The last two posts were interesting. Lately, I've been on a a quest to understand non-randomness and , perhaps, a bit overly occupied by it. But . . . .
Years ago, I read an article (actually an article about a scientific article) about a monkey breed living on some islands in the eastern Pacific. Some scientist was studying them and in that process discovered one day that one of the monkeys had started taking a longish stick, stuck it in his mouth to get it sticky, and then put it down an ant hole to collect ants for lunch. All new and innovative behavior and a chance for the scientist to watch new technology move thru an environment.
Shortly afterward, while on another nearby island visiting a different group he noticed that these monkeys also had just started using the same food gathering technique. And theses monkeys don't swim. . . . . Somehow this new monkey technology moved from one island to, over a brief time, a group of islands. All, it seems, spontaneously and without much monkey effort or cross island communication. Hmmmm? (Although, I guess maybe a few male monkeys could have swam across the ocean at nite with silk stockings and showed the lady monkeys how to use the sticks. Sorry, this thought just happened and was typed before I could stop it.
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Anyway, as my small hi-jack goes, I think lots of good technologies spread seemingly spontaneously and rapidly thruout the human world too. Sometimes scientists working separately arrive at similar answers to things, or formulas or whatever, without even knowing about the other person. Einstein was working alone in a patent office, in a non-academic setting, and came up with a bunch of wonderful ideas. Simultaneously, a flood of related ideas powerfully worked their way up and outward from the scientific and research community, responding, as I see it, to a powerful need in the environment. When Ray Kroc was thinking about a fast food restaurant chain, both the environment for its application was perfect, the correct combination of private cars, traveling and desire for consistent foods, and the idea just took off and was subsequently widely applied by many others with slightly altered game plans (KFC, Jack in the Box, etc).
I see a sort of semi-spontaneous emergence of energy efficiency and green ideas arising all over the place right now. It's a wonderful and good thing. Now we just need to figure out how to make the back seats in those Priuses a bit bigger
to encourage even more, um, good behaviors and thinking.