Showing posts with label Evolutionary Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evolutionary Economics. Show all posts
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The Enlightened Spark of the World
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The Enlightened Spark of the World
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION in HUMAN NATURAL HISTORY In a layer dated to one million years ago, hominid excavations found important new evidence of microscopic wood ash, animal bones and stone tools at the very aptly named Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The team led by the University of Toronto Michael Chazan and Liora Kolska Horwitz of Hebrew University identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 2, 2012 |  The Wonderwerk Cave. (Credit: R. Yates) |
 under a moonlit sky... I wonder if the Internet has not become the human campfire. Sitting globally together, discussing our thoughts and feelings and sharing our dreams. This find pushes back the evidence for fire use by 300,000 years. Humans... the tool maker? Tools have been used even longer than fire. We know that tools are not unique to our genus, other animals such as chimpanzees fabricate and use tools. Stone tools were more of a sustaining innovation over wood and other organic materials, life as usual, just a bit easier. But one tool that caused a cascade of transformative changes was when fire became a our tool. The control and use of fire is perhaps our defining technology. Fire is an innovation that has been an important part of hominid life for a very long time. At the dawn of its use, it was a disruptive game changer in the "economy of nature". I have worked at some interesting, rather famous hominid sites (meaning...sweated, climbed up and down ravines, sweated, picked at dolomite harder than cement with a jackhammer all the way down to a tiny dental hook, obviously sweated, sifted and analysed dirt, sweated some more, excavated some more, yes sweated again and climbed up and down ravines.. all under the beautiful very hot sun, although some of our ancestors lived through very different climate there), in Southern France. Bau de l'Aubesier (with Dr. Serge Lebel), Les Eyzies de Tayac and Caune de l'arago, (Tautavel). I had the great good fortune of working with Dr. Henry de Lumley excavating a Homo erectus site at Caune de l'arago in the Tautavel valley. I have seen the ancient traces of that game changing innovation, the control of fire. The species I have worked on ranged from Homo erectus, neanderthalensis to the more modern Cro-magnon. I have visited many more sites, including La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferassie, Le Moustier, Lascaux and others. I will be blogging more about those in future posts. Today is all about the innovation not just of the use of tools (other animals have shown this ability), but of humankind's disruptive innovation of fire. There are no words to describe the feelings that pass through you when after... you've carefully brushed away the last layer of dust, then photographed, logged, numbered and cataloged, checked gps, measured co-ordinates and level of strata, applied preservatives (if needed), "gently" loosened from substrate... And then. then finally you are holding a fossil bone or stone tool in the palm of your hand. Last seen and held thousands and thousands of years ago. you are the first since. A sense of the profoundness of human history and a direct, tangible contact with your ancestors is, frankly, overwhelming. An experience that nears a Zen awakening.  | and I use Disruptive Digital Darwinism helping people and institutions to light their way and hopefully disrupt the world with innovation for the good.  With my background in science and business I can't help but see things with the perspective and insight that working together those fields can bring. Being a Zen mind, I can't help it if some of that gets in. Briefly what that means is that phenomena of the market are analysed through the lens of evolutionary biology. Wikipedia definition: "Evolutionary economics is part of mainstream economics as well as heterodox school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Much like mainstream economics, it stresses complex interdependencies, competition, growth, structural change, and resource constraints but differs in the approaches which are used to analyze these phenomena. Evolutionary economics deals with the study of processes that transform economy for firms, institutions, industries, employment, production, trade and growth within, through the actions of diverse agents from experience and interactions, using evolutionary methodology. Evolutionary economics analyses the unleashing of a process of technological and institutional innovation by generating and testing a diversity of ideas which discover and accumulate more survival value for the costs incurred than competing alternatives. The evidence suggests that it could be adaptive efficiency that defines economic efficiency. Mainstream economic reasoning begins with the postulates of scarcity and rational agents (that is, agents modeled as maximizing their individual welfare), with the "rational choice" for any agent being a straightforward exercise in mathematical optimization. There has been renewed interest in treating economic systems as evolutionary systems in the developing field of Complexity economics. Evolutionary economics does not take the characteristics of either the objects of choice or of the decision-maker as fixed. Rather its focus is on the non-equilibrium processes that transform the economy from within and their implications. The processes in turn emerge from actions of diverse agents with bounded rationality who may learn from experience and interactions and whose differences contribute to the change. The subject draws more recently on evolutionary game theory and on the evolutionary methodology of Charles Darwin and the non-equilibrium economics principle of circular and cumulative causation. It is naturalistic in purging earlier notions of economic change as teleological or necessarily improving the human condition."  I will post more in the future about my excavations and thoughts on our evolutionary adventures, presenting them with a modern relevance to my current work. I am working on original videos...hopefully soon. |
Cretaceous Meteor Showers, the Human Ecological "Niche," and the Sixth Extinction Excerpt from a presentation by Niles Eldredge, "Two other points, before I get to my last characterization, which I hope will convince you that you can link humans up convincingly with the bolide impacts at the end of the Cretaceous: 1.65 million years is the onset of the first glaciation, and that's just about the date of at least the oldest-known specimens of Homo erectus, or the only ones now Ian Tattersall calls Homo ergaster. Larger-brained species, it's got a more sophisticated tool kit, and so forth. The significance here is -- well, and also they had fire. This is the last time, I think, you can point with confidence to a global climate, or any other kind of environmental event, and say: This had a direct effect on human evolution, whether it was an extinction event or an evolution event. Then,.9 million years ago, the onset of the second glacial: Humans, we now see, had gotten out of Africa, into Eurasia, prior to that, but not in any great numbers, apparently. At .9 million years ago, the onset of the second glacial, human beings actually left Africa and went north, and tools are all over the place. Presumably, they were hunting the megafauna that were there in abundance in Eurasia. I think, if these patterns hold up, and if I'm characterizing them correctly, that's dramatic and compelling evidence that we had expanded our niche. And I can't think of any other as dramatic example in the fossil record -- or any other source of data -- about niche expansion like that. And I think you have to think that it's culturally mediated." I will be commenting more on climate change in future posts. |   |
Enjoy.
