Monkey missions

Depending on your point of view, you might think of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV as EITHER a bad thing for kids OR as cutting-edge information technology. Regardless a comparison of "missions" in GTA4 to the primate activities illustrated by David Attenborough in the "Social Climbers" episode of BBC's Life of Mammals might convince you that the economic success of GTA relies on the creative placement of neolithic stereotypes (and projectile weapons) into a jungle rich in modern human structures and styles.

Before being hasty and turning up your nose up at such marketing strategies, you might want to consider the universal primate-appeal of other aspects of your behavior. From competitive social hierarchy, through family loyalties and play with friends, to the enthusiasm for a good meal, our communities are built on niche structures familiar from primate communities, as well as on commitment to loftier cultural and scientific goals.

One step toward moving beyond such strategies may be to recognize the legitimate basis for their appeal. That is, moving past our neolithic limitations may be helped by recognition that we have them to begin with.

Collaborative coding

Wiki collaboratives are one of various new and important processes that are evolving as I write this, on the back of emerging technology for electronic communcation. To see what I mean, create a user ID on Wikipedia and add pages of interest to your watch list so you can monitor developments and discussion about them from day to day.

The evolution of these processes is exciting (and problematic) because they could help to organically regulate the expression of idea codes, much as metazoan cells regulate the expression of molecule codes, by informing them to processes operating on multiple scales. There is still a long way to go on this, however, and each spare neuron that we can offer counts!