{"id":49940,"date":"2019-12-04T17:56:45","date_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49940"},"modified":"2019-12-04T17:56:50","modified_gmt":"2019-12-04T22:56:50","slug":"power-the-acceleration-of-cultural-evolution-and-our-best-hope-for-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=49940","title":{"rendered":"Power, the Acceleration of Cultural Evolution, and Our Best Hope for Survival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2019-12-04\/power-the-acceleration-of-cultural-evolution-and-our-best-hope-for-survival\/\">Power, the Acceleration of Cultural Evolution, and Our Best Hope for Survival<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/fantasy-3186483-768.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>These days I\u2019m deep in the process of writing a book on power\u2014both physical power (humanity\u2019s power over nature) and social power (the power of some people over others). The book\u2019s first few chapters explore the historical process by which we developed our currently awesome powers, starting with control of fire, simple stone tools, and language. Once we had these, the pace of human empowerment picked up dramatically. We didn\u2019t have to wait for biological evolution to slowly deliver improved organs; cultural evolution could rapidly supply new ideas, behaviors, and tools\u2014which often took the forms of&nbsp;<em>prosthetic<\/em>&nbsp;organs (such as clothing and weapons) that enabled us to take over habitat from other creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While the pace of cultural evolution was much faster than that of biological evolution, major cultural innovations like the domestication of plants and animals, the creation of the first states, and the emergence of the earliest empires were still spaced thousands of years apart. However, our sudden access to the storable, portable, and concentrated energy of fossil fuels, starting roughly in the 19<sup>th<\/sup>&nbsp;century, sped up cultural evolution to the point where disruptive cultural innovations began to be separated by mere decades, sometimes just years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the factors driving cultural evolution is the rebounding interaction of technology and language. Writing, the alphabet, printing, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, internet, and social media have sped up and spatially expanded human interaction, giving us the ability to cooperate in ever larger groups, in effect granting us expanding power over space and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Power, the Acceleration of Cultural Evolution, and Our Best Hope for Survival These days I\u2019m deep in the process of writing a book on power\u2014both physical power (humanity\u2019s power over nature) and social power (the power of some people over others). The book\u2019s first few chapters explore the historical process by which we developed our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[6665,1081,19437,786],"class_list":["post-49940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-heinberg","tag-sociocultural-evolution","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49941,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49940\/revisions\/49941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}