hi, just stumbled upon your blog after reading your latest piece on mathematics, and came back to read this inaugural post. i was wondering, how do you adress the post-colonial concern with evolutionary thinking regarding contingency (the idea that things are not "suposed to be" the way they are, and the fact that somethings is doesn't mean that it couldn't have happened differently)
i think the problem becomes clear un the following quote: "the present moment only exists in its current shape because it evolved from the past, built on everything that came before. The electric car couldn’t exist if we hadn’t first developed the motor car and the electric battery. It may seem trivial, but human society – our modern, globalised civilisation – evolved from the societies of the past. We didn’t just inherit the obvious technological developments, but also the more subtle (but no less pervasive) cultural and political developments."
if historical transformations are driven by humanity's adaptative change to evolutionary pressure, the output you would expect varies enormously according to how you understand "adaptative" and whom belongs within humans
This is a complex issue that deserves an article of its own to do it justice, but, briefly, the selective pressures acting on the political and cultural evolution of human civilisation over the last 12,000 years have been mostly driven by other humans (either through war or trade with others, or internal political and economic struggles within polities).
So it’s of course true that, with different initial conditions, or even different random events taking place at high leverage moments in history, we would have ended up somewhere completely different. But I am approaching this more through the lens of what did happen, rather than what could have been, purely because I am more interested in using an understanding of how we got to the present moment to influence the future.
Enjoyed reading - is very much in your voice. Will look forward to the next post.
What a brilliant read. I can't wait for more, particularly the intersection with mental health.
hi, just stumbled upon your blog after reading your latest piece on mathematics, and came back to read this inaugural post. i was wondering, how do you adress the post-colonial concern with evolutionary thinking regarding contingency (the idea that things are not "suposed to be" the way they are, and the fact that somethings is doesn't mean that it couldn't have happened differently)
i think the problem becomes clear un the following quote: "the present moment only exists in its current shape because it evolved from the past, built on everything that came before. The electric car couldn’t exist if we hadn’t first developed the motor car and the electric battery. It may seem trivial, but human society – our modern, globalised civilisation – evolved from the societies of the past. We didn’t just inherit the obvious technological developments, but also the more subtle (but no less pervasive) cultural and political developments."
if historical transformations are driven by humanity's adaptative change to evolutionary pressure, the output you would expect varies enormously according to how you understand "adaptative" and whom belongs within humans
Thanks for checking out the back catalogue.
This is a complex issue that deserves an article of its own to do it justice, but, briefly, the selective pressures acting on the political and cultural evolution of human civilisation over the last 12,000 years have been mostly driven by other humans (either through war or trade with others, or internal political and economic struggles within polities).
So it’s of course true that, with different initial conditions, or even different random events taking place at high leverage moments in history, we would have ended up somewhere completely different. But I am approaching this more through the lens of what did happen, rather than what could have been, purely because I am more interested in using an understanding of how we got to the present moment to influence the future.