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!

Taking the bait

One of those neolithic buttons, that globe-trotting ideas push, triggers xenophobia. Taking the bait means that, once pressed, the drumbeat that "subhumans threaten" competes for attention with sustainability issues like community health.

For instance "lose-lose" situations now unfolding in Africa suggest that taking the bait is a long-term recipe for state failure, through oscillatory cycles of indiscriminate response and reactions thereto. Jared Diamond points to older examples in his book "Collapse". Have you noticed other examples say in the past 100 years?

Unfortunately focus on community health is not a useful sound byte, since it involves multiple scales of time, space, and organization. Nonetheless avoiding the bogeyman button could help us do what we can to strengthen all communities involved.

Dollars and longevity are not the whole story. The most robust measure of progress (or its lack) may be niche-layer multiplicity i.e. the extent to which individuals in a community are able to: (i) stay fit, (ii) cultivate friendships, (iii) care for a family, (iv) function as a citizen, (v) participate in a culture, and (vi) contribute as observer to our understanding of the world around.

What fraction of your time have you managed to spend on each of these things in the last week? If your ability to do some of these things is starting to suffer, then perhaps you too will benefit from a collective effort to make these things possible for all. How can I help?

Monoscale thought

James Fallows' November 2002 article in The Atlantic Monthly on Iraq as "The fifty-first state?" described the long-term commitment that later materialized. Institutions making sub-prime loans at this time were also selling long-term commitment while thinking on only one scale.

The arguments given at the time did little to inform resulting decisions to the consequences they would have in other places, at other times, and on other levels of organization. Considering more than one opinion in these cases may have helped.

Such examples might also say this about second opinions: If those who disagree with you look like cartoons, then you may be mistaking the world that you live in for a cartoon world. The real choices that we have are seldom so simple.

Reproducing codes

Only since the middle of last century has it become apparent that life is intimately connected to the ability of codes to replicate. These codes are variously written in molecules (e.g. DNA and proteins), in memorized actions (e.g. tradition), in sounds (e.g. song and speech), on paper (e.g. text and images), and in digital media. Codes evolve through selective replication, and in that sense play a role which is complementary to that of organisms and cultures.

If the foregoing is true, then we might want to pay attention to the fact that new kinds of codes are easily replicated on the web. In addition to letters for making words, whose replication took a giant leap with invention of the printing press and libraries, and sounds whose replication took a giant leap with the invention of audio recording and radio, two dimensional videos with sound are now recorded and able to traverse the globe in seconds. Although this doesn't change organisms per se, it may change the nature of communities just as circulatory and nervous systems (YouTube for molecules?) changed how individual metazoans get by.

How does this changing picture of code replicability serve to modify the various narratives by which we live?

Neolithic habit

An important ancestral use of language was probably the use of ideas to represent other humans. Do you know any folks who act as if the reduction of human beings to code was a perfect fait accompli?

Representing people with ideas is a useful, even necessary, approximation in today's immense global community. However the dangers of taking the equivalence, between a human and a category or stereotype, too literally are legion as well. What examples of this pop into your mind?

The fact that egregious examples of "human abuse via stereotype" seem to effectively employ radios, TV, and the internet may be telling us this: Ideas that can replicate by taking advantage of a neolithic trait will do so, whether it's in the interest of humans or not. If so we might want to figure out which fun-to-replicate ideas serve our collective interests, and which don't. How can we do that?

Missed perspective

Diverse behaviors, from the kamikaze behavior of worker bees protecting the hive to the tradition of female praying mantids who dine on their mates, serve not individual survival but the ability of molecular codes (like DNA) to replicate. Now that idea codes can replicate electronically, we should keep an eye out for things that serve the interest of ideas but not the interest of individuals.

For example, consider the idea that we should treat certain folks as subhuman. If someone says that it's OK to treat you in this way, then you might either: (A) echo the idea by saying that folks should treat them as subhuman, or (B) downplay the idea as an ill-informed reaction that we must guard against given our neolithic heritage in this electronic age.

Note that in case A, by imitating those with the bad idea you serve the idea. Moreover, by ignoring the real shortcomings of the promoters (ie. that they offer no solutions) or by treating them as worthy adversaries, you might help distract from the real challenges that we face while lending credibility to those with the bad ideas.

In case B you might illustrate how those who promote the bad idea have no solutions to offer anyone, if indeed that's the case. This helps to put the bad idea and those who promote it in their place. It also puts the onus on you to offer balanced solutions, e.g. which tangibly support public health, individual freedom, family values, informed politics, cultural diversity, and scientific awareness.

Which of these two choices do you like best?