

Humans: Why They Triumphed - roqetman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html

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bediger
This is another one (of many) viewpoints that would seem to argue _against_
institutionalizing the concept of "intellecutal property".

"The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas
are having sex", "In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise
that relies on exchange" and other similar phrases and sentences permeate the
article.

Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with
patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?

~~~
rick888
"Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with
patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?"

I have a different take on it. Patents, copyrights, and intellectual property
increases the rate of new technology because people are forced to be creative
(companies have to put R&D into something new and different that isn't already
protected).

If Google could just copy the iPhone, do you think we would have ever seen
anything like the new Android phones?

Open source is another example of this phenomenon. How many Linux distros do
we have out there that are just copies of the same thing? Even look at apps
like VNC. I've seen so many companies just use VNC as a base for their remote
viewing app rather than engineer something new. This results in the same bugs,
slowness, and overall bad technology rather than a fresh, new approach.

Everyone complains about Mysql, yet nobody really has an incentive to create
something to replace it (because it's easier to just use it).

~~~
artsrc
One thesis is that using other peoples ideas increases the rate of new
technology. Another is that being forced to invent your own would.

The example of the Tasmanians, who were forced to invent their own stuff not
only did not progress technologically, they went backward.

So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and
add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we
have regression.

As for Linux distos, I would argue that they have out innovated windows in
many ways, such as 'apt-get', and knoppix.

There are many efforts to replace MySQL, such as CouchDB, Cassandra and
MongoDB. Besides MySQL actually works pretty well, its just that SQL
apologists try to pretend that other SQL database are significantly different.

~~~
rick888
"So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone
and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly
we have regression."

Why would we want them to re-invent it badly? I want something completely
different. If they just copied the iPhone and added a few things, it might be
slightly innovative, but not nearly as much as it could be.

It also wouldn't be regression because all of our existing technology wouldn't
suddenly degrade.

------
pragmatic
The author: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley>

It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human
development (wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism).

~~~
paulnelligan
One of my favourite books is by Matt Ridley .. it's called 'Nature via
Nurture' , and attempts to address the 'genes vs. environment' debate ..

Although recently I came across a brilliant cellular biologist called Bruce
Lipton who offers some great insights into human evolution and environment
(with a little quantum physics sprinkled in), check him out if you're
interested.

~~~
chasingsparks
Ridley's _Origins of Virtue_ got me into evolutionary computation, albeit
indirectly, in 9th grade. I'm starting a masters (although probably PH.D.)
program this fall in computational social sciences.

Thanks, Matt.

------
jonmc12
This is a meaningful article, but the title / thesis that humans triumphed
because of tool making ability does not represent the consensus of
archeological findings at the time when Neanderthals disappeared.

Evidence also points towards the cro-mangon ability (vs neanderthal) to
predict their environment. Specifically the ability to use the cycles of the
moon to predict patterns of large game and organize group hunts allowed the
cro-magnon to out-resource their Neanderthal peers. Prediction allowed for
expanded social ability - not just tooling - which has a different notion of
cognitive capability. One interesting article on the topic:
[http://www.bionomics-
institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar...](http://www.bionomics-
institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar_020.html)

~~~
adammichaelc
"This is a meaningful article, but the title / thesis that humans triumphed
because of tool making ability does not represent the consensus of
archeological findings at the time when Neanderthals disappeared."

That's not the thesis. The thesis is that humans flourished because they
started trading, which led to innovations and also allowed people to tap into
the "collective intelligence" of other groups.

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kds
While I agree about the great value of exchanging ideas for the humankind
progress, there is something wrong about presenting things in such an "easy"
way - sex between ideas, rational collective intelligence, etc.

For Galileo, Columbus, J.Bruno, Einstein, and others, it wasn't about nice
intellectual discources with their contemporaries about great ideas - it was a
struggle for their ideas to survive, though they themselves might perish in
it. Although they were right, as we all know for sure now.

