This is another one (of many) viewpoints that would seem to argue <i>against</i> institutionalizing the concept of "intellecutal property".<p>"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.<p>Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?
The author: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley</a><p>It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development (wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism).
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.<p>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: <a href="http://www.bionomics-institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar_020.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bionomics-institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>"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 ;)
I was reminded of the Qeng Ho, both historic (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He</a>) and fictional (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky</a>). 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.
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.
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.
"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."<p>-Mark Zuckerberg in today's WP article.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303828.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05...</a>
I think this book is somewhat related to this article:<p>The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Hardcover)<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465002218" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accele...</a>
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."<p><a href="http://www.johnraven.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.johnraven.co.uk/</a>
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?).<p>Hardly a triumph.
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.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html?pagewanted=2&ref=science" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html...</a><p>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.<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=VrpUh0rRYvsC&pg=PA25&dq=%22neanderthal+within&ei=IAjeS7vNMpOozQTopNjtCA&cd=1#v=onepage&q=%22neanderthal%20within&f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=VrpUh0rRYvsC&pg=PA25...</a>
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.
re :
"Self-sufficiency--subsistence--is poverty"
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"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"<p>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.<p>globalization is centralized control whereas internet is decentralized. I wouldn't couple these two things.<p>The Eloi were not very self-sufficient and had everything they wanted. I'll gladly incur some poverty to escape an Eloi existence.