Etat d’urgence permanent: "Tribunaux d’exception, torture, prisons secrètes, Parlements phagocytés par les exécutifs, écoutes illégales, etc. : au nom des impératifs sécuritaires, les acquis de la démocratie libérale sont, un à un, rognés aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni.
Rarement la distance entre démocratie réelle et démocratie formelle a été aussi grande. Partout ou presque, dans les pays démocratiques « avancés », des exécutifs faiblement légitimes gouvernent depuis des années sans – et souvent contre – l’assentiment populaire. En France, au Royaume-Uni, aux Etats-Unis et ailleurs, le pouvoir exécutif s’est autonomisé de la société, lui imposant, dans une marche en avant néolibérale et néoconservatrice aveugle, des « réformes » sociales régressives, ainsi que des mesures disciplinaires et sécuritaires de plus en plus répressives.

Network_Project_Presentation3_28_06.pdf (Objet application/pdf)
Consequences of Interdependency
z Propagation for Economic Failure – z Policy Decisions – lcountries. z Ideas are flowing – Development in South Africa will impact Greenland (South Africa trades with both China and Japan, both of whom are major trading partners with Greenland), Example: In 1912, Norman Angell argued that increasing economic interdependence woud make wars more costly and therefore as levels of economic cooperation between countries increased, we should expect less war between Cultures are spreading, fusing, and interacting.

MIT OpenCourseWare | Political Science | 17.918 New Global Agenda: Exploring 21st Century Challenges through Innovations in Information Technologies, January (IAP) 2006 | Home: "This workshop is designed to introduce students to different perspectives on international politics in the 21st century. Students will explore how advances in information technology are changing international relations and global governance through opening new channels of communication, creating new methods of education, and new potentials for democratization."

MIT_SSP_Breakthroughs06.pdf (Objet application/pdf)
You Never Knowism relies on flawed logic. But because it is generally a cover for politics, defeating You Never Knowism
requires more than reason. It requires changing the politics that create it.
One solution is competition with a budget ceiling. Because dangers have organizational advocates, budgetary pressure should force organizations to discredit threats that their rivals promote. The more public these fights, the better.

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "Pre-modern states are often struggling to survive; modern states fit perfectly with the theories of realism; post-modern states are countries like Luxembourg, whose GDP per capita is over $60,000. Although material interests are still among its concerns, it is no longer a focal point. Therefore, modern countries pursue material benefits and post-modern countries seek more abstract interests such as women's rights and environmental protection. Chinese people are mostly concerned with accumulating the wealth that the West has. In fact, part of the contradictions between China and the Western countries exist because they are at different stages of development."

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "The second reason is regionalism. Every mature region promotes regional cooperation so as to accelerate the development of all the countries in its region. The most outstanding examples are the development of the EU, the establishment of the North American Free Trade Area, and, the development of East Asian regionalism. ¡¡¡¡"

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "The first is civilizationiism. In his theory on the 'clash of civilizations,' Samuel Huntington argues that the Western world should band together in the conflict between civilizations. When two civilizations use their identity as a tool to achieve their political objectives, civilizationism emerges."

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "A number of transitional economies have emerged, particularly Brazil, Russia, India and China. "

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "United States policy on the Middle East, revised after 9/11, was an external stimulus for the chaos. Before 9/11, the United States' strategic objective in the Middle East was regional security. It supported a dominant force in the Middle East to control the situation but had no intention of deliberately overthrowing dissenting regimes. Following 9/11, the United States changed the foundation of its policy on the Middle East. It now seeks to alter the basic political environment and social situation in the Middle East through military strikes and democratic revolution. The region has been completely destabilized by conflict between races, religions, sects, and countries. The Middle East is constantly a focal point of trouble and contradiction. The United States' new policy for the Middle East not only upset the original status quo (however unstable that was), but triggered a series of conflicts and undermined various political powers in the region."

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "When the Cold War ended, the world political arena changed. During the Cold War, the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, dominated and fought against each other only in proxy wars. That situation no longer exists. No country is powerful enough to resist the United States' military power. In the past, the Soviet Union and the United States defended different camps and offered protection to medium and small-sized countries that supported them; now these countries are on their own. As these countries were not directly involved in the Cold War, they lack diplomatic experience and struggle with the complex post-Cold War political environment."

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "The absence of a sense of security causes different forces to engage in heated competition, each determined to gain control and ensure a better future. This kind of competition reflects political developments in a new world."

