I think I need to go read a book now… (check the link below for a fascinating and timely evolutionary biology reality check)
What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting. The internet and social networking, observes Pagel, may mark the culmination of this long evolutionary trend:
As our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: From hunter-gatherer to cutter-paster
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