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The Evolution Of Cooperation Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge - 3 views

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    "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."
Spaceweaver Weaver

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com - 2 views

  • 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?
  • Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.
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  • Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.
  • It is precisely the same in cultural evolution. Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.
  • Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.
  • Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.
  • And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.
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    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?
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

QORA - P2P Digital Currency - 0 views

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    "Welcome to the evolution of currency, to a new era of payments. We present you "QORA" a second generation crypto currency, a coin where all come together."
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    "Welcome to the evolution of currency, to a new era of payments. We present you "QORA" a second generation crypto currency, a coin where all come together."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

PowerMatcherSuite for producing and balancing energy | Opensource.com - 1 views

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    "The software development process has evolved from vendors owning, controlling, and selling proprietary software into a collaborative, open source model. The process of producing energy is going through a similar evolution."
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    "The software development process has evolved from vendors owning, controlling, and selling proprietary software into a collaborative, open source model. The process of producing energy is going through a similar evolution."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

10 Shocking Facts About Society That We Absurdly Accept As Normal | Collective-Evolution - 0 views

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    "When you take a moment and look around at the world, things can appear pretty messed up. Take 5 or 10 minutes and watch the 6 o'clock news. Chances are, the entire time, all you are going to see is war, conflict, death, illness, etc. Sure, ..."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How to Live Forever - The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "Part IV in a series on technological evolution. Part I was "If a Time Traveller Saw a Smartphone." Part II was "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?" Part III was "The Problem With Easy Technology.""
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    "Part IV in a series on technological evolution. Part I was "If a Time Traveller Saw a Smartphone." Part II was "As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?" Part III was "The Problem With Easy Technology.""
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Should Humans Eat Meat? [Excerpt] - Scientific American - 0 views

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    " There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth. Cooperative hunting promoted"
Ferananda Ibarra

Network organisation for the 21st century : turbulence - 4 views

  • On the Virtues of Being Popular In any network, some nodes are more connected than others, making them ‘hubs’. This is a recurring pattern in the evolution of successful networks, ranging from the world wide web to many natural ecosystems. A ‘hub’ is not just a node with a few more connections than a usual node; a hub has connections to many other nodes – many quite distant – and also connects many disparate nodes (nodes of very different types). If you were to count all the connections each node has, you would get a mathematical distribution called a ‘power-law’ distribution with relatively few hyper-connected nodes – hubs – and a ‘long tail’ of less connected nodes.
  • Unlike networks that have a normal or random distribution of connections, networks that have a power-law distribution of connections are ‘scale-free,’ which means that no matter how many more nodes are added to the network, the dynamics and structure remain the same. This seems to be a sweet spot in the evolution of networks for stability and efficiency. The network can get bigger without drastic changes to its function.
  • The Surprising Strength of the Long Tail There is a looming contradiction: how can we have hubs and still have a strong network of dense connections that is not dependent on them? Don’t hubs lead to the emergence of permanent, entrenched leaders, centralisation and other well-documented problems? There is something of a tension here: the point is not simply that we should develop hubs, but that we have to simultaneously ensure that the hubs are never allowed to become static, and that they’re at least partially redundant. Sounds complicated, but healthy and resilient networks aren’t characterised simply by the presence of hubs, but also by the ability of hubs to change over time, and the replacement of previous hubs by apparently quite similar hubs.
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  • The long tail does not drop off into nothingness (which would be the ‘exponential’ rather than ‘power-law’ distribution), where there are a few hubs and every other node has almost no connections. Instead, the long tail is extensive, consisting of small groups of dense connections, going ever onwards. In fact, the vast majority of the connections in the network are not in the hub, but in the long tail. One clear example is that of book-selling in the 21st century: the majority of Amazon.com’s book sales are not in the best-seller list, but in those millions of titles in the long tail that only a few people order. Every successful movement must be built on dense local connections. It is these dense local connections that support the dynamic creation of hubs.
  • In a perfect world, every node would be a hub – we would all easily connect with any other person and be able to communicate. However, creating connections takes time and energy, so nodes that are more long-standing or just have more spare time will naturally become hubs
  • The Construction of Collective Intelligence Hubs tend to evolve naturally in well-functioning networks – but we can accelerate the process of network development
  • Unfortunately people can’t become hubs without largely re-inventing the wheel. It might be irritating for existing hubs, but it’s true. Being a hub requires more than just introductions, it requires information, skills, knowledge, and a memory of the past. However, we can accelerate this process by decentring as much of the connections and knowledge as possible away from individual humans and onto the environment, whether this environment be books, websites, songs, maps, videos, and a myriad of yet un-thought-of representational forms. A useful example is the pheromone trace of the ant, reinforced as more ants use a particular trail. The mere act of ‘leaving a trail’ shows how individuals with limited memory can use the shaping of the environment as an external memory.
  • You can imagine this on an individual level: a person using their mobile phone to remember the phone numbers of their friends. With easy access and reliability, the phone almost seems part of your intelligence. Just extend this so that the part of your mind that is extended into the environment is accessible and even modifiable by other people, and collective intelligence begins.
  • This use of the environment to store collective intelligence allows for the easier creation of hubs.
  • Collective intelligence allows highly organised successful actions to be performed by individuals who, with limited memory and knowledge, would otherwise be unable to become hubs.
  • Collective intelligence requires a commons of collective representations and memory accessible to the network, and so digital representations on the internet are idea
    • Ferananda Ibarra
       
      That is exactly what they can do! Currencies as currents, as symbols of value enabling and making flows visible. Allowing us to see the tracks of the pheromones, the activities, the streams, the right signals, the hubs. We will be able to measure, trace value much more precisely. We will then be able to compose flows into landscapes (scapes) of that which is interesting for a node, for a hub, for a group or machine. Scapes will allow us to display information in unimaginable ways. Our collective intelligence right there, in the blink of an eye. We will be able to see wholes instead of parts, make patterns more visible.
  • A key focus for improving our collective intelligence would be a few central websites compiling analyses of social movements and events, alongside practical pieces from key hubs and organisers on how particular events were pulled off. A collective ratings approach would allow people to quickly find needles in the electronic haystack, via Digg-It-style ‘I like this article’ tags, or collaborative bookmarking, allowing different users to see each other’s bookmarked webpages. Of course some of these types of things exist, with tagging systems well developed on sites of magazines, newspapers and blogs. However, no current website performs the function of an analysis and learning hub
  • If we are to act swiftly and sustain momentum we will need to create collective intelligence – the ability to create accurate records of events, distribute them widely, analyse success and failure, and to pass on skills and knowledge.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Your Real-World Git Cheat Sheet | Linux.com - 0 views

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    "The Git version control system is pretty nice, a useful evolution from Subversion, CVS, and other older version control systems. It's especially strong for distributed development, as you can work disconnected and not have to depend on the availability of a central server."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Humans evolved by sharing technology and culture: Our early ancestors, Homo sapiens, ma... - 0 views

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    "Our early ancestors, Homo sapiens, managed to evolve and journey across the earth by exchanging and improving their technology"
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

PageOneX Visualize the evolution of stories on newspaper front pages - 1 views

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    "PageOneX makes it easy to track, code, and visualize major news stories based on the proportion of newspaper front pages that they take up. "
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