People's Daily Online -- Disorder will persist in world political arena: "The world political order is more complex now than it was during the Cold War. The four 'isms' -- civilizationism, regionalism, nationalism and tribalism -- coexist with three types of states: failed states, modern states and post-modern states."

The Arlington Institute: "The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday. "

The Arlington Institute: "Overweight Top World's Hungry -- (BBC -- August 15, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4793455.stm
There are now more overweight people across the world than hungry ones, according to experts. Researchers told the International Association of Agricultural Economists the number of overweight people had topped 1 billion, compared with 800 million undernourished. Obesity is rapidly spreading, while hunger is only slowly declining among the world's 6.5 billion population."

The Arlington Institute: "America's War on the Web -- (Sunday Herald -- April 02, 2006)
http://www.sundayherald.com/54975
At the Pentagon, technologies are being deployed to wage the war on terror on the internet, in newspapers and even through mobile phones. The US wants to take control of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, allowing US war planners to dominate all forms of modern communication. At the flick of a switch, entire countries could be denied access to telecommunications resources."

The Arlington Institute: "There seems to be an acceleration of the number of significant events that point toward big change in the near future. At TAI we watch many different trends, but the most significant ones are climate change and the possibility of a rapid shift in the world�s weather, the peaking of the global supply of oil and the attendant emergence of a new energy era, a major disruption in the world�s financial system, a global pandemic and, of course, the possibility that terrorism will escalate to a much higher level. There are other areas that interest us, like the dwindling supply of drinking water and technology trends, but the big ones get most of our attention."

People's Daily Online -- US: Possibility of world war never too far away: "Although there has been no war in the style of World War I or II, primarily because of nuclear deterrence, there is another kind of war emerging. The US has developed its own method of 'seek and destroy', weeding out and defeating countries one by one. Since the end of World War II, the US and its allies have been engaged in war; North Korea (1951), Vietnam (1961), Grenada (1983), followed by Libya, Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it is pointing its sword towards Iran and North Korea. The flames of war ignited by the US are spreading across the world.

A book by British scholar Dr. Vassilis K Fouska entitled, 'New American Imperialism: Bush's war on terror and blood for oil,' caused widespread concern in Europe and the US. In the book, the author points out that 'the new American imperialists often use splendid rhetoric to disguise themselves. [They use phrases] such as ¡®maintaining peace' and ¡®democracy and freedom.''"

Metaverse Roadmap: Roadmap 2016 Page 2: "The emerging metaverse sector of the global economy includes resources, products, and services managed through 2D and 3D virtual and augmented reality environments. As the density of our network accelerates on a planet with finite surface area, and as our digital and physical environments become increasingly intelligent, automated, networked, and transparent, major new developmental emergences must occur."

AACC - Institute for the Future - Ask About the Future with John Smart (page 2): "The continued acceleration of local technological intelligence is very likely to be the central driver and determinant of the modern era. Hesitantly at first, and quickly now, our increasingly fast and microscopic technological extensions of our humanity may soon learn (encode, predict, and understand) both the physical and abstract nature of all the slow and macroscopic systems in our local environment—our biological selves included. "

AACC - Institute for the Future - Ask About the Future with John Smart (page 2): "The generalized rate of electronic evolutionary development is at least seven million times faster than biological information processing, the speed of an action potential and synaptic diffusion in a human brain. In an utterly surprising state of affairs, each new generation of computing system has been, without exception, increasingly miniaturized, increasingly resource efficient (per standard computation, however defined), increasingly human autonomous (in the replication of its complexity, again however defined) and increasingly biologically-inspired (having features of evolutionary development or organization increasingly similar to our own) than the last."

AACC - Institute for the Future - Ask About the Future with John Smart: "In human history anthropologists have long noted that significant cultural advances (neolithic tool kits, architectures, language, civil society, law, science) have emerged at an accelerating rate in human history. Many scholars (Jared Diamond, James Burke, Robert Wright) consider such factors as increasing population density, technological diffusion, and communication rates to be key drivers of these sociotechnological accelerations.

