People are no longer passive citizensThere are four times as many democratic systems in the world today as there were twenty-five years ago – even taking into account the fact that there are more states in absolute terms. There is a structural reason for this. We are living in something like a global information society: people are no longer passive citizens, they want to be much more active with regard to their own lives.

Global By ‘global’ we meant not just transformed conceptions of time and space but the new social meaning that worldwide relations involved. This could be understood as the development of a common consciousness of human society on a world scale, with an increasing awareness of the totality of human social relations as the largest constitutive framework of all relations. Global civil society represented attempts to give this consciousness the form of purposive action and organisation with an explicit normative agenda.

Global justice logo Some radical activists have shifted from seeing globalisation as the problem (‘anti-globalisation’ is no longer a label of choice) and have re-branded their movement under a ‘global justice’ logo.

THE GLOBAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES The military reassertion of American nationalism by the George W. Bush administration, following the terrorist massacre of 11 September 2001, has widely been seen as marking an end to the liberal globalism of the previous decade. And if ‘globalisation’ was the buzzword of the 1990s, it now seems distinctly less fashionable.

The Vicious Circle of Aids and Poverty - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "In the optimism of the Millennium summit in 2000, the UN proposed a series of 'Development Goals' to be achieved by 2015. These set targets on areas such as education, healthcare, clean water, and impose responsibilities on the developed world as well as expectations on developing countries. But the spread of HIV/Aids, the most complex health problem ever faced by the world, means that the targets are moving all the time. If the Millennium Development Goals are not to remain a hopeless dream then international development organisations need to rethink their approach fundamentally. If they do not succeed then the cycle which links poverty to Aids will continue to spiral downwards. "

Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving? - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.
Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a 'market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value - oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal - must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. "

The One-Note Superpower - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "A funny thing has happened around the world over the past two years. While the war on terrorism has dominated headlines, the great engine of globalization has kept moving, rewarding some, punishing others, but always keeping up the pressure by increasing human contact, communication and competition. For almost every country today, its primary struggle centers on globalization issues-growth, poverty eradication, disease prevention, education, urbanization, the preservation of identity. "

A Tougher War for the US Is One of Legitimacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The notion that the United States could take such a narrow view of its 'national interest' has always been mistaken. But besides being an analytical error, the enunciation of this 'realist' approach by the sole superpower in a unipolar era was a serious foreign policy error. The global hegemon cannot proclaim to the world that it will be guided only by its own definition of its 'national interest.' "

A Tougher War for the US Is One of Legitimacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Americans for much of the past three centuries have considered themselves the vanguard of a worldwide liberal revolution. Their foreign policy from the beginning has not been only about defending and promoting their material national interests. 'We fight not just for ourselves but for all mankind,' Benjamin Franklin declared of the American Revolution, and whether or not that has always been true, most Americans have always wanted to believe that it is true. There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves. "

World Future Society--Future Survey Picks Best Books for 2003: "The UK Astronomer Royal plausibly describes how new technology can increasingly disrupt society in many ways. The rising potential for terror and error, combined with growing risks of environmental disaster, makes the odds less than 50-50 that our civilization will survive 21C. "

John Tirman: The New Humanitarianism When viewing the failed states, civil wars, famines, and now the HIV pandemic, placing the NGOs at the center of the problem is a bit like blaming an ambulance driver for a patient suffering from a heart attack. The humanitarian international is—as all these writers argue with great acuity—a symptom of the systemic problem, which is to say, how the wealthy nations have organized the global order.

Recent Changes/Additions A property frequently used to characterize self organization is an increase of order which is not imposed by an external agent.

Global society that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and democratically based The challenge is not just to provide a high-tech military response to terrorism, but to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and democratically based—one where there is hope for everyone. Such an effort would more effectively undermine the spread of terrorism than a doubling of military expenditures.

Ratio between defense spending and foreign aid “There is an emerging global standard set by industrialized countries, which spend $1 on aid for every $7 they spend on defense. . . . At the core, the ratio between defense spending and foreign aid signals whether a nation is guided more by charity and community—or by defensiveness.” And then the punch line: “If the United States were to follow this standard, it would have to commit about $48 billion to foreign aid each year.” This would be up from roughly $10 billion in 2002. The challenge is not just to alleviate poverty, but in doing so to build an economy that is compatible with the earth’s natural systems—an eco-economy, an economy that can sustain progress. This means a fundamental restructuring of the energy economy and a substantial modification of the food economy. It also means raising the productivity of energy and shifting from fossil fuels to renewables. It means raising water productivity over the next half-century, much as we did land productivity over the last one. This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market to be ecologically honest.

Eco-economy History judges political leaders by whether they respond to the great issues of their time. For today’s leaders, that issue is how to deflate the world’s bubble economy before it bursts. This bubble threatens the future of everyone, rich and poor alike. It challenges us to restructure the global economy, to build an eco-economy.

The price of a gallon of gasoline for instance, includes the cost of production but not the expense of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air or the repair bill from acid rain damage. Nor does it cover the cost of rising global temperature, ice melting, more destructive storms, or the relocation of millions of refugees forced from their homes by sea level rise. As the market is now organized, the motorist burning the gasoline does not bear these costs... Some of the record economic prosperity of recent decades has come from consuming the earth’s productive assets—its forests, rangelands, fisheries, soils, and aquifers—and from destabilizing its climate. If we want to determine the full cost of burning gasoline, we need to calculate the indirect costs of doing so...Some studies were done, however, during the early and mid-1990s on the external cost of automobile use in the United States, including direct subsidies, such as parking subsidies, and many local environmental costs. A summary of eight of these studies by John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club indicates that if the price were raised enough to make drivers pay some of the indirect costs of automobile use, a gallon of gas would cost anywhere from $3.03 to $8.64, with the variations largely due to how many indirect costs were covered. For example, some studies included the military costs of protecting petroleum supply lines and ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil, while others did not.

Before the bubble economy collapses The world can restructure its economy quickly if it is convinced of the need to do so. Many people—although not yet the majority—are already convinced of the need for a wholesale restructuring of the economy. The issue is not whether most people will eventually be won over, but whether they will be convinced before the bubble economy collapses...The key to restructuring the economy is the creation of an honest market, one that tells the ecological truth..The market is an incredible institution—with some remarkable strengths and some glaring weaknesses. It allocates scarce resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match. It easily balances supply and demand and it sets prices that readily reflect both scarcity and abundance. The market does, however, have three fundamental weaknesses. It does not incorporate the indirect costs of providing goods or services into prices, it does not value nature’s services properly, and it does not respect the sustainable-yield thresholds of natural systems such as fisheries, forests, rangelands, and aquifers.

Stabilizing world populationStabilizing world population at 7.5 billion or so is central to avoiding economic breakdown in countries with large projected population increases that are already overconsuming their natural capital assets. Some 36 countries, all in Europe except Japan, have essentially stabilized their populations. The challenge now is to create the economic and social conditions and to adopt the priorities that will lead to population stability in all remaining countries. The keys here are extending primary education to all children, providing vaccinations and basic health care, and offering reproductive health care and family planning services in all countries.

