As the left and right fight it out, I have once again proposed that the truth lies in the middle, and demands that we use our brains a lot more to have any real hope to avoid extinction. Forst, what I said to them:
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... wrote:
of the tribe are present in their female children. Thus genes *for*
This is an important area. There are many areas where I have figured out ways to "get out of the box" of rigid, thoughtless assumptions... but not enough time to wfrite them all up. Therefore I have often sought collaborators I could trust, and have even found a few. (See scholar.google.com.)
This is one of those.
A new way to do evolutionary psychology specifically for human history was one of the two topics I defended in the oral exams for the PhD at Harvard. The faculty was much more interested in the new positions I presented on this, the first topic, but I chose instead the second topic. (The thesis has thousands of citations at scholar.google.com, which gives you some idea why I regretfully neglected the first topic, and why I also stepped down as first Presidnet of Harvard Committee for a Space Economy. I am so grateful that Mark Hopkins took up THAT baton.)
The faculty were excited in part because THEY, acknowledged leaders in their diverse fields, learned so much in heated arguments between EACH OTHER, where they learned that the assumptions in one field about another are sometimes wrong. For example, I suggested that the typical lifetime of human civilizations (a few centuries, citing folks like Toynbee and Spengler and Eisenstadt and many others) is similar to the seven to twelve generations which are enough to cause huge changes in the genes for social behavior, reflected in part in books like E.O. Wilson's classic text Sociobiology. (In my view, that is STILL a fundamental, seminal source, cited less lately because of simple stupid political correctness pressures. I am tempted to say more about those, but let me wait until it seems more appropriate.) Ed Bossert, a sometime collaborator with Wilson, explained to my advisor (Karl Deutsch) that six to twelve is a very precise number, backed up by a huge mass of experiments, quite different from conventional wisdom in fields like political science. As Wilson says, there are multiple time scales at work here. Wilson did not understand the brain or culture learning dynamics as well as some of us now do (as in my ACTUAL thesis topic!), but that does not wipe out the huge value of the insights he DID include.
Keith mentions depressing conclusions. Yes, it is a major challenge how to rise above those scary things -- but, as with climate change, the best way to reduce the probability of bad outcomes is to understand WHY they happen so often. AFTER one takes a lot of time and effort to understand it right, without stupid ego defenses getting in the way and stimulating stupid reactive guessing left or right.
Depressing?
Beyond E.O. Wilson, another seminal source (still deeply respected) is the book Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, which came as a huge shock when it came out.
MOST ecological networks lead to massive crises and extinctions. We don't see that so much now in nature because so many extinctions have ALREADY occurred, and things did not change SO much after that.
Well, folks, things have changed and are still changing now, massively. In my view, we either use our full brains (yes, including space development, but also including some of the other stuff Barbara Marx Hubbard sensed), or we have little chance of surviving the many emerging threats becoming ever more real every day. (As I type this, I see news in the background of Iran joyously sending autonomous new weapons to folks like Houthis to threaten the world oil price. Just a hint of what may be to come. Is it impolite to describe what the IRG is?)
But a New Frontier is not enough, for the moderate long term. One reason why I did not choose this topic was that I knew I was missing something. Now I have a better idea of what.
At ONE important level, it comes down to nonzerosum n-player games, like what Von Neumann and T.C. Schelling described. It comes down to something LIKE a certain kind of social contract or immune system. It IS possible in principle, but it is not easy. Do enough people really care and understand?
But this email is probably too long for this list already, as it does address a different subject.
Best of luck. We all need it.
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Addendum: At Facebook, I have posted several posts with links on what I learned about this subject in many cruises
and treks through the Pacific and Latin America. MANY societies had terrible Malthusian collapses, but viable new social contracts
based on visible, transparent new social contracts offering honorable competition on a new "worldview" foundations often worked very well.
Better management of new emerging IT (from cryptocurrencies to information to weapons, with new security mechanisms)
and global climate threats, COULD WORK if we face up to the need for cooperation of the most important powers.
"Smart brains and apps,smarter integrative platforms, and clear simpler 'immune system' rules for everyone."
New technical standards for IT to make it real, and to safeguard the fuzzy broader concerns we hear of from governments all around the world.
If regulation of IT is managed like the tax code, we all die.
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