Thread by @jmikolay

I read and synthesized 4 of the most influential books of the past decade:
-The Beginning of Infinity
-The Origins of Creativity
-The Rational Optimist
-Sapiens

Here's what they say about human progress, potential, evolution & creativity:

Progress starts with rebellion
-Rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge
-Refusal to accept the present order of things
-@DavidDeutschOxf @carlorovelli

The potential for human progress is unlimited.

The more human beings have exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process.
-@mattwridley

There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism.

The source of our theories is conjecture, and the source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.
-@DavidDeutschOxf

Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species.

It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution, and is still under way.
-@DavidDeutschOxf

Will there be heroic ages of the intellect in the future? I feel certain that there will be. Outside our sensory bubble are countless prospects...

The challenge is to translate the previously unperceived into the limited audio-visual world of human consciousness.
-E.O. Wilson

So long as somewhere somebody is incentivized to invent ways of serving others’ needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.
-@mattwridley

Our species is uniquely endowed with language, the greatest evolutionary advance since the eukaryotic cell.

Language freed the mind from the animal to be creative, thence to enter and imagine other worlds infinite in time and space.
-E.O. Wilson

Language is the basis of society.

Our minds can travel lightning-fast through space and time, and, with increasing scientific precision, visit any place on the planet, and beyond.

Language is not just a creation of humanity, it *is* humanity.
-E.O. Wilson

At the highest level of creativity, all human beings talk and sing and tell stories.

Drawing on the combined consciousness of our species, each one of us can go anywhere in the universe, seize any power, achieve any goal.
-E.O. Wilson

The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions.

Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.
-@harari_yuval

The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively and revise behavior rapidly.

This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.
-@harari_yuval

Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.

Without the ability to compose fiction, humans are unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers. Nor can we adapt to rapidly changing challenges.
-@harari_yuval

Creativity is the innate quest for originality. The driving force is humanity's instinctive love of novelty:
-The discovery of new entities & processes
-The solving of old challenges & disclosure of new ones
-The aesthetic surprise of unanticipated facts & theories

-E.O. Wilson

Creativity is the capacity to create new explanations.
-@DavidDeutschOxf

Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material.
-@mattwridley

To create is to recombine.
-François Jacob

The extraordinary capacity for change in our species is not something that happened within a brain. It happened between brains.
-@mattwridley

Meme: a unit of cultural imitation
-Richard Dawkins (1976)

Cultural imitation enables fast adaptation, and “humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation.”
-@mattwridley

Imitation enables adaptation by “transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.”
-@harari_yuval

Originality and style are measured by the degree to which the innovations attract imitation.

We judge creativity by the magnitude of the emotional response it evokes.
-E.O. Wilson

Natural selection gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species.
-@mattwridley

Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.
-Will Durant (bonus)

Prosperity is time saved: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.
-@mattwridley

History’s themes:

The metastasis of exchange, specialization, & the invention it calls forth, the ‘creation’ of time

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more & more diff. things by each producing fewer and fewer
-@mattwridley

Specialization encouraged innovation because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool.
-@mattwridley

But tool-making is of little consequence unless it is coupled with the ability to cooperate with many others.
-@DavidDeutschOxf