Authors & Works cited in this section (citations below):
Brenner, Neil, & C. Schmid. 2014. “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” "Contextual organismality begins from the recognition that the condition of organismality is not fixed but instead depends on context." Diaz-Munoz, Samuel, Boddy A., Dantas G., Waters C. & Bronstein J. 2016. "Contextual organismality: Beyond pattern to process in the emergence of organisms." Evolution. 70-12: 2669-2677. P. 2670.
"It is straightforward to envision that loose interactions, such as interspecific mutualisms, incorporate both cooperation and conflict and are context dependent." Diaz-Munoz, Samuel, Boddy A., Dantas G., Waters C. & Bronstein J. 2016. "Contextual organismality: Beyond pattern to process in the emergence of organisms." Evolution. 70-12: 2669-2677. P. 2672.
"Thus, a lack of context dependency can be used as an indicator of an organism, that is, a group that preserves high cooperation and low conflict among the parts across widely divergent contexts." Diaz-Munoz, Samuel, Boddy A., Dantas G., Waters C. & Bronstein J. 2016. "Contextual organismality: Beyond pattern to process in the emergence of organisms." Evolution. 70-12: 2669-2677. P. 2674.
"As outlined in our examples, the cooperation-conflict dynamic of a group can change in response to resource availability in a wide variety of biological entities. In response to nutrient starvation, bacteria, amoeba, and cancer cells increase their cooperative interactions to create new forms of organismality: fruiting bodies, slugs, and tumors, respectively." Diaz-Munoz, Samuel, Boddy A., Dantas G., Waters C. & Bronstein J. 2016. "Contextual organismality: Beyond pattern to process in the emergence of organisms." Evolution. 70-12: 2669-2677. P. 2676.
"... evolution has been punctuated by hierarchical evolutionary transitions (HET) [also known as transitions in individuality], whereby simple units assembled into groups that themselves became new units of biological organization." Van Gestel, Jordi & Tarnita C. 2017. "On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity." PNAS. October 17. V 114. N 42. 11018-11026. P. 11018.
"Bonner focused in particular on the role of the life cycle in the HET to multicellularity. He argued that the life cycle encapsulates all properties needed for the potential to evolve by natural selection (i.e., reproduction and heritable variation) and considered the life cycle, and not the organism, to be the unit of biology. With this view, biological entities (including groups) have the potential to be a unit of selection if and only if they are part of a life cycle." Van Gestel, Jordi & Tarnita C. 2017. "On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity." PNAS. October 17. V 114. N 42. 11018-11026. P. 11019. Reference: Bonner, JT. 1965. Size and Cycle: An Essay on the Structure of Biology. Princeton UP.
"Even in endosymbioses, facultative associations between the symbiotic partners are hypothesized to have preceded obligate relationships." Van Gestel, Jordi & Tarnita C. 2017. "On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity." PNAS. October 17. V 114. N 42. 11018-11026. P. 11019.
"It is important to note that here the role of ecology is distinct from the one typically considered in studies on HET: while most studies only consider the ecology when it comes to the selection pressures that favor group formation, we emphasize that the ecology can also play a critical role in triggering and supporting the origination of the first group life cycles." Van Gestel, Jordi & Tarnita C. 2017. "On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity." PNAS. October 17. V 114. N 42. 11018-11026. P. 11020.
"Bonner pointed out that all aquatic origins of multicellularity arose via ST [stay together], while most terrestrial origins arose via CT [come together]. This shows that the physics of the environment–for example, a relative lack of surfaces that could support aggregative multicellularity in aquatic systems–can constrain the possible grouping mechanisms, reemphasizing the diverse and critical roles of ecology in the origination of groups." Van Gestel, Jordi & Tarnita C. 2017. "On the origin of biological construction, with a focus on multicellularity." PNAS. October 17. V 114. N 42. 11018-11026. P. 11021. Reference: Bonner, JT. 1998. "The origins of multicellularity." Integr Biol. 1:27-36.
"At the core of this look across geohistory is an emphasis on urban spatial causality, how cities as spatially organized social formations actively shape social relations and help to stimulate societal development. Cityspace in this sense is not just a place in which social life unfolds and major events occur but is also an affective and consequential context." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 363.
"... it can be argued that he world’s earliest urban settlements took place in the highland belt running through southern Anatolia to present day Iran and south into the levant rather than in the so-called Fertile Crescent of alluvial Mesopotamia." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. Pp. 363-4.
"But what is clearly suggested from contemporary archeological evidence and the logic of distance-minimizing human spatial behavior is that urbanization and agricultural development evolved together in a mutually causal and symbiotic relationship. The creation of an agricultural surplus played a key role in stimulating the development of cities, but just as important, urbanization played a generative role in the Agricultural Revolution." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 364.
"The settling down into permanent urban clusters was perhaps the most revolutionary event in the history of human society, following after at least 2,000,000 years of existence as small nomadic bands of fewer than a hundred members." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 364.