State of the World 2004: Consumption By the Numbers: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "Production efficiencies of the 20th century have driven much of the consumption boom. Modern industrial workers now produce in a week what took their 18th century counterparts four years. In the U.S. only about 12 hours of work per week were needed in 2000 to produce as much as 40 hours did in 1950."...Global spending on advertising reached $446 billion in 2002 (in 2001 dollars), an almost nine-fold increase over 1950. More than half is spent in the U.S. markets....Overweight. In the United States, an estimated 65 percent of adults are overweight or obese, leading to an annual loss of 300,000 lives and at least $117 billion in health care costs in 1999. The average U.S. adult now spends 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, often alone. ...Time pressures are often linked to the need to work long hours to support consumption habits—and to upgrade, store, or otherwise maintain possessions. Americans are among the most overworked people in the industrial world, putting in 350 hours (9 workweeks) more on the job each year than the average European. ...Some 41 million passenger vehicles rolled of the world's assembly lines in 2002, five times as many as in 1950. The global passenger car fleet now exceeds 531 million, growing by about 11 million vehicles annually....In 1999, some 2.8 billion people—two in every five humans on the planet—lived on less than $2 a day. Providing adequate food, clean water, and basic education for the world's poorest could all be achieved for less than people spend annually on makeup, ice cream, and pet food....
CAN MONEY BUY HAPPINESS?
Declining happiness. Findings from the World Values Survey, an assessment of life satisfaction in more than 65 countries conducted between 1990 and 2000, indicate that income and happiness tend to track well until about $13,000 of annual income per person (in 1995 purchasing power parity). After that, additional income appears to yield only modest additions in self-reported happiness.

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "In the United States today, there are more private vehicles on the road than people licensed to drive them, the Worldwatch report points out. The average size of refrigerators in U.S. households increased by 10 percent between 1972 and 2001, and the number per home rose as well. New houses in the U.S. were 38 percent bigger in 2000 than in 1975, despite having fewer people in each household on average. As a result of these consumption patterns, the United States, with just 4.5 percent of the world's population, releases 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "'Nearly half of all global consumers now live in the developing world,' ... 'While the average Chinese or Indian consumes much less than the average North American or European, China and India alone now boast a combined consumer class larger than that in all of Western Europe.' "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "'Higher levels of obesity and personal debt, chronic time shortages, and a degraded environment are all signs that excessive consumption is diminishing the quality of life for many people. The challenge now is to mobilize governments, businesses, and citizens to shift their focus away from the unrestrained accumulation of goods and toward finding ways to ensure a better life for all.' "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release Around 1.7 billion people worldwide—more than a quarter of humanity—have entered the "consumer class," adopting the diets, transportation systems, and lifestyles that were limited to the rich nations of Europe, North America, and Japan during most of the last century. In China alone, 240 million people have joined the ranks of consumers—a number that will soon surpass that in the United States.

The Bubble of American Supremacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum***: "Exploiting an event to further an agenda is not in itself reprehensible. It is the task of the President to provide leadership, and it is only natural for politicians to exploit or manipulate events so as to promote their policies. The cause for concern lies in the policies that Bush is promoting, and in the way he is going about imposing them on the United States and the world. He is leading us in a very dangerous direction. "..the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it...The Bush doctrine, first enunciated in a presidential speech at West Point in June of 2002, and incorporated into the National Security Strategy three months later, is built on two pillars: the United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and the United States arrogates the right to pre-emptive action. In effect, the doctrine establishes two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations; and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the will of the United States. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated so starkly; it is shrouded in doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because of the contradiction between the Bush Administration's concept of freedom and democracy and the actual principles and requirements of freedom and democracy. Talk of spreading democracy looms large in the National Security Strategy. But when President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will prevail, he means that America will prevail. In a free and open society, people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy, and not simply follow America's lead...

The Bubble of American Supremacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum***: "Even so, September 11 could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values. "..This foreign policy is part of a comprehensive ideology customarily referred to as neoconservatism, though I prefer to describe it as a crude form of social Darwinism. I call it crude because it ignores the role of cooperation in the survival of the fittest, and puts all the emphasis on competition. In economic matters the competition is between firms; in international relations it is between states. In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy. Before September 11 the ideologues were hindered in implementing their strategy by two considerations: George W. Bush did not have a clear mandate (he became President by virtue of a single vote in the Supreme Court), and America did not have a clearly defined enemy that would have justified a dramatic increase in military spending. September 11 removed both obstacles.

US: A Bigger Stick - And No Longer Speaking Softly - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "But the war on terror - the first major armed conflict of the 21st century - has also visited a kind of regime change on the world as a whole. Its most powerful entity, the US - backed by its unparalleled military and economic might - seems more imperial than ever before. "...More than mere domination, the American superpower now seeks to control history," writes Robert Jay Lifton, a Harvard expert on terrorism, in a recent issue of The Nation magazine. Professor Lifton calls this the "Superpower Syndrome," the title of his recent book. Like the Roman and British empires before it, America inevitably flexes its muscle because it has cornered the technology that offers unrivaled military dominance, he argues....But as Ronald Reagan pointed out about the former Soviet Union, the concern has less to do with declared intentions and more with capabilities and recent actions. And here, the US looks like a juggernaut. It has not only visited regime change on two nations in two years, it spends more on its armed forces than the next dozen countries combined - $382.2 billion last year. Imperial powers have always been backed by superior military force. Armies of the Roman Empire dominated the land masses of Europe and North Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Navies of the Spanish and British empires ruled the seas. Twenty-first century warfare and power projection hinge on control of the air. Today, no other country comes close to US air power...The US dominates the skies to a far greater degree than Roman legions controlled the ground or the British fleet ruled the seas. ..The rest of the world also watches in disquiet as the US tries to widen its military lead with new technology. "Nonlethal" weapons, laser- and satellite-guided ordnance, remote-controlled attack aircraft that can loiter over a battlefield for hours before striking, cruise missiles with high-power microwaves to zap an enemy's electronic gear, and a new generation of small, "bunker busting" nuclear bombs offer the possibility of moving from the cold war's relatively static "mutually assured destruction" to actual warfare. The US also appears intent on militarizing space. A congressionally mandated commission headed by Secretary Rumsfeld has called for "superior space capabilities ... both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space."

In 2,000 Years, Will the World Remember Disney or Plato? - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "'The US has become the most powerful, significant world force in terms of cultural imperialism [and] expansion,' says Ian Ralston, American studies director at Liverpool John Moores University. 'The areas that particularly spring to mind are Hollywood, popular music, and even literature.' But what some call 'McDomination' has created a backlash in certain cultures. And it's not clear whether fast food, Disney, or rock 'n' roll will change the world the way Homer or Shakespeare has.