Over the last millennium, rates of planetary technological innovation and diffusion have broadly accelerated as a whole, with ever-briefer pauses between each new phase of acceleration. The increasingly rapid development of what may be called the 'average distributed complexity' of our sociotechnological systems has been apparent even as catastrophes, declines, wars and revolutions have caused local discontinuities within specific civilizations. "

AACC - Institute for the Future - Ask About the Future with John Smart: "Eric Chaisson (Cosmic Evolution, 2002) has recently given the calendar a helpful thermodynamic explanation. He notes that as universal development moved from galaxies to solar systems to life-friendly planets to microbes to plants to animals to human brains to computing technology, each new computational system in this hierarchy has operated with significantly greater free energy rate density (energy available for computation per volume per unit time). This increased energy density has allowed each of these complex systems, whether living or nonliving, to model and react to its environment far more rapidly and extensively than its predecessors. There is also independent data that later-developed systems in this hierarchy are significantly more resource efficient (per physical or computational output), denser, and more miniaturized. This impressive resource efficiency and energy density of the most newly emergent systems apparently allows the leading edge of universal intelligence to continually avoid resource limits to accelerating growth."

AACC - Institute for the Future - Ask About the Future with John Smart: "In our best current understanding, the history of universal evolutionary development has always seen an increasingly faster development of computational complexity (modeling intelligence) within special subsets of locally emergent forms. Carl Sagan first popularized this in his famous metaphor of the 'Cosmic Calendar.' Place all universal history on a calendar year, and the closer you get to the end of the calendar, the faster change goes, with the pace of change continually accelerating."

The Future of Robots - Popular Science: "The brain can be described in just 15 million to 50 million bytes because most of its wiring is random at birth. For example, the trillions of connections in the cerebellum are described by only a handful of genes. This means that most of the cerebellum wiring in the infant brain is chaotic. The system is designed to be self-organizing, though, so as the child learns to walk and talk and catch a fly ball, the cerebellum gets filled with meaningful information."

The Future of Robots - Popular Science: "Today there are more than two million Roomba robots scurrying around performing a task (vacuuming) that used to be done by humans, but they look more like fast turtles than maids. Most robots will continue to be utilitarian devices designed to carry out specific tasks. But when we think of the word “robot,” Capek’s century-old concept of machines made in our own image still dominates our imagination and inspires our goals."

The Future of Robots - Popular Science: "Human experience is marked by a refusal to obey our limitations. We’ve escaped the ground, we’ve escaped the planet, and now, after thousands of years of effort, our quest to build machines that emulate our own appearance, movement and intelligence"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "uring the past few weeks, oil prices have flared. The reasons behind this rise are various, such as the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, the endemic instability in Iraq, mounting clashes in Nigeria, concerns about the Iranian nuclear program, stronger energy demand from China and India, and the Alaskan oil pipeline shutdown."

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News - Lifting seven veils of the Iraqi illusion: "A minimally viable central government is built on at least three foundations: the coercive capacity to maintain order, an administrative apparatus that can deliver government services and directives to society, and the resources to manage these functions. "

People's Daily Online -- US to catch her breath in military expansion: "n the past, whenever national strength developed, the United States renewed her ability of waging war, thus opening up new colonies or enlarging her 'sphere of influence' through launching wars and occupying trade channels, raw materials and markets to provide better support for further domestic development. This serves as both energy consumption accumulated in early wars and a start for collecting greater military capacity in the near future. Within the world political and military vision, the US has been exercising her war power by launching one round of military expansion, followed by another. The WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, and Iraq War are all essentially the same"

People's Daily Online -- US to catch her breath in military expansion: "Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States took advantage of this golden world political situation and unfolded a new round of military expansion, aiming to build a US empire with a global presence that is similar to the Ancient Roman Empire. She started expansion in the early 1990s which has vigorously changed the world political environment. The successor of the Soviet Union has been degraded to a second class nation and is busily defending her homeland; the former Soviet Union influence has lessened. The US military has entered various important strategic places across the world and has obtained distinct geographical advantage against Russia and China. The US image of a preeminent empire has been initially established. However, there is evidence indicating that the United States has used up her capacity to fight accumulated during the cold war in achieving these results. She seems to have no more spare energy to continue launching war."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Approximately 20 percent of Asians do not have easy access to water while almost 60 river basins in Asia have been identified as potential flashpoints for inter-state conflict according to a joint study by the United Nations and the University of Oregon. The rapid development, growing populations and long-standing inter-state and internal instabilities in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Mekong Sub-region in Southeast Asia increases the likelihood of water-related conflict in these regions and makes any water-related tensions in these areas of wider regional and potentially global significance. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "In the 21st century, however, Asia may emerge as the new focal point of water-related conflict given the rapid growth of the region, which is likely to put pressure on water resources, coupled with the concentration of long-standing internal and inter-state tensions, which can act as a spark for turning water-related disputes into full-scale conflicts. Asia is home to 57 international basins, the third largest after Europe and Africa."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Water is increasingly emerging as a scarce commodity, fueled by population pressures, intensive irrigation, and erratic weather patterns brought on by global warming. According to the International Water Management Institute, by 2025 one-third of the world's population will lack access to water."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "hile the world's attention is focused on record high oil prices, water, like oil, is increasingly emerging as a catalyst for international instability and conflict as the recent upsurge in violence in Sri Lanka illustrates. "

Fastest-evolving human gene linked to brain boost - being-human - 16 August 2006 - New Scientist: "The fastest evolving gene in the human genome is one linked to brain development, researchers say.