"There is no clear evidence of early agricultural villages that somehow grew into cities. Indeed, the idea that reasonable people would cluster together in permanent dwellings to farm does not make sense, especially when defense against outsiders was not a factor." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 365.
"Trade then was the primary urbanizing force, especially in the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the main commodity was workable stones such as flint and obsidian, the volcanic glass that was most closely associated with the growth of Catalhoyuk." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 365.
"Catalhoyuk, perhaps the major metropolis of the Neolithic, lasted for nearly 2,000 years,.... Its generative power was impressive, leading to expanding agricultural development, innovative architecture and urban design, a form of highly egalitarian and family based religion, and the greatest burst of artistic creativity in human geohistory up to that time." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 365.
"After around 8,000 BP, however, before the flowering of the Mesopotamian city-states, evidence of walled settlements has been found showing signs of increasingly centralized authority and growing hierarchy, with some buildings much larger than others and with urban spaces possibly devoted to ceremony and/or exchange.... "What this suggests, as noted earlier, is that urbanization and state formation grew together symbiotically, very much like the mutually stimulating development of cities and agriculture...." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 366.
"The stimulus of urban agglomeration began to have an effect 12,000 years ago, reached an early peak in Catalhoyuk, and would explode again in Sumeria with the formation of city-states,..." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 367.
"Following Aristotle, Isin argues that politics are essentially urban generated, intrinsic to the city-state or polis, and reflective of deepening inequality of power and wealth. Without a sense of urban spatial causality, this argument becomes incomprehensible and almost impossible to understand and accept. Yet it is a vital part of what was happening in the eastern borderlands of the Mediterranean starting 8,000 years ago, as peaceful and egalitarian stateless cities became politically charged city-states." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. Pp. 368-9. Reference: Isin, E. 2002. Being political: Genealogies of citizenship. U of Minnesota Press.
"The rise and globalization of mercantile cities, many without significant state functions, had another geographical effect, leading to a rapidly growing coastal urbanization process, as port cities and long distance trade routes connected the littoral of all the worlds inhabited continents and contributed to the relative decline of some city-states located deeper inland." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 370.
"The Industrial Revolution accordingly triggered an exponential surge in urbanization unlike any that preceded it. The proportion of the world’s population that lives in cities remained very low, probably well under 1%, for the first 6,000 years of societal development. It rises only slightly over the next 5,000 years through the age of the city-state, but explodes in the late eighteenth century, when some states such as Great Britain and the Netherlands became predominantly urban for the first time as a third mode of urbanization emerged in association with the growth of the industrial capitalist city." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 370.
"Manchester illustrated paradigmatically the intertwined co-evolution of urbanization and industrialization in a chicken and egg dynamic resembling what happened earlier with regard to agricultural development and state formation." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 371.
"There has been broad agreement that three interactive forces have been primarily responsible for the restructuring of cities and states in the contemporary era. The new technologies have played a facilitative role in fostering an accelerated globalization of capital, labor, and culture and the formation of what is summarily called a ‘New Economy,’ variably described as postfordist, information intensive, flexible, and global. While evidence of the effects of these three forces can be found nearly everywhere to some degree, they combine in unique ways in every city and state to pose new challenges to interpretation, comparative analysis, and theory-building. "... I focus here on two closely related aspects of the contemporary restructuring of cities and states: rescaling and regionalization. Rescaling refers to the re-organization of the spatial scales and hierarchical structures through which cities and states operate. Scale has conventionally been seen as rigidly defined and almost naturally given.... The notions of rescaling and regionalization in this sense provide a specifically spatial framework for understanding the co-evolution of cities and states." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 373.
"The unbounding of the modern metropolis, as in part the product of the globalization of the urban, creating the most culturally and economically heterogeneous cities the world has ever seen, has been at the same time leading to the urbanization of the entire globe." Soja, Edward. 2010. "Cities and states in geohistory." Theor Soc. 39:361-376. P. 375.
"While performing a joint task, co-actors typically monitor their task progress to determine whether the current state of the joint action and the desired action outcome are aligned.... Monitoring is useful to detect mistakes or unexpected outcomes in one’s own or one’s partner’s performance, enabling one to quickly react and adapt accordingly... Findings from an EEG experiment with expert musicians indicate that the neural signature associated with the detection of unexpected musical outcomes is similar irrespective of whether an auditory deviation arises from one’s own or the partner’s action. This suggests that co-actors monitor the actions toward the overall joint goal in addition to their own individually controlled part." Vesper, Cordula, Abramova E, Butepage J, Ciardo F, Crossey B, Effenberg A, Hristova D, Karlinsky A, McEllin L, Nijssen S, Schmitz L & Wahn B. 2017. "Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others." Frontiers in Psychology. January 4. V 7. Article 2039. P. 3.
"Joint attention relies on co-actors’ ability to monitor each other’s gaze and attentional states. For instance, when synchronizing actions, co-actors divide attention between locations relevant for their own and for their co-actor’s goal, and sharing gaze affects object processing by making attended objects motorically and emotionally more relevant." Vesper, Cordula, Abramova E, Butepage J, Ciardo F, Crossey B, Effenberg A, Hristova D, Karlinsky A, McEllin L, Nijssen S, Schmitz L & Wahn B. 2017. "Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others." Frontiers in Psychology. January 4. V 7. Article 2039. P. 3.