© 2012 wonder404
 | in infinite growth on a finite planet is either mad or an economist." |
Yes the economy is about money but business is all about people and innovationWouldn't it be cool to live in a world where innovation like this is the rule and not the exception? Adam Smith's book The Theory of Moral Sentiment. It's what I found sorely lacking in today's practice of economics. I want my company to change that. Here are a couple of 1st paragraphs from the 1st two chapters; PART I Of the PROPRIETY of Action Consisting of Three Sections SECTION I Of the SENSE of PROPRIETY CHAP. I i SYMPATHY How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. CHAP. II Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary. Those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love, think themselves at no loss to account, according to their own principles, both for this pleasure and this pain. Man, say they, conscious of his own weakness, and of the need which he has for the assistance of others, rejoices whenever he observes that they adopt his own passions, because he is then assured of that assistance; and grieves whenever he observes the contrary, because he is then assured of their opposition, But both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous occasions, that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived from any such self-interested consideration. A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him, and he regards this correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest applause. This is the same Adam Smith. Amazing isn't? Doesn't quite fit the image we have of how business is done today. How did the greatest economic minds ever miss reading or understanding about the constraints to selfishness and the empathic nature of mankind? I have not seen much evidence that has been incorporated into past economics. A Shameless Plug This is why I'm starting wonder404 Consulting Disruptive Digital Darwinism www.petershimon.com info@petershimon.com I will put together what I've learned of human science and consult based on evolutionary economics (I can't stop any Zen that might get in there) I want to disrupt the way we live and do business, to work at and promote the hell out of getting us to a good place. And I want it done with good science. Enjoy. | Jeremy Rifkin - Empathetic Civilization I have posted this clip before, but it bears repeating (my thanks to GW) The Empathetic Evolutionary Economy Now supposedly, Adam Smith wrote the theoretical book on capitalism and economic philosophy as practiced today. But he also wrote another book seldom mentioned, called the Theory of Moral Sentiment. In it he asserts that it is in one's own self-interest and nature to empathize and care for his fellow man. That's the point, "the common good" that selfish free markets are supposed to have as a goal. Has no one read that one, I wonder? How did the economists miss it? Free markets must play within moral guidelines, even selfishness has enlightened self-limits. Maybe in the short term they may gain, but in the long run it's a losing game. Now here's where Darwin comes in. It's not only survival of the fittest. It's more like the race is won by the swiftest, first out of the gate, or sometimes its just luck of the draw, but it's almost always with something new. It can be a sprint at some points but mostly it's a long distance run. In nature it is also not always a race that one wins by knee-capping his competitor. Competition can be the engine of innovation under certain conditions. Most often in nature species don't evolve and become the dominant type by willfully or strategically wiping out all competition. it may happen, but not always the rule. Bio-diversity is a stabilizing force for all species in an eco-system. Species can and do co-exist in spite of apparent competition and maintain an equilibrium. However this lack of ruthlessness can apply even in predation. It too has limits. Successful predators don't eat all their prey. A predator who whether by strategy or "selfish" instinct, eats all his prey only ends up left to eat himself to extinction. BTW, anyone ever seen the movie Soylent Green? I think it is no small coincidence that in the new digital world, many of the old business models and companies that don't adapt to the new social and information realities are called dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are the ultimate poster-child for extinction and like the dinosaurs we can see many have already gone and many are faltering. There is mass extinction awaiting those businesses that don't adapt quickly enough, including the long time dominant giants. Kodak is only one of many. There are things about what's going on in the world in which I can see parallels with what we see in the natural history of the planet. According to the theory of punctuated-equilibrium by Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, events change the ecological landscape and mass extinction of the current players ensues for those not adapted to the new conditions. In their place spring up small upstarts, that were in what previously was a stable ecology, but relatively un-open to the small and or new. An unstable ecology of rapid change occurs, (maybe weather or asteroid) and opens up previously unavailable terrain, greater opportunities for new adaptive radiation come with that. There is competitive release and the survivors quickly gain ground, grow and in time become dominant, depending on how well they do in the new conditions. Bio-diversity will recover, but not the same critters as before. There is an explosion of new species with innovative adaptations to fill the niches. Succession forest are somewhat similar, they need sustained changes to gradually build up an environment that supports big trees. You don't immediately get forests on razed land without a succession of grasses, shrubs, small trees, a variety of r strategist and K . After going through different stages with different types of trees and other plants will there be the ecology that supports big trees. But really, aren't we familiar with this pattern in economics as well? Business markets, the way people make a living, have gone through boom and bust cycles throughout the history of human economic activity, disruptive ones usually due to technological or other innovations. In science, people in an environment fostering disruptive ideas often lead to those innovations. |