A study of differences between the human and chimp genomes has identified a gene associated with neural growth in the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain involved in processing thoughts and learning – as having undergone “accelerated evolutionary change”.

Katherine Pollard and colleagues at the University of California Santa Cruz, US, suggest that the fast-changing gene may help explain the dramatic expansion of this part of the brain during the evolution of humans.

They identified the rapidly evolving region of DNA – called human accelerated region 1 (HAR1) – after carrying out an extensive computational comparison between the genomes of humans, chimpanzees and other vertebrates."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Due to constant demand for cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines, ecstasy, and other drugs, the Mexican criminal enterprise earns over US$50 billion a year. A considerable amount of this money makes its way back to Colombia to purchase pure cocaine and heroin. Millions of dollars a year land in the hands of policemen, intelligence agents, mayors, port masters, pilots, and many other officials who face the infamous 'plata o plomo' decision."

Lifeboat Foundation FAQ: "As technology continues to advance, it will vastly increase the power of leading nations, leading corporations, and leading individuals. Soon, a set of emerging technologies — Genetics, Robotics, and Nanotechnology — will make more power available than has ever been known in human history."

InformationWeek | Gartner | Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact | ao�t 9, 2006: "Under Web 2.0, social-network analysis and Ajax were rated as 'high impact' and reaching maturity in less than two years. Collective intelligence, on the other hand, was rated as potentially transformational to businesses."

ID21 - communicating development research: "Evidence shows that:

* Since 1992 the number of conflicts leading to over 1,000 battle-deaths has dropped by 80 percent.
* Wars between countries are rare – now less than five percent of all armed conflicts.
* While there were 25 coups or attempted coups in 1963, in 2004 there were only ten and all of them failed.
* The average number of people reported killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000 but in 2002 was 600.
* Since the late 1970s the number of states governed by authoritarian regimes has dropped from 90 to 30."

World Trends Research - Major Trends Shaping Global Context: " Science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as “life,” “nature” and “human.” Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "I have just outlined four possible outcomes for the threatened tribes: destruction, absorption and trans
formation, withdrawal, and imitation. In everyone of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Power becomes important where two actors (or more) would choose the same thing but cannot both have it; power becomes important when the obstacles to the achievement of one's will come from the will of others. Thus, as the expanding capacities of human societies created an overlap in the range of their grasp and desire, the intersocietal struggle for power arose.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The meaning of 'power,' a concept central to this entire work, needs to be explored. Power may be defined as the capacity to achieve one's will against the will of another. The exercise of power thus infringes upon the exercise of choice, for to be the object of another's power is to have his choice substituted for one's own. * "

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "If an expanding society willingly stops where its growth would infringe upon neighboring societies, it allows death to catch up and overtake its population. If it goes beyond those limits, it commits aggression. With no natural order or overarching power to prevent it, some will surely choose to take what belongs to their neighbors rather than to accept the limits that are compulsory for every other form of life."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Since the labor of a few could now feed many, an extensive division of labor became possible. The breakthrough in food production cleared the way for the rise of civilization. From the narrowly circumscribed conditions of primitive social life, suddenly all things seem to become possible for the cultural animal."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Then came a major cultural innovation in the technology of subsistence. When plants and animals were domesticated, mankind began truly to depart from the place in the living order given it by nature. At first, some ten thousand years ago, the economy of domestication was merely an appendage to the ongoing hunting-and-gathering economy. Gradually, the new way of life supplanted the old. It took several millennia before the power of this breakthrough to usher in a new age became manifest. It was not just that man's role in the ecosystem was forever altered by his unprecedented power to rearrange the living system for his own purposes. Beyond that, the new abundance brought about by developing agriculture made possible open-ended changes in the previously fixed size and structure of human society. Except in a few extraordinary locations, a hunting-and-gathering society was by necessity a small, fairly mobile group. The rise of agriculture made possible a more settled life with far larger populations living in the same territory under a single social organization. "