"If it's really a good idea, you'd have to hammer it down people's throat" --
Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL (The quote might not be exact, but the idea
is ;)

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akkartik
I was reminded of the Qeng Ho, both historic
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He>) and fictional
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky>). Vernor Vinge describes
a universe where civilizations rise and fall throughout the galaxy, and a race
of space-faring traders ensure that technological advances aren't lost when
civilizations die.

------
JoeAltmaier
Population density increases more than "collective brainpower". It increases
free time, as laborers specialize and increase efficiency. The author doesn't
seem to credit this at all.

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wooby
If you're into this article, you might like "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared
Diamond. I'm reading it on the recommendation of my favorite anthropology
professor, and it's great.

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whereareyou
"If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a
world that's more open and connected is a better world."

-Mark Zuckerberg in today's WP article. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303828.html)

~~~
robryan
On a long time span and in general. There is still a lot of danger into
sharing everything in smaller localized incidents and one company controlling
this sharing is bad to.

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kiba
I think this book is somewhat related to this article:

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
(Hardcover)

[http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-
Accele...](http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-
Accelerated/dp/0465002218)

------
tokenadult
This view of intelligence fits well with the view of John Raven, publisher of
the Raven Progressive Matrices test, that "intelligence is an emergent
property of groups."

<http://www.johnraven.co.uk/>

------
richieb
Frankly, dinosaurs were much more successful as a species. They were around
for about 200 million years. Humans have been around barely 20 million years
and time during which civilization existed is even smaller (5000 years?).

Hardly a triumph.

~~~
robryan
Yet there doesn't seem to have been a dinosaur nimble enough to perform
intricate tasks like humans can. I guess evolutionary wise anything that could
have headed down the path of human like ability would have been destroyed by
the larger species before it had a chance to get to the level of out thinking
and building them.

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rubashov
This article repeatedly paints Neanderthals as a dead end. It has very
recently (like last three months) been proved by genetic sequencing of
Neanderthal remains that humans and Neanderthals interbred.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html?pagewanted=2&ref=science)

Most interestingly, it is convincingly argued that Neanderthal genetic
contributions explain a sudden and profound explosion in technological
sophistication of European and Asian cultures. It is very possible that modern
humanity is defined by its Neanderthal genes.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=VrpUh0rRYvsC&pg=PA25...](http://books.google.com/books?id=VrpUh0rRYvsC&pg=PA25&dq=%22neanderthal+within&ei=IAjeS7vNMpOozQTopNjtCA&cd=1#v=onepage&q=%22neanderthal%20within&f=false)

~~~
spamizbad
> Most interestingly, it is convincingly argued that Neanderthal genetic
> contributions explain a sudden and profound explosion in technological
> sophistication of European and Asian cultures

Convincingly argued? Not really. The Neanderthal's genetic imprint on "modern"
Europeans and Asians is very limited, and is stated as such in the NYT article
you cite. From what we've mapped so far, the DNA man retained from the
Neanderthal is superfluous. There is also no anthropological evidence it gave
Europeans or Asians any advantage.

Also, wouldn't the distinct lack of Neanderthal-like qualities in modern
Europeans and Asians be a strong indication that Neanderthal genetic traits
were not very advantageous? If they were the "secret sauce" of the West and
the East, one would assume their traits would manifest themselves in locations
other than the "junk" portion of our genome.

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zeynel1
Thought provoking article but I am not sure -maybe it is true I don't know-
that human individual is the "planet dominator with rapidly progressing
technologies." An alien civilization hoping to buy Earth as a planet would not
negotiate with human individuals as the owners of the earth but with global
organisms. These organisms own the earth; as a human individual we do not even
have the freedom to travel on the planet. If humans owned the earth no doubt
we could freely travel without registering with global organisms.

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jjs
Why "They" Triumphed?

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flowtron
re : "Self-sufficiency--subsistence--is poverty" && "Given that progress is
inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize,
then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic
progress in the coming century"

globalization? If you want to further the notion that ideas should have sex
with each other, then you want to break down power hierarchies (state,
country, global unions) that prevent freedom.

globalization is centralized control whereas internet is decentralized. I
wouldn't couple these two things.

The Eloi were not very self-sufficient and had everything they wanted. I'll
gladly incur some poverty to escape an Eloi existence.

