I wonder - have we become trapped in a type of culture that has turned us into Neanderthals? What do I mean by this weird statement?
I wrote yesterday
"Remember that we think that complex language was an adaptation to hunting on the savannah and hence was our start as homo sapiens - the tool maker. Our new ability to learn across tribes and across time, rather than only directly face to face in present time, gave us the ability to adapt to changes in the environment by using culture not biology.
Neanderthal did not innovate. In 200,000 years his tools' set did not change much. He could not cope with the invasion of Homo sapiens and was extinct within 1,000 years of first contact. With no complex language he could not communicate ideas in the abstract. He therefore could not cross tribal barriers. With no complex language he could not recall the past nor imagine the future. He could only work in the context of the present.
We are like that today.
In the modern organization there is no allowance for cross tribal discussion. Instead of looking across, we look up and down. This is also true of our learning organizations such as Universities. University departments are trapped inside their disciplines and find cross disciplinary work very challenging. Yet we know that the breakout in human potential came as a result of using complex language to look across boundaries. Innovation seems to demand a diverse perspective. As one human tribe found a new way to make a tool - the horizontal links drove not only adoption but improvement. Recursive loops between tribes accelerated the improvements.
In the modern organization, and in political life, we live in a fixed present - the life cycle of a CEO or an administration. There is a denigration of the past. We puff up our selves by dismissing the work of the predecessors. Because we do not look to enough to the past, we fail to see the patterns available there that tell us why and how we are in the present. Consequently, we cannot see the systemic causes of current problems. So, instead, we look for simple cause and effect - a view of causality that does not exist in the natural world. We not only do not look at the context of the past, but we seem incapable of imagining the future. Our days and minds are filled with the crises of the present. So we, like Neanderthal, are trapped in the present unable to move .
We have been trapped by a cultural meme that has turned us into Neanderthals.
So what is the way out? I think that social software will be like complex language. It offers us the chance to cope with our challenges by once again opening up the context of the past so that we can see the patterns. It re-attaches us to the power of the future to pull us forward. How does it do this? By opening up the horizontal channels and by opening up time again.
Is blogging an evolutionary tool?
1:12:24 PM 
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