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "These primitive bands, in their size and structure and in their means of subsistence, maintained a fundamental kinship with the primate groups from which they emerged. In other words, despite the notion that the beginnings of culture represent the point of radical discontinuity between man and the rest of nature, our ancestors developed culture over hundreds of thousands of years without greatly disrupting the continuity in the relationships among individual, society, and the natural order. As long as human societies sustained their lives with the food that nature spontaneously provided, they could develop culturally only within strict limits.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "To some, the emergence of culture is the crucial point in the discontinuity between man and the other creatures. According to this view, if the first volume of our Natural History is to be called The Physical World, and the second The Evolution of Life, the third should be entitled The Rise of Culture. Culture introduced the capacity for freedom of choice onto the earth"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Culture opened a gap in the rigid regime of the living order. Gradually, over the last one or several million years, our ancestors widened the range within which human creativity, rather than human genetics, determined the way human life was lived. Tools were invented, manufactured, and used in the basic processes oflife. Language and other symbolic forms were created for the communication and representation of experience. Like the beginnings of learning in the distant evolutionary past, the beginnings of culture were no doubt modest and unobtrusive. And as with learning, the success of the new experiment quickened its development. Over hundreds of thousands of years, culture and genetics acted together to reinforce this acceleration of cultural development. The selection for individuals whose hands were good at tool use led, over the generations, to the evolution of hands better suited to tool use. The advantages of those who could use language well led to brains and mouths better equipped for working with language. More and more the human animal enjoyed an unprecedented freedom. It could create its own way of life."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The cumulative learning of a group of human beings is its culture. *
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Human learning has changed the world in a way the learning of other animals did not. This is not primarily because we are individually more intelligent than other individual animals, though we are. Rather it is because our intelligence has crossed that threshold where it becomes possible for us to pool our learning
collectively and to transmit its fruits down through the generations. At that point, the capacity to learn became transmuted into the far more potent ability to create culture.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "With the emergence of learning, the control of organismic behavior by genetic blueprint ceased to be absolute. A creature's own experience --not just the aeons of ancestral experience carved by selection into the genes-- could now play some part in shaping how it acts in the world. The capacity to learn creates a new discontinuity between the living and the inanimate worlds. First came matter and energy obeying physical laws, then came organisms mechanically following laws inscribed by ages of evolution. The animal that can learn is something new in that the determinants of its behavior are not wholly created outside of itself. As long as genetic control remains absolute, the living present is wholly bound by the evolutionary past. With the emergence of learning, the present gains a degree of latitude to shape itself."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "That more flexible creatures like mammals have arisen late in the evolutionary process compared with the more rigid reptiles (not to mention the still more primitive forms) is evidence not so much of superiority as of complexity, and of the fact that greater complexity takes longer to evolve. Conceivably, such flexibility could be entirely programmed into the genes. Indeed, in insects some fairly elaborate discriminations are completely, or almost completely, genetically 'wired.' But after a certain level of complexity is reached, such an approach would be terribly cumbersome-- worse than computers that play chess by considering every imaginable move at every point. Selection has therefore favored a more efficient route to behavioral flexibility-- learning."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "We can better understand biological evolution if we see it less as a process of change than as a creation of order. Natural selection has molded an order of indescribably complexity from the molecular level to the global. Each piece of the intricate pattern oflife must play its specific and narrow role in the whole. This order is rigid but not coercive, for there is no governing power in the system. Each creature follows its own law, but that law itself has been written by an evolutionary process that secures the orderliness of the overarching system of life. Each creature is free in the sense that none of its impulses are prohibited. But it is a freedom without choice."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "For living things to persist, or survive, their environment must provide them with the substances and energy they need to maintain and to reproduce themselves. As life grows denser, the environment on which each organism depends consists increasingly of other living things. The survival of each, therefore, comes to depend upon how well all the others maintain crucial flows of materials and energy throughout the system. Life requires environmental reliability. The implications for natural selection are clear. Selection molds not just individual species but entire ecological communities, favoring those combinations of creatures that most reliably act synergistically to maintain the flows on which all the creatures depend. As life developed on this planet, the networks of interdependence and cooperation expanded until some of the major flows became global in scope. The earth's atmosphere as we know it is a product of the living ecosystem."