Jun 14 2009
The Internet as a Hyper-Crossroads
Is the Internet sort of super crossroads that is causing and will cause an increase in the speed of intellectual innovation and cultural evolution? I think so.
A study out of the University of College London has tagged past population density as the key trigger to “cultural explosions.”
Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour.
This seems sensible to me, for, as the authors note, the signs of modern civilization appeared multiply tens of thousands of years after the modern brain had already appeared. And where do we find the first signs? Not deep in the jungle in a tribe that has existed there for eons, undisturbed.
But does a significantly large-enough population density alone cause a tipping point to human progress to be reached? I would guess there is more to it than that, as the news release about the study briefly addressed. But while they mention the migration between high-skill and low-skill groups as playing a role, I wonder if they also considered the likely essential roles of trade, surplus, and exposure to multiple groups of people.
Back to the “cyberspace explosion” we are currently experiencing. It seems to me that an information superhighway doesn’t really go anywhere if all its minds are doing and thinking the same thing. Thankfully, the Internet is not one highway, but truly a web of millions of roads, all crossing . . . to humanities betterment, I bet.
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