Biology evolves through mutation propagation, and larger populations tend to regress mutations to the mean more than smaller populations.
Behavior changes don't require any mutations, and they can be shared in all directions (unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants) This already fundamentally changes how societies can evolve.
Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case, as we have continued to innovate and create new things even after we have been globally connected.
While our global society does propagate some homogeneity (McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere), it also lets innovations spread very quickly, which gives more chances for amazing new things to propagate.
It is not only about "innovation" but about cultural diversity. For good or bad, a globalized world is standardizing culture around the world. Hollywood was a very powerful starting point as allowed everyone to see what the USA produces.
> innovations spread very quickly
That is the point. There are less and less pockets of different approaches. In one side of the world someone invents a new app and people is using it in the other side of the world 3 days later. Innovation may be fast, but it is not diverse but there is a convergence of ideas and ways of thinking. If we get it right it is fantastic, if we get it wrong there are no alternatives.
A good example, hot topic, is cryptocurrencies. If it is something good they are everywhere, if it is a mistake then it is consuming an incredible amount of resources for no use. If you had pockets of innovation the impact would be smaller and it will take more time to copy it if it becomes successful.
I read the argument as being about diversity. There are innovations, but as you point out in the next paragraph, they spread quickly, which could be good, but also destroys a lot of diversity. Look at how different UI design trends spread e.g. I don't consider that a clear win. Having many less connected groups could potentially lead to more, and more diverse innovations, vs. everyone jumping on the same bandwagon
The other thing that spreads more quickly is disease (here I mean metaphorically). If everything is the same, it gets infected the same way, and I believe there is an element of that when you look at online discourse, at dark patterns and other user hostile business practices, etc.
There are some reasons homogeneity is good, especially locally in time, but it presents an evolutionarily disadvantage over longer scales, which is what I took to be the point of the MC quote
Actually, transgenesis happens. E.g. bacteria can share genes horizontally with plasmids. And viruses may bring genes from unrelated species.
Take society as an organism in the abstract and it definitely needs to mutate.
Crichton was a pop science author, right-wing believer in America. His idea small groups get things done was lost on this guy who watched entire corporations publish his books and movies. I’d take his philosophy and science creds with a grain of salt.
The masses were too busy collectively validating his banal artistic efforts, so of course he would balk at collectivism philosophically while ignoring it took a village to lift him up.
Those folks are scared that if everyone can have time to write mediocre sci fi they’d have to get real jobs.
"In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving.
My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all the media and books ever produced at your fingertips, free of charge. What you might've figured out in 30 years of your own trials and tribulations can now be learned in a couple of years reading books. Of course pride and arrogance keeps us from learning but that's a different story and will probably be weeded out by evolution much faster now than ever before thanks to free access to information.
An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on.
In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that.
It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method.
But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.
There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima.
Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.
Depends on the problem. If the problem is complex enough, say nutrition, then you see constantly changing narratives and theories and even competing ones in the present. There's no Best Solution™ way to nourish ourselves yet so people experiment and the top competing theories are being actively discussed and debated. Sure there are keto / vegan / paleo nuts out there but they're just test subjects really. Same argument can be said about software dev, there's no best language or best framework; or about ways to earn money, employment vs entrepreneurship is not a settled debate.
Can you name some problem that you feel has stagnated in the modern world?
Sure - passive cooling for homes. Architecture used to vary dramatically by climate. In the last 50 years or so new homes are generally only designed for electric cooling.
It's so easy to literally build a square box and stick a cooler/heater in it that everyone (including me) chooses to do it.
Does that mean it's the right way for us to be handling heating/cooling for our homes? Sure seemed like it 50 years ago. Sure seems less like it today with climate change, but we've already picked, and now general cultural preferences make it hard to undo (not even mentioning sunk costs on buildings that are hard to modify)
Basically - the point they're making is that as we homogenize, we put all the eggs in one basket. And we have a long history of making decisions that seem GREAT! today, but actually have some downsides at scale (like electric AC contributing to climate change, requiring more electric AC, making climate change worse, etc)
Truth is we haven't got to 5 billion online. Just getting 3 billion online has run into massive issues that has split the net in many ways no one imagined. It doesn't look like we will ever get to 5 billion.
So there is some baked in natural resistance. Andrew Odlyzko is looking like he was onto something when he said Metcalfe and Reeds Law of network growth would not hold.
Primarily the limitation is the 6 inch chimp brain and the Dunbar number. If the avg chimp has the channel capacity for a 100 ppl max what's the point of all this connectivity?
We are taking our sweet time to realise it.
Micro (is a Honey I shrunk the kids story but with a much more jurassic park science vibe. Have no idea why its hasn't been made into a movie)
Timeline (has been made into a movie and is a cool time travel story)
And science evolved greatly in the highly interconnected parts of the world.
This is more than backwards. Evolution does not only accelerate when you connect small populations into a larger one, it also starts happening on a higher level, selecting over collections of traits larger than what was possible before.
Group diversity (like speciation) of course depends on isolation, but individual diversity does not. It depends on a series of factors that are completely different for memetic and biologic evolution. (Personally, I don't know how either react to isolation, but since the author got wrong every single fact that I know, I don't imagine he has any idea either.)
I saw it first hand when I migrated to USA, here people religiously watched news and had very uniform, fixed ideas about policies, whereas where I came from TV was still a luxury back then. I found people more open minded willing to engage in different views.
The more connected we become the less diverse we get in terms of perspectives.
Now everyone can live in virtual echo chambers where everyone agrees with them and they never need to compromise. So they start viewing anyone who disagrees with them as pure evil.
When population numbers within a species are large, interbreeding will tend to dilute genetic mutations within the total population. When populations are small, e.g. due to physical isolation or temporal isolation, mutations are more likely to spread and become established. This is increased further when selective pressure is applied.
https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr...
My own TLDR: Explains how the trauma and betrayal experienced by Boomers impacted that generation, and how it may have forged Crichton's personal philosophy.
Uniformity: top-down
COVID as an example, would have previously been a contained regional outbreak. Globalism made it an instant problem for every continent. Social media exacerbated responses in most every country.
Interconnectivity is fragility.
Monocultures are fragile. The only part of globalisation that gives me cause for concern is that it can make bigger monopolies that would otherwise be possible.
"This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity."