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[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis-this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

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; Coauthor (with Roger Highfield), SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Martin Nowak's Edge Bio Page In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations. For publication schedule and details, go to Edge Master Class 2011: The Science of Human Nature.

Transcript of fabulous presentation on the evolution of cooperation with great Q&A at the end.

recommended by Amy Scatliff ; she said: Also, on this thread Gilly Salmon's model came up - http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml. I'd like to link that to Gregor, what you've posted on socializing through cooperative board games. I'd love to keep the conversation going on how to scale social interaction between learners by using real world simulations and games (in my case I'm usually thinking of learners 18+) as a way to train in the skills necessary to navigate micro-interactions--is that the word that's been used?--within social dilemmas. I like to see how games can relate as closely as possible to the real-life situations being navigated.

Our interest in trying to find a way to analyze the ecological effects of the traditional management system was stimulated by the crisis in rice production triggered by the advent of the "Green Revolution" in Bali. During the 1950s Indonesia (figure 7.1) was forced to import nearly a million tons of rice each year. The government of Indonesia was thus very receptive to the promise of higher yields from the "Green Revolution" in rice, and in 1967 launched a major program called BIMAS (Bimbingan massal, or "massive guidance") to boost rice production by providing farmers with high-yielding rice seeds and access to fertilizers and pesticides. The new rice varieties grew faster than the native crops, and farmers were encouraged to triple-crop the new rice whenever possible. BIMAS reached pests. in 1971 and by about about 70 percent of the rice terraces in South Bali were planted with Green Revolution rice. At about the same time, the Asian Development Bank began a major irrigation development project in Bali. Rice production increased, but as early as 1974 field-level agricultural officials in Bali were reporting "chaos in water scheduling" and "explosions of rice pests. In 1984 I wrote an unsolicited report to the Asian Development Rank, in which I tried to show how these problems were linked to their disruption of the traditional system of water management.

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

Oblique Strategies for Ambient Journalism Alex Burns (alex@alexburns.net) Published in M/C Journal, 13(2), May 2010.  Alfred Hermida recently posited 'ambient journalism' as a new framework for para- and professional  journalists, who use social networks like Twitter for story sources, and as a news delivery platform.  Beginning with this framework, this article explores the following questions: How does Hermida  define 'ambient journalism' and what is its significance? Are there alternative definitions? What  lessons do current platforms provide for the design of future, real-time platforms that 'ambient  journalists' might use? What lessons does the work of Brian Eno provide-the musician and  producer who coined the term 'ambient music' over three decades ago? My aim here is to formulate an alternative definition of ambient journalism that emphasises craft,  skills acquisition, and the mental models of professional journalists, which are the foundations more  generally for journalism practices. Rather than Hermida's participatory media context I emphasise  'institutional adaptiveness': how journalists and newsrooms in media institutions rely on craft and  skills, and how emerging platforms can augment these foundations, rather than replace them.

A tiny book published in 1951 by the longshoreman Eric Hoffer.  From wikipedia: The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.

Why Plans Fail or It's Your Own Darned Fault I breezed through Jim Benson's short and informative Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business.  As you can see from the subtitle, it isn't about blaming someone else for why plans fail.  It's about helping us see how our own thinking gets us in this mess. I have seen many discussions of cognitive biases in popular writing (Gladwell, the Heaths, etc), but those books tend to be much more discursive.  I like that Benson has decided to keep the discussion closely limited to cognitive biases connected to planning and managing knowledge work.  And that he is drawing from his own experience and that of his client engagements.

Recommended by Ted Newcomb - full of insight as to how we focus our attention, how that affects our personalities and life paths, and the results.

Robert Cialdini is an emeritus psychologist at Arizona State University who studies how our behavior is affected by social rules that we're only vaguely aware of but which have incredible power over what we do. What happened to Kunz, he explains, is the direct result of one of the rules that most interest him: the rule of reciprocation. The rule, he says, is drilled into us as children.

recommended by Howard Rheingold,  He says: "Mark Elliott claims that Wikipedia is an example of how people use online media stigmergically." Mark Elliott says (from the site): "As stigmergy is a method of communication in which individuals communicate with one another by modifying their local environment, it is a logical extension to apply the term to many types (if not all) of Web-based communication, especially media such as the wiki."

Talking about ants, Andrés Acevedo mentioned this book saying: Dan  Suarez's novel Kill Decision, is about what might happen if  drones were run by software based on model of ant behavior.  There is a clear explanation of stigmergy and how ants use pheromones to coordinate action.  I don't think it's giving the plot away to say that bad thing happen.

Reed's law or Group-Forming value-add affordance of networks grows much faster  than either Sarnoff or Metcalfe calculations of value.  Nice graphs showing how the three curves compare (scalar of n, square of n, and 2 to the nth power.)

Also recommended by David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  David says: In 1954 Sorokin's The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation was published. The common assumption is that love is weak in the face of power. Sorokin and his staff researched the history of war and peace. What they found was that coercion and force were given far too much credit in the headlines of our histories and the power of love not nearly what it deserved. He devotes an entire chapter to examples of how love prevailed against far superior forces. He said that he could have filled several books with the examples that they found. He covers much of the same ground as Tolstoy, Gandhi and King.

The HUB has it's own special recipe for collaboration. Here's a quick guide on how to create a meaningful community from a beautiful space.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics -- exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. 

Again, from David Watkins, in rebuttal to the Parable of the Tribes