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"Recently, a friend innocently asked me how many file formats there are. My semi-serious response was, "Think of a soup bowl filled with beach sand.""

"Lots of conversations like this can lead to increased novelty in a language. Ed Yourdon If you ever wondered as a child who invented the English language, the answer might have surprised you: no one did. We got this incredibly sophisticated system of communication from no particular person. Languages just sort of sprung up and evolved, just like biological organisms."

"Lots of conversations like this can lead to increased novelty in a language. Ed Yourdon If you ever wondered as a child who invented the English language, the answer might have surprised you: no one did. We got this incredibly sophisticated system of communication from no particular person. Languages just sort of sprung up and evolved, just like biological organisms."

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media. From "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan", Playboy Magazine, March 1969. © Playboy

needed: * The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early. * The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y. * The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group. * The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest. * General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.

"Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity? MARTIN NOWAK is a Mathematical Biologist, Game Theorist; Professor of Biology and Mathematics, Director, Center for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Author, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed."