This is an amazing view. I kept saying ‘No’ while I was listening to Mark Pagel but some how it seemed very convincing.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
I have difficulty in accepting this view. Not sure why, for I cannot argue against this possibility. Infiintely Stupidity? is a video worth watching. This half an hour journey is guaranteed to stimulate you and make you think.