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "History, then, has traditionally not allowed our vision to transcend the civilized condition that needs explaining. But in the last century or so, the perspective of 'natural history' has revealed to us how extremely truncated is that old view of time. Our infancy was not in the cradle of civilization, but far, far back before then. Our human ancestors go back hundreds of thousands, perhaps several millions of years. But our ancestry is still more ancient. Our story, as much as that of any creatures on earth, goes back to the beginning of life, more than three billion years ago. Walking a time line of the earth's history overwhelms our provincial sense of time. From the earth's beginning to the point where life emerges is a number of paces. It is a long walk before mammals have appeared, but only a few steps from there to the appearance of the human animal. The time of recorded history is scarcely visible. What we call history is like a period at the end of the long story of life on earth."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The experience of a lifetime gives an inadequate perspective. Unlike Bibby's ancients of four thousand years ago, we can see change. But we have difficulty seeing what is constant amid the change. We were born into a vehicle already far along on an extended trajectory so that our present experience is intelligible only in terms of forces that acted in the past."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "One can add to the shortcomings of the human decision maker the extraordinary difficulty of these decisions. For the progress of civilization has been a continuous advance into uncharted territory. Even the wisest judge needs precedents, and civilized peoples have repeatedly been compelled to deal with unprecedented problems. Even intelligent people, under those circumstances, will adopt solutions which do not work or which work today but sow the seeds of tomorrow's problems. Irrigation brings a miracle of greenness in the short run but leads eventually to the disastrous spread of deserts over salted soils."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This model of selection can account for much of the development and spread of new components of civilized culture. In part, culture is indeed a kind of market in which new possibilities - in making pottery, in telephone service, in musical expressions, in vaccinations - replace or supplement old because people want them. Without making any prejudgment about the nature and complexity of human wants, we may grant that choices based on those wants are important in determining the way our cultural systems evolve."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This theory can be aptly illustrated by the development of a cuisine. In the beginning, people are surrounded by plants and animals, of unknown nutritive value and taste. Over the course of time, everything gets tried. People learn from their experience. They remember what tasted good, what was poisonous, even what diet made them feel healthy. They experiment with new combinations, new ways of preparing, storing, and curing foods. Constantly, they select for the most satisfying cuisine. As people from one region contact people from another, they exchange ideas and ingredients. Each group now benefits from the other's recipes, and altogether new recipes come into being as new combinations of foods become possible - one group's nuts are traded for another's herbs, citrus comes to the New World as the tomato is taken to the Old. Selection continually generates improvement."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This commonsense theory of social evolution offers a benign and reasonable view of human affairs. According to this image, people are continually hunting for ways to better their condition. (One immediately recognizes the Economic Man of capitalist theory). The alternatives are readily generated by this pursuit of improvement. The longer the hunt goes on, the more alternatives are discovered. And, since man is an inventive as well as exploratory creature, what is discovered in the world is increasingly supplemented by what people have created. With the passage of time, therefore, more and more cultural alternatives become available for all aspects of our cultural business - how and what to produce, how to govern ourselves, what to think, how to travel, play, make music, and so on. The process of selection is done by people. The criterion for selection? People choose what they believe will best meet their needs, replacing old cultural forms when new and better ones become available. Again, the resonance with economic theory is striking: social evolution is the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "History's acceleration has made manifest what has been true from the beginning of civilization: the structure of life for civilized peoples has been constantly subject to profound changes as new cultural ways are developed and replace the old. We can see now that civilization is an evolving system.

The question is: what determines the direction in which civilization evolves? It is a vital question, for if we are shaping our destiny without comprehension, how likely is it we will shape it well? For our power to exceed our understanding is dangerous. What is remarkable about this question besides its fundamental importance is the paucity of attention it receives. There seem to be two principal reasons for this neglect: (1) some do not search for an answer because they believe none can exist; and (2) some do not search for an answer because they assume they already know it.
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The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "People often do not recognize, much less grasp, the effects of their actions. Four thousand years ago (as Geoffrey Bibby describes in a book of that title, 1961) change in civilized societies was so gradual that people thought that life had always been as it was then. The question of explaining change hardly arose in their minds. Yet they were actively (if inadvertently) effecting one of the great revolutions in the history of life - the evolution of civilization. Change that was cataclysmic by the standards of life's previous development was nonetheless too slow to be visible in the perspective of a single lifetime.

Now, change has so quickened that one cannot help but witness dramatic metamorphoses in civilized societies. Before our eyes, ancient tribal groups are being welded into nations. Whole societies adopt new forms of social and economic organization. Intellectual revolutions and technological innovations constantly alter people's methods of production, transportation, housing. Traditional values and ideologies all over the world are altered or overthrown as they encounter new and unexpected conditions."