Beijing's deepening pockets mean it can spend on quantitative and qualitative military improvements. Defense budgets have increased more than 10 percent annually for 13 consecutive years, bringing the official figure in 2003 to $22.4 billion. However, China's real military spending might be much higher: The official spending figure does not include weapons purchases, research and development or other costs; foreign estimates put the total figure at $35 billion to $65 billion.

Foreign Policy To overcome opposition when the WTO was established in 1995, promoters promised benefits eerily similar to those trotted out before Cancún: billions of dollars in global economic growth and the reduction of poverty in poor nations. Not only has the WTO failed to deliver on such promises, but numerous countries are suffering economic, environmental, and social harm after implementing the global body’s mandates. This harm highlights the WTO’s key contradiction: Shouldn’t those living with the results determine the policies versus having them imposed by the WTO?

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "The problem is that technical advances will in themselves render society more vulnerable to disruption. 'We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy.' These threats are growing for three reasons: 1) the destructive and disruptive capabilities available to an individual trained in genetics, bacteriology, or computer networks will grow as science advances; 2) society is becoming more integrated and interdependent; 3) instant communications mean that the psychological impact of even a local disaster has worldwide repercussions on attitudes and behavior."

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "'we live in an extraordinarily fluid time, when choices made today will have massive consequences for tomorrow.' The difference between rosy and gloomy global scenarios boils down to a single word: governance, or the ways in which groups of people collectively make choices. Governments are obviously a big part of global governance, but corporations are playing an increasingly larger role, as well as a vast and growing array of nonprofit groups. The current system for running the world is based on rules set in the mid-20th century, in the wake of WWII, based on assumptions that a handful of great powers will make most of the decisions. The world of the early 21st century is quite different, with humanity facing many threats, but responses largely adding up to unimaginative muddling through. "

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "Foreign Policy: we are in a new age of American dominance, with debate between Hegemonists (who believe the US should unabashedly exercise its power) and Globalists (who reject unilateralism and emphasize international law and institutions);"

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "Additions to the stock of knowledge probably provide the best hope for long-range economic expansion "

Mergers and the Supersizing of Business - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "Mergers, megamergers and empire-building corporate weddings are back in vogue on Wall Street. Almost every day, there is news of some new billion-dollar combination: banking, healthcare, and tobacco in just the past few days. Behind the new surge in acquisitions is a much healthier stock market. Since the beginning of the year, stock prices are up between 15 and 20 percent. This has given companies the means to snap up competitors - some weakened by an economic downturn. "

The Future Human" Workshop Roboticist Hans Moravec thinks that the advent of intelligent robots will represent a pivotal point in human culture, much like the advent of writing, or of computers, or of the internet. “The first intelligent computers will provide us with unimaginable wealth brought on by the fantastic levels of productivity. Within 20 years, computers will be built that process information faster than human brains. By 2020 there is a technological singularity that enables us to move ahead very fast with the help of super-intelligent robots.”

The Future Human" Workshop Humans will start to self-direct their own evolution. For better or worse, we are gaining the power to redesign ourselves in what has been called “self-directed” or “conscious” evolution. Biotechnologies are providing powers to intervene in human bodies and minds that go beyond the traditional goals of healing the sick, to threaten fundamental changes in human nature and the meaning of humanity. These technological changes have brought us to a crucial fork in the road. We are compelled to decide nothing less than whether human procreation is going to remain human, whether children are going to be made to order, rather than be begotten, and whether we wish to say yes in principle to the road that leads to the dehumanized hell of Brave New World.”

The Future Human" Workshop “In considering the future, there are three dominant threads—science and technology, demography, and governance. By science and technology, we mean things like genetics, brain science, materials (nanotechnology or other yet-to-be invented materials that may replace plastics, etc.), energy, and information technology. By demography, we mean: What is the distribution of human beings in space and time? By governance, we mean: How are those people organized?

The Future Human" Workshop “Human culture and scientific invention represent the most potent force—in terms of potential for change at unexampled rapidity—ever unleashed upon the planet. Biological evolution cannot possibly achieve even one percent of the potential speed of human cultural change,” said Stephen Jay Gould. Ideas arise in human minds and, with modern communication technologies, can readily jump from mind to mind until hundreds of millions share an idea. These “memes,” as they have been called, can be pure entertainment or they can represent political (democracy, communism) or religious (Islam) ideals or calls to action....How will this play out in an increasingly interconnected global culture?

The Future Human" Workshop“technological progress, particularly in the life sciences, is rushing out of control and violating important moral boundaries. The rapid development of new and increasingly sophisticated biotechnologies has raised difficult questions of values for societies, particularly questions regarding human identity, social relations, use of resources, and our relation to the natural world...The technologies go beyond safety, efficacy, and cost. They change the meaning of what it is to be human. They don’t come at once. They come piecemeal. You get used to them without thinking.””

The Future Human" Workshop Scientists and philosophers, since the days of Aristotle and Plato, have pondered such eternal questions as the nature of reality and the nature of the physical world in a quest to understand human identity and our place in the universe. Today, advances in scientific fields as varied as medicine, genetics and genetic engineering, biology, ecology, nanotechnology, robotics, space exploration, and cosmology continue to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Technology also has fundamentally reshaped patterns of social organization. We have unlocked energy from fossil fuels; developed energy prime movers (electricity generation, internal combustion engines) for human use; created information technologies (computer, fiber optics communication) that allow us to process, share, and store information—to name but three examples. A series of 20th century revolutions have pushed us through a nuclear age, a space age, biomedical revolutions, gene splicing, advances in reproductive technologies, brain research, and a trend toward globalization of commerce and government.While technological and scientific advances may be drivers of social change, we still have the neural architecture of our cave-dwelling ancestors. We remain influenced by our history, by our culture, and by the potential for seemingly intractable conflicts of the kind that have long plagued human societies. We see today a growing tension between these two forces.

The Future Human" Workshop We don’t understand the human body. We don’t understand human cells. We don’t understand the human mind—that is why it is dangerous to try to go with improvements. Even though technically we could do some of the things now—like transgenic humans; we could make a transgenic human right now—but for scientific, ethical, and moral reasons, we should not do it.

The Future Human" Workshop Enhancement may include not just traditional categories above the average. Look at this case: We now know the gene that causes some insects to see in the ultraviolet. Wouldn’t it be interesting if some of us could see in the ultraviolet? It might not be profitable and it could even be destructive, but this would be an enhancement in which you go beyond the normal range of expectations or of possibilities for most people. Some of it might be exogenous to our species. Some of it might be endogenous to our species...However, what we might look at as true enhancement would be adding new or non-human traits such as allowing us to see in the UV, probably by using synthetic genes, genes that are really not within the human repertoire, and that is where we are headed if we are talking about forced evolution of the human species into something that isn’t human, á la Greg’s book [Redesigning Humans], for example.

The Future Human" Workshop The real question is: What are the ends we can safely assume will continue for human beings that will lead us to want to use these technologies to change human nature? The ends, for any foreseeable future, will be that people will want to live longer; they will want to have more abilities; they will want to have less disease and more able bodies; they will want to be happier; and they will want to be smarter. If you just assume that all of those are intrinsic goals of human life, all the technologies will, both for corrective purposes and for enhancement purposes, serve those ends to the extent that we allow people to use them.

The Future Human" Workshop We have to recognize the existence of uncertainty at all
times.

"The Future Human" Workshop... the question of self-designed evolution for humans, and some of the controversies might be laid to rest when people realize that although our genes define us as a species, our neurons define us as individuals...We have for the first time in any species in history developed the capability to intervene and influence our own evolution...We can do something absolutely unique in history: influence our own evolution and also the evolution of every other species with which we choose to intervene.

The Future Human" Workshop 700 million years ago when single cells joined together to form multicellular organisms—because we are joining together by our technologies, by our communications technologies, by our trade, to produce a cooperative that is as intimately connected as are the cells in a multicellular organism....The fact that we can even envision the future, for instance, is not coming out of our individual concepts; it is extracted from all the information that is scattered and distributed around us—a sort of a global brain....the fundamental breakthroughs that are occurring now, which are unique to this time—in fact, they are without precedent in the history of life—are, first, that we are creating nonliving materials (silicon) and constructing it at a level that it is achieving the complexity of life itself. This is going to go on. In fact, intelligence will probably exceed that of human intelligence in noncarbon substrates. Nothing like this has ever happened before. The second thing that is occurring is that we are beginning to manipulate our own biology consciously, so that we are basically seizing control over our own evolution, and we will radically transform ourselves. The third is that we are moving out into space. For the first time in the history of life, life is escaping from this thin film on the surface of the planet and pushing out toward the stars.

"The Future Human" Workshop Society, of whatever kind, is built up by individual human beings. It will, therefore, reflect the average view, abilities, and so on of these human beings. Number Two is that human beings themselves are pretty much determined by two things: by their genes (their genomes) and by their culture. We can say, “by genes and memes,” to say it in simple words. Number Three: The lifetime of memes may sometimes be radically shortened or changed, as by revolutions, for example, the French Revolution. On the other hand, genes are very long-lived and permanent. The average lifetime of a gene is about three million years, I understand. So, when you look at the future of humanity, you should start with what is really the basis: the genes and memes, and how these may change.

"The Future Human" Workshop Humans of the future—with infrared vision and muscle implants—may be technologically as well as biologically enhanced. One cyborgian, Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, thinks the artificial part will one day predominate. He believes that “we will enhance our brains gradually through direct connection with machine intelligence until the essence of thinking has fully migrated to the far more capable and reliable machinery.” Such talk strikes many humanists and theologians as hubristic and exaggerated. Since Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that humans are created in God’s image, the idea of artificial intelligence is as unsettling as the idea of germline engineering. But many scientists think that, like it or not, it will happen....STOCK: “We are in the midst of an evolutionary transition as significant as that 700 million years ago when complex multi-cellular organisms evolved. Future humans will look back on this era (the next few hundred years) as one of the most extraordinary in the history of life, a period when the key developments that have shaped the form and character of their existence—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and space travel—took place.”

BROOKS: “Emotions are our current last bastion of specialness. Computers are not only able to calculate better than humans, but do many tasks better than humans. Computers are now better at doing symbolic algebra than are humans. We many have lost our central location in the universe; we may have lost our unique creation heritage … we may have been beaten out by machines in pure calculating and reason, but we still have our emotions. This is what makes us special. Machines do not have them, and we alone do.”

"The Future Human" Workshop Robot: I tried to come up with some simple rules that would enable it to survive in its environment. I gave the spider what it needed to make quick decisions in order to avoid or move towards certain objects. One simple idea was that instead of telling it to avoid objects, I said, ‘Just go for the spaces between objects.’” Brooks’s robots can carry out surprisingly complex behavior based on a few simple rules.

"The Future Human" Workshop All life is made up of cells. But the life spans of living organisms vary greatly—from round worms that live a few days to Joshua trees that live for 5,000 years. Evolution has been able to adjust different organisms’ life spans to suit various competing survival needs. Can scientists do the same? With animals the answer is a defi- nite yes. Scientists have been able to increase the life span of round worms by a factor of six with very simple genetic manipulations. If the same things could be done for humans, we might live for 500 years or more.

"The Future Human" Workshop At the start of the 20th century an American woman’s life expectancy was 46 years; today it is 79.

"The Future Human" Workshop Before Dolly, many scientists doubted that ordinary specialized cells could be converted to embryonic stem cells, but the cloning of Dolly showed that, in principle, the mature fate could be reprogrammed to that of its embryonic state. Stem cells are the Holy Grail of biology, and scientists don’t want the fear of cloning to stand in their way. They even use a distinct term for it: therapeutic cloning....What they have found is that the stem cells seem to take their signal from their situation and the surrounding cells and then “decide” what kinds of cells to become. Mesenchymal cells, for example, will in different settings form bone, cartilage, and stroma....The body is designed as a selfassembling system. Given the right cues, cells will organize themselves into the tissue or structure appropriate for that position in the body. It is a society of cell types, all communicating.

"The Future Human" Workshop Every cell in a human body has a full complement of DNA—eye cells have the same DNA as muscle cells— but in all specialized cells, most of the DNA is silent; most of the genes are turned off. Only the genes necessary for a particular cell (for example, skin genes) are “expressed.” It wasn’t always that way. At the start of life, when an organism is an eight-celled embryo, each of the eight cells has the potential to become any cell in the body. These totipotent stem cells then start to take on definite fates. As they divide and divide, the cells become specialized and lose their “plasticity”—ending up as either a muscle cell or a skin cell or one of the several hundred other cell types in the mammalian body. The miracle ofembryogenesis is that cells magically self-assemble into the myriad tissues of the body by means of positional information mediated by chemical signals. When an organ or limb has reached its determinedsize it “knows” to stop growing (p32).

"The Future Human" Workshop Since 1997, scientists have been able to do something else that has never before happened in nature (with the special exception of identical twins)—cloning. Lucy looks like any normal kitten. But Lucy is, in fact, a clone. She was made by taking a skin cell from an adult cat. The nucleus of that cell—which had become specialized to make only skin cells—was, through a piece of scientific magic, “reset” to its embryonic state (when it had the potential to make any of the hundreds of kinds of cell types that compose a cat), injected into an egg, and implanted. Lucy is the result. Lucy has no mother and father; she was born by asexual reproduction. She is a genetic copy of the cat that provided the skin cell nucleus. Lucy is an evolutionary freak.

"The Future Human" Workshop The notion of human equality is fundamental to many societies. In politics humans are accorded special rights—to vote, for example— based on a presumed special essence that no animal or machine possesses. Even though the rich and successful can pass on privileges, they can’t take away rights and they can’t so far embed advantages genetically. Will genetic enhancement destabilize our political institutions? I think that we should be acutely concerned.”

"The Future Human" Workshop Today the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction guarantees that the son or daughter of a parent will not necessarily inherit his or her talents and abilities. Germline engineering reverses the “unfairness” of this genetic lottery, making good genes a matter of choice, not accident of birth. Another approach scientists are working on is artificial chromosomes. By adding a new pair of artificial chromosomes to the embryo (chromosomes that have been engineered with all the latest genetic enhancements), designer babies could be produced.”
The Human Genome Project has proceeded so rapidly that it is highly probable that in a century or two most of the mysteries of biology (which took millions of years to evolve) will be understood and mastered. Some scholars have argued that one danger of this technology is that in the future, social elites may be able to control the genetic odds for their offspring. Will this undermine the notion of universal human dignity and lead to a bifurcation of the species into Genrich and Genpoor humans?

"The Future Human" Workshop Science and technology have always challenged beliefs about the nature of humanity. The world’s religions have had to accommodate discoveries about the creation of the universe and the Earth’s place in it; they have had to acknowledge the scientific theory of the origin of humanity and the human animal’s relationship to other living things. But the scientific advances of the past 50 years in science pose perhaps the greatest challenge to our self-image. If human evolution can be self-directed, if humans can be redesigned, then what happens to our beliefs about human nature, human rights, and human dignity—beliefs that underpin our religious, political, and legal institutions? What happens to long-established constructs like free will and consciousness?

"The Future Human" Workshop “Even with relatively low-tech screening methods, a change in the human species is well under way. Sex selection has been possible for more than a decade and, while illegal, it is widely practiced, especially in Asia. In South Korea, boys outnumber girls: There are 122 boys born for every 100 girls. The rates are similar in China. This signals the beginning of a fundamental change in our species. Within 20 years, up to a fifth of all Chinese males will be unable to find brides from their generation.”

"The Future Human" Workshop The pill and other later birth control devices, and the legalization of abortion in most countries, enabled women the option of having fewer children. It worked better than anyone imagined. Today in Western Europe many countries produce little more than one child per couple on average. Populations are falling and aging. Better prenatal care led to a great reduction in the infant mortality rate. But screening methods have led to some unintended consequences—especially in Asia.

"The Future Human" Workshop Wilkins started life as a physicist who did work connected with the atomic bomb project. Horrified by what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he decided to switch to biology, feeling that nothing as bad could flow from biological research. His switch was motivated by reading an extraordinary book by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger entitled What Is Life?
MAURICE WILKINS: “This book changed my life. From the moment I read it, I realized that I would devote the remainder of my career to exploring the living world. The book started with a simple question and with the brilliant precision of a physicist’s mind, Schrodinger led the reader directly to the conclusion that the entity that passes life’s traits from one generation to another—the gene—must be a large molecule. Life in all its magic was at root simply fancy chemistry. Pretty soon we realized that the key chemical of inheritance was a substance called DNA. That’s what led me to my work, and what led Jim and Francis to their breakthrough.” After Watson and Crick showed that DNA was shaped like a double helix, connected with four chemical bases, other scientists went on to explain how such a simple molecule could be a blueprint for life—manufacturing proteins, cells, tissues, and organs. The discovery of the structure of DNA started a new science, molecular biology, a science with enormous promise for good.

"The Future Human" Workshop LEE SILVER, Princeton University: “Why not seize this power? Why not control what has been left to chance in the past? Indeed we control all other aspects of our children’s lives and identities through powerful social and environmental influences and, in some cases, with the use of powerful drugs like Ritalin and Prozac. On what basis can we reject positive genetic influences on a person’s essence when we accept the rights of parents to benefit their children in every other way?”

"The Future Human" Workshop So, from our own 21st century human viewpoint, what is it that we would alter? Clearly, the overall performance of people is something we desire, because we desire this in ourselves: to be smarter, quicker, live longer, healthier, etc. But yet there are other features of human behavior that rest in the limbic system, the midbrain, and this is very primitive historically. This is the seat of emotion and probably most of human behavior. ..The limbic system and midbrain of my cat and of myself are very similar. It is only the cerebral cortex that has evolved over the last, say, 50,000 years that has enabled human beings to further the motives directed by the more primitive parts of their brain.We can say that wars, aggression, and the kinds of survival instincts that evolved in primitive animal societies or even early human societies are now inappropriate for a so-called civilized planet, so should these things be something we change as well? Eliminating aggression, enhancing altruism, reducing greed and selfishness, which seems to be the dominant value, at least in a capitalist society, and the results are not particularly desirable for most of us.

"The Future Human" Workshop We now have the tools, through genetic engineering, to force evolution, if the products of evolution can in some way survive as first a minority population in a vast majority of unmodified people. This is changing the whole Darwinian scheme a bit if such products of forced evolution are going to make it. We have talked about genetic enhancement, improving intelligence, longevity, resistance to pathology, and the question is, of course, who decides how these changes are going to be made and what the changes actually will be.

"The Future Human" Workshop As we are moving through the next millennium, I think that the factors that are going to be important are that essentially we are gaining control over matter; we are learning powerful technologies that can be applied not just on the world around us—we have already applied technologies to reshape the world around us—but now they are becoming focused enough and precise enough that we can turn them back upon ourselves. The challenge is how we are going to use this technology to alter our biology, because we will alter our biology, just as we have the world around us...I think that the major ways that we are going to change our biology are going to be driven by some of the key factors that in the past have influenced our behaviors: Our desires, our wants are shaped by our evolutionary background. Our desire for affiliation, our desire for status among individuals, sexual drives—all of these sorts of things are going to be affected as we move forward...I believe that a thousand years from now, anything of real value that is possible with germline manipulations and with alterations of our biology as adults is going to probably have diffused throughout the entire human population. There is a question as to whether it would create simply a little elite that would be within a sea of unchanged humans, sort of the “future Amish.” I suspect that anything that is of real value—things that lead to increases in life expectancy, added health, those sorts of things—everybody is going to want those.

"The Future Human" Workshop Human enhancement will ultimately work to have some people preferring to have their progeny stronger in some areas, some in another, and by the time the 40 generations or the next thousand years have gone by, we will begin to see new variations in people based upon those accumulated choices. We already have people who differ in variety: tall, slim, black Africans; short, squat Aleuts; and so forth and so on. But they are all the result of geographic isolation. What is new is that it is going to be the accumulative effect of individual, private choice...Connected with that will be the associated, semiindependent developments in brain science. Some of that, of course, is genetic, and some is not. As brain science develops, we are going to have a technology of the brain, in the ordinary sense of: take it apart, put it together, change it, alter it, improve it. All of those words of technology are going to apply to the brain, and some of the improvements will be genetic; some will be through drugs; and so forth and so on.

"The Future Human" Workshop Evolution will continue, and the most important development has been, within the past decade or two, that research in genetics now makes it possible—in fact, increasingly real—that we are the first species to be able to directly influence its own evolution. And, of course, we will also be able to influence the evolution of other species: animals, plants, and so on. That is such an unprecedented capability that it is difficult to come to grips with it and understand all the implications.

"The Future Human" Workshop The Next Thousand Years | Workshops In the past there have been a number of enigmas of existence that we have been able to overcome, we have been able to comprehend. The mechanistic operation of the universe, which until quite recently was ascribed to the workings of a god or gods; the nature of life, what is life? Now we actually understand that, and we are fast understanding genetics and embryogenesis, our development, and such.

The Next Thousand Years | Workshops If we start doing self-designed evolution for ourselves, we may well speciate into subgroups that eventually will become isolated breeding populations, which is sort of a definition of a species. And it may, in fact, also happen even more certainly so if we end up exploring space, if we send out human missions—not just robots. Then, de facto , each starship is going to be a new species, because the isolation will be too great. One of the things we will have to come to terms with, which will be perhaps harder than the technology and what it means in terms of changing, is the fact that we are the starting point for the future—not the crown of creation, not the jewel in that crown, but the beginning.

The Next Thousand Years | Workshops Our definition of humanity has broadened. Originally it was the members of our clan.

The Next Thousand Years | WorkshopsLiving 300 years, if that does not go along with a quality of life, is, in fact,300 years of dying, not 300 years of living. So, my concern is not technically what we will be as future humans—because we could be a marvelous group of species with all kinds of improvements (whatever improvements are)—but I am not comfortable that we will have the wisdom to be able to make use of these new technologies in a way that will result in less human suffering and a better quality of life.

The nature and boundaries of life, intelligence “The completion of the Human Genome Project opens a whole new set of possibilities for biology, biotechnology, medicine, and society at large. A similar revolution occurred when humans first learned to read and write. We are now learning to read and write the language we are made of. But in many ways it is just a beginning and only a piece of a larger revolution that is well underway. Within the same generation, the human brain will face machines that surpass its raw computing power and a world of information-processing devices that makes science fiction pale in comparison. Together these milestones raise profound and troubling questions about the nature and boundaries of life, intelligence, and who we really are.”

Item Details: "By 2000, the UN estimated that about 140 million persons,or about 2 percent of the world's population, resided in a country where they were not born. In recent years, substantial numbers have migrated, or sought to migrate, from regions afflicted byk poverty and insecurity to more prosperous and stable parts of the world. Papers presented at this UN University WIDER conference in September 2002 focused on two themes: the economic consequences of immigration, and issues associated with asylum migration."

Court to Rule on Israeli Barrier -Global Policy Forum - International Justice: "the Hague-based International Court of Justice court was asked by the UN General Assembly to rule on the legality of the barrier. Israel insists it is vital for its security, while the Palestinians say it an attempt to seize their land. The court said the hearings would open on 23 February. It also set a 30 January deadline for the submission of written statements. Although Palestine is not a UN member, it will be permitted to state its case because of its status of a UN observer and a co-sponsor of the resolution adopted by the General Assembly. The International Court of Justice does not have the power to enforce its decisions or impose sanctions. "

Crimes of War > The International Criminal Court: "Arguments were now made that the traditional concept of sovereignty was empty. In its place, the 'new sovereignty' would be located in the capacity to engage in international institutions. 4 In the age of globalization, there was no longer to be a distinction between the domestic and the transnational. Thus, national politics would be replaced by transnational networks - networks of capital, trade, information, culture, productive capacities and even population flows. "

Crimes of War > The International Criminal Court: "The conflict over the Court today is so intense not because the practical stakes are high, but because the jurisdiction of the Court has become the site for a symbolic battle between law and politics. Supporters of the Court tend to believe that twentieth century politics led to the devastating violence of that century. On their view, politics itself is dangerous; indeed, it is the source of the problem for which the Court is to be the answer. In this new century, the politics of vital national interests should be replaced by the managerial and technocratic sciences of the welfare state, on the one hand, and a regime of universal law, on the other."

A civil society critique of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Reducing poverty or repeating mistakes?

US Dollar's Decline Is Worrisome if Current-Account Deficit Isn't Cut - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum Prof. Mundell says the way not to fix this problem is by pushing China to revalue its currency, which Beijing keeps fixed to the dollar, and which the White House would like to see float freely against other currencies. He sides against the Bush administration and with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who argued recently that a more expensive Chinese currency wouldn't bring any manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., but simply shift the Chinese jobs to other low-wage nations. "It's not a good idea for China and it would derail its growth…. And it would not be good for the world economy. It would impede China's ability to do all those things to comply with the World Trade Organization," Prof. Mundell said. A hypothetical 40% devaluation in the yuan, he notes, would do little to bridge the wide disparity between U.S. and Chinese wages.

Trade hypocrisy: the problem with Robert Zoellick Kevin Watkins - openDemocracyThe analogy was apt – but inadvertently so. After all, the dumping of agricultural produce is one area in which the United States retains a powerful comparative advantage, spending billions of dollars each year disposing of American farm surpluses in developing countries. Another area of trade policy in which the Bush administration exercises global leadership, superbly captured by the Zoellick manifesto, can be summarised in a single word, ‘hypocrisy’. Like the British colonialists that attracted the ire of the Boston tea party fraternity, the United States is a good old-fashioned mercantilist power, combining protectionism at home with a commitment to free trade overseas.

Fusion energy Applications: ITER is the next big step toward making fusion energy a reality. Fusion energy is particularly attractive as a future energy source because it is environmentally benign (it produces no air pollution and no carbon dioxide, and it does not create long-lived radioactive waste); its fuels are easily extracted from ordinary water and from lithium, an bundant element; and it can be generated on demand and in sufficient capacity to power large cities and industries.

Burning plasma The Facility: ITER is an international collaboration to build the first fusion science experiment capable of producing a self-sustaining fusion reaction, called a “burning plasma.” It is the next essential and critical step on the path toward demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
Background: Fusion is the power source of the sun and the stars. It occurs when the lightest atom, hydrogen, is heated to very high temperatures forming a special gas called “plasma.” In this plasma, hydrogen atoms combine, or “fuse,” to form a heavier atom, helium. In the process of fusing, some matter is converted directly into large amounts of energy. The ability to contain this reaction, and harness the energy from it, are among the important goals of fusion research.

Asia Times: "Some of the Western world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists attend Bilderberg, in their view, to polish and reinforce a virtual consensus, an illusion that globalization, defined under their terms - what's good for banking and big business is good for everybody else - is inevitable and for the greater good of mankind. If they have a hidden agenda, it is the fact that their fabulous concentration of wealth and power is completely dissociated from the explanation to their guests of how globalization benefits 6.2 billion people. Some of the club's earlier guests went on to become crucial players. Bill Clinton in 1991 and Tony Blair in 1993 were invited and duly 'approved' by the Bilderberg before they took office."

Labor market mobility would do more to improve global economic efficiency The intellectual property regime does not balance the interests of producers and users (including users in developing countries) appropriately. In particular, the concerns of drug companies for strengthened intellectual property rights trumped broader societal concerns that the poor in developing countries have access to life saving drugs.....While improved labor market mobility would do more to improve global economic efficiency than improved capital market mobility, attention has focused on the latter to the exclusion of the former.

The asymmetric trade liberalization (in which the south has been forced to reduce its tariffs and trade barriers, while the North has not fully reciprocated) has resulted not only in the North gaining a disproportionate share of the gains from trade liberalization, but some of its gains have come at the expense of poor countries. The poorest region of the world, sub- Saharan Africa, actually saw its income decline as a result of the Uruguay round.

Global reserve system impose high costs on the poor The instabilities and inequities associated with the global reserve system impose high costs on the poor. There are reforms that would address these problems, including an annual emission of SDR’s (global greenbacks), which could be used to finance development and other global public goods. America might be directly disadvantaged (it would no longer benefit as much from the benefits of being the major global reserve currency), but it would gain from the greater stability to the world’s financial system. In any case, clearly, it is wrong for the United States to put its own self-interest ahead of those who suffer under the current arrangement.

Rich should lend to the poor? At outsider looking at the global financial system would note one further peculiarity: the richest country in the world seems to find it impossible to live within its means, borrowing some $500 billion a year (5% of its GDP) from abroad – including almost half from poor, developing countries. Standard economic theory suggests that the rich should lend to the poor; in fact, it appears that just the opposite is happening.

Globalitzation While there are strong forces pushing globalization forward – in particular, the lowering of transportation and communication costs – the forward march of globalization is by no means inevitable. After World War I, there were marked reductions in capital and trade flows (relative to the size of GDP). Today, within the developed world,there is a growing awareness of some of the darker sides of globalization, as terrorism too can move more easily across borders. But the developing countries have long experienced many of the other darker sides of globalization.

Globalitzation Elsewhere, I (J E. STIGLITZ) have argued for the reform of the institutions and policies which have governed globalization, that these institutions and policies, while they may have served the interests of the advanced industrial countries, or at least special interests within those countries, has not served well the interests of the developing world, and especially the poor within those countries. I suggested that unless there were serious reforms in governance, the legitimacy of the institutions would be undermined; unless there were serious reforms in the practices, their well may be a backlash.

Wired 11.06: Microcosmos: "I have seen the future, and it is small. Steady advances in miniaturization are leading technologists beyond the scale where Newton's laws govern the world and into the realm I term the nano arena. Within the unimaginably tiny space of 100 by 100 nanometers - one millionth the area of the period at the end of this sentence - we're about to witness an amazing collision of physics, biology, and information technology. Developments in nano space will define this century just as electronics defined the last."

Wired 11.06: New Frontiers: "At the start of the 20th century, 10 percent of the earth's population lived in cities. By the end of this decade, 50 percent will be urban dwellers. By 2015, there will be 58 metro areas with more than 5 million inhabitants each. Of these enclaves, 48 will be located outside the developed world. The lower-profile cities - those like Bombay, Lagos, and Dhaka - are flourishing the most, while traditional mega-metropolises, such as London, Osaka, and Detroit, are stagnating. "

Wired 11.06: The New World: "Our old ideas about space have exploded. The past three decades have produced more change in more cultures than any other time in history. Radically accelerated growth, deregulation, and globalization have redrawn our familiar maps and reset the parameters: Borders are inscribed and permeated, control zones imposed and violated, jurisdictions declared and ignored, markets pumped up and punctured. And at the same time, entirely new spatial conditions, demanding new definitions, have emerged."

Social Change and Modernity: "As in all cases of historical change, the crucial element in the process of the crystallization of new symbolic and institutional formations is old and new elites, that is, the leadership groups on different levels of the social structure in continuous interaction with broad social sectors, the visions they carry, and the various coalitions among them, including coalitions with different external forces in the new international systems. These groups are of crucial importance in shaping the different responses to the continuous challenges of modernization. As in the case of the different heterodoxies analyzed above, these groups are not uniform. They are indeed quite variable, and even the new elites that have developed are much more influenced by the various traditions of response to change and the heterodoxies and innovation existing in any society than has often been assumed. "

Social Change and Modernity: " Although the emphasis on economic and technological development has become part of each modern or modernizing society, they differ greatly with respect to the meaning of such development in the context of their overall cultural and social premises. Above all, they vary in the degree to which the emphasis on economic development is connected with an emphasis on the mastery of the environment rather than adaptation to it, in the relative importance of economic goals in the panorama of human goals, and in the conceptions of the social order. The vary in having productive or distributive economic orientations, in their type of political regime (authoritarian, pluralist, or totalitarian), in their major modes of political protest and participation, and in their conceptions of authority, hierarchy, and equality. "

summary2: "Murdock outlines a general process of cultural change. First, there may be an innovation, which is the formation of a new habit by a single individual which is subsequently accepted or learned by other members of the society. Innovations may be variations, that is slight changes of already existing habits. Variations may be small at any given time, but the accumulation over time may be very large. Innovations may also be inventions, which is transferring behaviors from one context to another, or is combining old behaviors in new ways. Murdock indicates that most of the technological innovations have been inventions. In addition, inventions can occur simultaneously within the same or similar cultures. A third type of innovation happens when, basically, entirely new habits are developed. These happen through trial and error, and may occur because old habits prove ineffective and people in the situations are strongly motivated to find new solutions. Crises, for example, economic crises, famines or epidemics are particularly conducive to this third type of innovation. The final type of innovation is cultural borrowing, or diffusion. This type is the most common and important. Murdock writes that almost every culture owes at least 90 percent of it"s culture to borrowing. He gives as an example, the U.S. culture, with it's language borrowed from England, it's alphabet from the Phoenicians, paper and printing from China, family and property system from medieval Europe, banking and finance system from Babylonia along with modern elaborations from Italy and England, and so on. Most often, societies borrow mostly from immediate neighbors, and trade, missionary activities, political conquest and inter-marriage are the usual means of enabling borrowing. Borrowing only occurs when there is need, when a society does not alre"

