Category: Books

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Exaptation – copy & paste in the evolution of tech and culture

Just got a name for something I have grasped for a long time. I used to call it accidental by products of evolution, and had this idea when I was doing biology aged 15. EG the piano is a by product of the evolution of fingers. We as humans have gone beyond what was biologically fittest, accidental by-products just heaped upon themselves and interacted with each other to enable creativity and consciousness.

From What Technology wants by Kevin Kelly page 50: “These inadvertent anticipatory inventions are called exaptations in biology.”

“Exaptation is a term used in evolutionary biology to describe a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection has built it.”

“It is a relatively new term, proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba in 1982 to make the point that a trait’s current use does not necessarily explain its historical origin. They proposed exaptation as a counterpart to the concept of adaptation.

For example, the earliest feathers belonged to dinosaurs not capable of flight. So, they must have first evolved for something else. Researchers have speculated early feathers may have been used for attracting mates or keeping warm. But later on, feathers became essential for modern birds’ flight.

It is a relatively new term, proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba in 1982 to make the point that a trait’s current use does not necessarily explain its historical origin. They proposed exaptation as a counterpart to the concept of adaptation.

For example, the earliest feathers belonged to dinosaurs not capable of flight. So, they must have first evolved for something else. Researchers have speculated early feathers may have been used for attracting mates or keeping warm. But later on, feathers became essential for modern birds’ flight.

(Perry, 2013)

In the evolution of technology and culture it is all exaptation. The reason is that the basis of tech and cultural evolution are not genetic, the information is carried by social means. Thus nothing goes extinct, and all innovations can be resurrected. In other words we can cut and paste to make new things, that process is far faster and more efficient than evolution in the biological sphere. Sexual reproduction is a form of cut & paste, but still far more primitive than what we can do with our inventions.

For example: Id love to graft the Graffiti handwriting system from the dead Palm onto a current smartphone.

References

Parry, Wynne. (2013, September 16). Exaptation: How evolution uses what’s available. Retrieved February 8, 2016, from http://www.livescience.com/39688-exaptation.html

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Jesus the man, Jobs the man

To make sense of this post you may need to read my last entry.

Also you may need to know who Barnum was:

And read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?src=dayp that my friend Amy just sent me.

Jobs may well be a Barnum, and like Barnum he creates a new medium for communication, but it is not just the man. It is as if humanity is ready for a jump and it finds a vehicle to make it happen. Unfortunately it has to make in the capitalist context, given the failure of the German revolution after World War one. While Jobs is a creative guy, no doubt, and while he is enough of a Barnum to pull it all off in the world as it is, the world was ripe for a new leap in communication, to go beyond printing presses and beyond tele type machines. It took someone to make the next leap actual. Zuckerberg is another such. These steps in the evolution of the psyche are all distorted by the fucked up relations of production. The agony is to live in a sick social system, the actual agony of children in chinese factories and the agony of collusion, alienation and powerlessness for many others of us.

The leap in relations of production that we were on the edge of in capitalist countries at the start of the last century did not happen, history missed its natural turning. If we were in an era of new social relations of production the miserable state of psychological developments would not be the context for these technical innovations leading to huge cultural global shifts sweeping the world. However Rosa Luxembourg was assassinated, the social democrats subverted the revolution, industrial revolutions happens in the name of socialism and distorted the history of possible new relations of production. But that is how it is.

So what of new developments? Everything we create or do is in a backward social system. Creativity is social and public, but ownership lags behind, it is private and coercive and seeks out Dickensian situations such as china to maximize profits and to avoid failure in the market. I don’t think Jobs sold out on his vision, I imagine there was agony in making it happen.

Should he not have made the mouse, the first personal pc? Should we not use the technology? It is tempting as every object contains the labour power of the poor and exploited. I don’t think it it’s the answer to smash the tools, unless there was a mass movement of boycott. Even then the much needed jump is nothing to do with the tools, but in the relations of production, and this not because “we” collude with Chinese fascism, as Mike Daisey implies in the NYT interview. It is more that capitalism went global, that it is alive and well as a system. Not so well actually, perhaps in its vicious death trows. Who will lead that transition we are now on the edge of? We are ripe for another leap.

The revolution, innovation, the next big thing will not be technological but social and political. People who lead this next leap forward won’t be just great writers like Marx or orators like Lenin and Trotsky but people able to lead using the new orality of the Internet, even though its built with an unjust system of production. The screens are not the same thing as the humans who communicate via those screens. Revolution won’t be be because of the the Internet, but it can’t happen if people throw away their telephones and everything made in China, we live in this world.

The reflection I’m making, if it is not obvious, is that there are mighty forces at work, and that no one man Jesus or Jobs is really the cause of them. There is always someone who gives expression most fully and effectively to a collective urge. The power of leaders is not only because of what they do or say, but because of the ripeness of the culture they speak to. The culture chooses leaders.

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Sociodrama in a Changing World

By Eds. Ron Wiener, Di Adderley, Kate Kirk

File Download, PDF Format

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Price: $33.65
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Sociodrama is a flexible, creative, spontaneous way of working with groups, both large and small, to explore the systems we live in and which impact upon us. Originally part of J.L. Moreno’s teaching, sociodrama is used across the world in endeavours such as: conflict management, school and higher level teaching, team building, cross-cultural exploration, problem-solving, change management, role training, community and organisational development, consultancy, story-telling, understanding the news, future planning, political change and much more. This book brings together examples of the work of sociodramatists from around the world, together with a wide-ranging collection of views on the current debate ‘What is Sociodrama?’
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Underground – NYT review

UNDERGROUND

By Wouter Spiegelmens,

Hardback 325 pp. Doubleday Books, 2011 $32.90

Reviewed by Echo J Daniel

NYT Sunday Book Review.

