumps in large-scale evolution. Rapidly evolving mating systems gave us the diversity of species that astonished Darwin.

Nature knows that, in the long run, established species are expendable and new species are essential. That is why Nature is ruthless to the individual parent and generous to the emerging species. Risk-taking is the key to long-term survival and is also the mother of diversity.

The picture of Nature revealed by Kimura and Goodenough is new and striking. Nature loves to gamble. Nature thrives by taking risks. She scrambles mating-system genes so as to increase the risk that individual parents will fail to find mates.

Kimura's theory explains the diversity paradox that puzzled Darwin. Why are we surrounded by such an astonishing diversity of birds and insects and microbes? From the point of view of Darwin, a small number of dominant species would have been sufficient. Kimura explains the mystery by invoking the power of genetic drift, which becomes suddenly rapid and effective just when it is needed, when small populations can vary fast enough to become genetically isolated and form new species.

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.

Darwin knew nothing of genes. He was unaware of the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who worked in his monastery garden and did experiments on the inheritance of pod-color in peas. Mendel discovered that heritable traits such as pod-color are inherited in discrete packages which he called genes. Any act of sexual reproduction of two parents with different genes results in offspring with a random distribution of the parental genes. Heredity in any population is a random process, resulting in a redistribution of genes between parents and offspring. The numbers of genes of various types are maintained on the average from generation to generation, but the numbers in each individual offspring are random. Mendel made this discovery and published it in the journal of the Brünn Natural History Society, only seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Mendel had read Darwin's book, but Darwin never read Mendel's paper. In 1866, the year when Mendel's paper was published, Darwin did a very similar experiment, using snap-dragons instead of peas, and testing the inheritance of flower-shape instead of pod-color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of plants, and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation. Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of the mathematics of statistical variations. He used only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the ratio of normal to star-shaped offspring. This result did not suggest any clear picture of the way flower-shapes are inherited. He stopped the experiment and explored the question no further. Darwin did not understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a statistically significant result. Mendel understood statistics. His sample was sixty-four times larger than Darwin's, so that his statistical uncertainty was eight times smaller. He used 8023 plants. Mendel's essential insight was to see that sexual reproduction is a system for introducing randomness into inheritance. In peas as in humans, inheritance is carried by genes that are handed down from parents to offspring. His simple theory of inheritance carried by genes predicted a ratio of three between green and yellow pods in the third generation. He found a ratio of 3.01 with the big sample. This gave him confidence that the theory was correct. His experiment required immense patience, continuing for eight years with meticulous attention to detail. Every plant was carefully isolated to prevent any intruding bee from causing an unintended fertilization. A monastery garden was an ideal place for such experiments. Unfortunately, his experiments ended when his monastic order promoted him to the rank of abbot. Obedient to his vows, he ceased to be an explorer and became an administrator. His life-work lay hidden in an obscure German-language journal in Brünn, the city that later became Brno and is now in the Czech Republic.

. Naively, we should expect Darwinian evolution to result in a world with a much smaller number of species, each selected by superior fitness to be a winner in the game of survival. All through his life, Darwin was puzzled by the abundance of weird and wonderful species that look like losers but still survive. I call this abundance the diversity paradox.   If only the fittest survive, we should expect to find a few hundred superbly fit species adapted to live in various habitats. Darwin looked at the real world and found an extravagant display of species, with a great diversity of superficial differences. He saw elaborate structures that are expensive to maintain. The theory of evolution by natural selection should tend to keep creatures plain and simple, but nature appears to prefer structures that are elegant and complicated.

In the Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", the six characters come on stage, one after another, each of them pushing the story in a different unexpected direction. I use Pirandello's title as a metaphor for the pioneers in our understanding of the concept of evolution over the last two centuries. Here are my six characters with their six themes. 1. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Diversity Paradox. 2. Motoo Kimura (1924-1994): Smaller Populations Evolve Faster. 3. Ursula Goodenough (1943- ): Nature Plays a High-Risk Game. 4. Herbert Wells (1866-1946): Varieties of Human Experience. 5. Richard Dawkins (1941- ): Genes and Memes. 6. Svante Pääbo (1955- ): Cousins in the Cave. The story that they are telling is of a grand transition that occurred about fifty thousand years ago, when the driving force of evolution changed from biology to culture, and the direction changed from diversification to unification of species. The understanding of this story can perhaps help us to deal more wisely with our responsibilities as stewards of our planet.

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

michael hudson

it's  always a matter in the end of redefining   a power relation between different social groups  so it cannot be completely peaceful it involves a   conflicting social interest it involves different  groups of people with different agenda and you   know in many ways we have we are in a situation  which is not i think completely different from   00:12:20 the one at the time of the french revolution which  is at the you know those who those who should pay   have somehow managed to design a legal system  and a political system so that they can escape   taxation and and at the same time middle class and  lower class people are you know fed up of paying   the bill for them and so and so the solution is  more and more debt but you know at some point   there will have to be something else will have to  happen and i think it will be roughly the same it   00:12:51 will have to be roughly the same solution as it  was you know 200 years ago which is the end of   fiscal privileges of a small group in the  population that has that has managed to   escape taxation for for for too long

How is Reality Constructed in the Brain

Understanding human perception by human-made illusions

it received a warm and encouraging response from noted psychologist, Alfred Adler, who declared that henceforth it would be required reading for his students.

Holism was also warmly adopted by the school of gestalt psychology as it offered a valuable informing framework for their approach. Gestalt psychologist, Fritz Perls, who moved from Germany to South Africa (and then left for the United States when Smuts was voted out of power) quoted Smuts verbatim in his own work, 'Ego, Hunger and Aggression'.

“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.”

Indeed he identified Smuts as one of ten people in the world who, he believed, truly understood relativity.

Presidential Address at the Centenary Conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931.

This was followed in 1910 by an unpublished manuscript, ‘An Inquiry into the Whole’. In that work he also suggested: "If we had the mental vision, our object would be to penetrate to that concept of the Whole which is no mere aggregation or sum total or compound of parts, but which is itself one and indivisible, a real vital organic unity of which the multiplicities of the universe are not the constituent parts but aspects, phenomena or manifestations."

Whereas science claims to access universal truths about the natural world, 'Holism and Evolution' was neither intended to be a scientific work nor a philosophical treatise. Rather it was an attempt to explore, as Smuts puts it, the debatable borderland between science and philosophy in order to identify certain points of contact. These points of contact, he believed, would be significant for the higher ‘spiritual’ interest of humankind.

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

Zerzan, though, goes further; looking at how it was the abstract, intellectual basis of modernity – the human duality of body and mind – which was, and continues to be the basis for our severance from the natural world.

Massive, unfulfilling consumption, within the dictates of production and social control, reigns as the chief everyday consolation for this absence of meaning

Progress is an ‘uncontested good’: Theoretically, that means scientific and technological progress is assumed to be a positive irrespective of any evidence to the contrary; practically, though, it means the moment technological or scientific progress is questioned it will often illicit silence, or ridicule, or in the worst case, abuse.

industrialism took away people's ability to manage and measure in their own time it imposed an order of time externally regulated by clockmakers and timekeepers and with that came the 00:02:28 control of labour which enabled complex industrial systems to evolve to reach its high point of globalized just-in-time manufacturing in the modern world time both dulls the senses and orders people's lives