Social Change and Modernity: "The continuous expansion of international systems and movements gives rise to the incorporation of societies and civilizations that do not share either the basic symbolic premises of this new civilization or most of its specific institutional contours. Such an expansion also, of course, undermines the symbolic and institutional premises of these non-Western societies, opens up new options for various groups within them, and generates within them far-reaching processes of change, responses to these changes, and the concomitant crystallization of new symbolic and institutional formations.
These responses are shaped by the continuous interaction among several basic factors. First, the patterns of response are affected by the 'point of entry' of any society into the new international systems and the specific aspects of its institutional structure that are undermined by this entry, the options that this entry opens, and the continuous development and changes of these processes. Second, the patterns of responses are influenced by the modes of technology and economic formation existing in these societies. Third, the responses are shaped by the basic premises of the civilizations and societies on which they impinge, that is, by the basic perceptions of the relationship between the cosmic and the social orders, the social and cultural orders, and hierarchy and equality that are prevalent in them. They are also shaped by the structure of the predominant elites that are the carriers and articulators of these perceptions and visions and the modes of control that these elites exercise. Fourth, the responses are shaped by the tradition of responses to the historical situations of change that have developed in most of these civilizations. In the 'great' or 'axial age' civilizations, particular experience"

Social Change and Modernity: "the basic premises of the civilizations and societies on which the new modern international systems impinge; the points of entry of these societies into these international systems; the types and models of technology and economy prevalent in these civilizations; the tradition of response to situations of change; and the traditions of heterodoxy, rebellion, and innovation that have developed in the history of these civilizations has generated the varying institutional and symbolic contours of different modern and modernizing societies, their dynamics, and the different patterns of economic development within them. "

Social Change and Modernity: "The spread of the various modern ideologies and premises of European civilization throughout the world has been accompanied by far-reaching structural and organizational changes, especially in the economic and political fields. This diffusion took place through a series of social, political, and cultural movements that, unlike movements of change and rebellion in many other historical situations, tended to combine protest with strong tendencies toward institution-building and center-formation. As a result of this combination, it has been difficult to isolate the different international systems from one another and to maintain any one of them in a continuous equilibrium. The interrelations among systems are never static or unchanging in any given international setting. Indeed, the dynamics of such settings give rise to continuous changes in the interrelations among the different systems and the forces created by them, thus generating various processes of change in these systems. "

Social Change and Modernity The new civilization that developed in Europe later spread throughout the world, creating a series of international systems. Each system was based on some of the premises of European civilization, but at the same time each system had its own internal process of change. The expansion of European civilization resulted in a tendency toward the development of universal, worldwide institutional and symbolic frameworks. Such frameworks are unique in the history of mankind. The expansion of Europe also resulted in not one but several worldwide systems developing. Although these different systems originated in the same place—in Western Europe—and were closely interrelated, the centers of power and influences within each system were not identical. Each developed a dynamic of its own and each often reacted to the others. Most important, within the international ideological and cultural systems, very strong reactions developed against the problems generated by the international economic system. These reactions were most evident in a variety of national and social revolutionary ideologies.

Social Change and Modernity: "the central premise of European modernity was the possibility of the active transformation of crucial aspects of social, cultural, and natural orders by conscious human activity and participation. The fullest, although not the only, expression of these premises could be seen in the transformations and repercussions of the Protestant ethic in the economic, scientific, and political spheres and later in the impact these transformations had on the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Accordingly, the special characteristics of European modernity were initially focused on attempts to form a 'rational' culture, an efficient economy, a civil (class) society, and nation-states where these rational tendencies could become fully articulated and within which major social actors, leaders, and influences could create a social and political order based on freedom. "

Social Change and Modernity: "The crystallization of these potentialities of change usually takes place through the activities of secondary elites, who attempt to mobilize various groups and resources in order to change some aspects of the social order as shaped by the ruling coalition of elites.
The possibility of the failure of integrative and regulative mechanisms is inherent in any society. Every civilization and every type of political and economic system constructs some specific systematic boundaries within which it operates. But the very construction of such civilizations and social systems also generates within them various conflicts and contradictions that may lead to change, transformation, or decline, that is, to different modes of restructuring their boundaries. "

Social Change and Modernity: "Even if for very long periods of time a great majority of the members of a given society may identify to some degree with the values and the norms of the given system and be willing to provide it with the resources it needs, other tendencies develop in connection with intergroup conflicts, demographic changes, and the development of heterodox ontological visions and these changes may give rise to changes in the initial attitudes of any given group to the basic premises of the institutional system.
Thus 'antisystems' may develop within any society. Although the antisystems often remain latent for long periods of time, they may also constitute, under propitious conditions, important foci of systematic change. The existence of such potential antisystems is evident in the existence in all societies of themes and orientations of protest. These social movements and heterodoxies are often led by different secondary elites. Such latent antisystems may be activated and transformed into processes of change by several processes connected with the continuity and maintenance, or the reproduction, of different settings of social interaction in general and the macrosocietal order in particular. "

Social Change and Modernity: "In any social order, then, there is always a strong element of dissension about the distribution of power and values. Hence, as we have seen, any institutional system is never fully homogeneous in the sense of being fully accepted or accepted to the same degree by all those participating in it. "

Social Change and Modernity: "Thus different coalitions of elites construct the boundaries of social systems, collectivities, and organizations. Yet no such construction can be continuously stable. The crystallization and reproduction of any social order, of any collectivity, organization, political system, or civilizational framework is shaped by the different forces and factors analyzed in the preceding section and generates processes of conflict, change, and possible transformation.
Conflict is inherent in any setting of social interaction for two basic reasons. The first reason is the plurality of actors in any such setting. The second reason is the multiplicity of the principles inherent in the institutionalization of any such setting the multiplicity of institutional principles and of cultural orientations and the power struggles and conflicts among different groups and movements that any such institutionalization entails.
Any setting of social interaction, but particularly the macrosocietal order, involves a plurality of actors elites, movements, and groups�with different levels of control over natural and social resources. These elites continuously struggle over the control, ownership, and the possibility of using such resources, generating ubiquitous conflicts on all levels of social interaction. "

Social Change and Modernity: "However, the concretization of these tendencies takes place in different political-ecological settings. Two aspects of such settings are of special importance. The first aspect, heavily stressed in recent research, is the importance of international political and economic systems. The places of societies within these systems and the different types of relations of hegemony and dependency are issues of particular importance. The second aspect is the recognition of the great variety of political-ecological settings of societies, including differences between small and large societies, their respective dependence of internal or external markets, and the like. Both of these aspects greatly affect the ways in which institutional contours and dynamics tend to develop. "

Social Change and Modernity: "Different coalitions of elites, together with the modes of control they exercise, shape the major characteristics and boundaries of the social systems that they help to construct, namely, the political system, the economic system, the system of social stratification and class formation, and the overall marosocietal system. The differing modes of control shape the power aspects of the institutional structures in different societies. Especially important among these structures are the structure of authority, the conception of justice, and of political struggles, the principles of social hierarchy, and the definition of the scope of membership of different communities. "

Children's height Children's height will keep growing with income per capita but, guided by nature, it will converge to a geneticallydetermined potential children's height....I show that a model of children's height supplemented with the assumption that nature and nurture jointly determine final adult height can be use to derive a model that successfully explains the recent historical evolution of men's stature in England. I also show a way to use the model to forecast the future evolution of heights.

A Model of the Evolution of Human Stature

A Model of the Evolution of Human Stature