This novel is creating excitement among a circle of people, mostly therapists and philosophers if the book’s Facebook page is anything to go by. It is readable as a whodunit, thought provoking about the nature of the soul in a Jungian way, funny though not exactly LOL, and controversial about the nature of science and research in the humanities. It was published in January and is set to be a cult classic. A sequel is likely and there are rumors about a movie and a HBO T.V. series.

This is a first novel by a hitherto little known New York psychotherapist Wouter Spiegelmens Ph.D. who draws deeply on the experience in his practice. There is no shortage of descriptions of psychotherapy sessions, the book consists of little else. Oh, except for long introspections by the main character and hero Matthew Prendergast. If you are one of his clients, and wondering if your confidentiality has been breached you may take comfort that the title page clarifies in the usual way that this is not about real people living or dead. You may also note a reference in the novel, ‘You’re so vane if you think this book is about you, about you, you’re so vane.’ The book may well draw on the authors life in other ways, while we know little about Spiegelmens we do know that Prendergast and the author practice in the Greenwich Village, they are both in their early fifties and both have been divorced. We know the authors ex-wife is Martha Heathcote brother of the owner of real-estate firm Heathcote Chester and Gracefield. This would explain Spiegelmens’ intimate knowledge of the NYC real-estate scandals in the late 1990s, a time that is often referenced in the book though it is set well after 9/11, as is evidenced by references to OMG!!! Twitter posts, the ubiquity of iPads and clients talking about being unfriended and fraped (look it up).

Prendergast is neurotic in a Woody Allen kind of way, matching the seemingly endless stream of clients that come to his practice. He doubts his own existence as his clients talk of being invisible. He has sexual fantasies that are bizarre but inform him of his counter-transference, and lead him to make insightful and totally ethical responses to the client. For example he has just mentally undressed and chained a seductive young woman to a bed, and then in real life responds ‘You are terrified by too much freedom, you yearn for some constraint.’ she feels very well understood and nodes profusely, leading to more elaborate fantasies in the mind of the therapist. Yes counter-transference is a word you will be quite comfortable with if you even closely resemble one of the book’s enthusiastic followers.

By means of therapy sessions, clinical supervision sessions, and supervision sessions about supervision sessions we become familiar with a network of people who in their own way shed some light on the death of building contractor entrepreneur. Was he killed or is it suicide? Does the dream by a client of a psychotherapist who Prendergast supervises and the philosophy of John Lock hold a key to the answer to that question? The answer is yes. As a reviewer I’m fearful of loosing my credibility to admit that I found that a credible answer.

I’ve given away too much already. I can say, as it is already on the back cover, that this is a novel where learn how a crime is solved as we join a psychotherapist’s journey into the collective unconscious.

Read this book, I doubt the movie will be as good, unless they employ Spiegelmens to approve the script; he has a quirky insight into the nature of reality and consciousness that should not be lost in translation.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 1, 2011, on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Underground: Fiction reveals truth.

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Worth listening to… Dennis McKenna

I enjoyed listening to a Future Primitive interview with Dennis McKenna. I often listen to these Joanna Harcourt-Smith discussions.

http://www.futureprimitive.org/2011/05/dennis-mckenna-the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss/

This is the brother of Terence McKenna and hes about to write a book about the relationship of these brothers and their journey into the psyche.

Interesting and more so as he is using KickStarter to fund his writing. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss

Here is the interview:

Click to play & download Dennis McKenna and Joanna Harcourt-Smith

       

Oh, and I pledged to buy the book!

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Seizing the moment or seizing the media

I looked again at a post from 2002, on the Immediast approach.

https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2002/immediast/

It must be an obscure thing, there is not much on it that I can find, yet it is alive and well! In the search I came across Hakim Bey again, who was on the horizon in the Psyber-l days. I quoted him in my research on the archetypes of cyberspace.

He comes in with the word Immediatism. Related?

I think the first is about the media and the second about the here & now, but they are both political arty philosophies. I am making the note because I might want to get back to it.

I came across them again because the protests in the middle East are on my mind, and also how people power is needed to recover from this earthquake.

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When to use a pdf.

PDFs should be used and only used when the following apply:

IF

1. The document will be printed.
For example the document will be used for several people to sign at a meeting or this document is created to go into a paper system.

OR

2. The document is likely to be saved for reference on a computer.
For example, in addition to being accessed on the web or by email and the user will be likely to store the document. A signed contract.

AND

3. The document’s integrity is important.
For example that it has been designed for its look and feel and this needs to be consistent throughout its use. Or if it is important the document can’t easily be changed. A Journal article.

NEVER
Use a pdf on other occasions.

Forms are better in a Word file so people can edit them and return them or the form can be online in html. Information that is primarily on the web should be in html. In cases where use is mixed provide both a pdf and other formats. For ebooks consider providing epub, mobi, Kindle, Nook or plain text versions.

Later Consider Apple Author versions

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