"For instance, Tomeo et al found that expert soccer players, compared to novices, more effectively predict the direction of a kick from another person’s body kinematics." Vesper, Cordula, Abramova E, Butepage J, Ciardo F, Crossey B, Effenberg A, Hristova D, Karlinsky A, McEllin L, Nijssen S, Schmitz L & Wahn B. 2017. "Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others." Frontiers in Psychology. January 4. V 7. Article 2039. P. 4. Reference: Tomeo E, Cesari P, Aglioti S & Urgesi C. 2012. "Fooling the kickers but not the goalkeepers: behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of fake action detection in soccer." Cereb. Cortex. 23: 2765-2778.
"Accordingly, coactors might adjust the kinematic features of their action (e.g. velocity or movement height) in order to make their own actions easier to predict for another person. Thus, ‘sensorimotor communication’ is characterized by having both an instrumental (e.g., pushing a sofa) and a communicative goal (e.g., informing a partner about one’s movement direction). This facilitates action prediction by disambiguating different motor intentions for the observer, thereby relying on people’s ability to detect even subtle kinematic cues." Vesper, Cordula, Abramova E, Butepage J, Ciardo F, Crossey B, Effenberg A, Hristova D, Karlinsky A, McEllin L, Nijssen S, Schmitz L & Wahn B. 2017. "Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others." Frontiers in Psychology. January 4. V 7. Article 2039. P. 4.
"Mother-infant tactile communication, gaze, and emotional vocalization are found in all cultures and societies, although cross-cultural research revealed that touch plays a more important role for communication during play and learning in traditional compared to Western societies. Moreover, tactile communication is integral to cultural practices such as dance and martial arts." Vesper, Cordula, Abramova E, Butepage J, Ciardo F, Crossey B, Effenberg A, Hristova D, Karlinsky A, McEllin L, Nijssen S, Schmitz L & Wahn B. 2017. "Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others." Frontiers in Psychology. January 4. V 7. Article 2039. P. 4.
"Historically, the word ‘organism’ emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in particular in the debate between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the chemist and physician Georg-Ernest Stahl, the author of a 1708 essay On the difference between mechanism and organism.... For Leibniz, the particularity of the organisms consists in the level of complexity of its organisation: for him, organisms are machines that are machines down to their smallest parts... This contrasts with Stahl’s conception of an organism, as he prefers to think of the organism as a whole governed by the soul at all levels of its bodily functioning from the way we blink if an object comes too close to our eyes, to our fighting off an infection, to fully involuntary processes like digestion. Although Leibniz also insists on the role of the soul or the dominant monad in his account of living beings, this role is far less central to it than to Stahl’s. Consequently, the term ‘organism’ occurs rarely in the Enlightenment, when people spoke more of ‘organised bodies’ or ‘organisation’. Kant ... speaks of organised bodies’ rather than of ‘organism.’" Demarest, Boris & Wolfe, Charles. 2017. "The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond." HPLS. 39:2. P. 2.
"For the period from Leibniz to Kant is also the period when biology as a science is emerging, the term ‘biology’ itself appearing in the 1760s, although it only settles into stable usage as the designation of a comprehensive science of life by the 1800s." Demarest, Boris & Wolfe, Charles. 2017. "The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond." HPLS. 39:2. P. 3.
"In order to clarify some of these issues, we distinguish between strong and weak conceptions of organism, where the weak conception simply holds that organisms are types of organisation with some specific features, like homeostasis, which are not found in storms or supernovas, whereas the strong conception insists on a real, irreducible uniqueness or organisms and challenges our entire scientific world-picture on the basis thereof e.g. Goldstein’s insistence that the organism is ‘in time’ and characterised by its ‘historicity’ as opposed to the rest of physical nature." Demarest, Boris & Wolfe, Charles. 2017. "The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond." HPLS. 39:2. P. 3.
"Buffon warns us that the success of mathematical physics should not be taken as evidence that nature’s inner structure is on a par with the mathematical structures through which we understand it. Instead, we should keep in mind that mathematical physics is only successful as an approach to those phenomena that are almost unphysical, i.e. unnatural in being abstract. Buffon identifies having physical (natural) qualities with being composite and complex, and being geometrically simple with being unnatural and ‘devoid of physical qualities’. Hence Buffon’s anti-mathematicism in the life sciences: the phenomena of life are those of organisation, of real physical qualities, and not those of abstract mathematical structure." Demarest, Boris & Wolfe, Charles. 2017. "The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond." HPLS. 39:2. P. 10.
"Buffon suggests that the mistake here is to have substituted for real, complex and rich nature that teems with life the impoverished conception of nature proposed by Pythagoreans and Platonists. In real nature, organisation is a common, perfectly natural phenomenon, whereas in the latter it can only be introduced by the special structuring powers of an intentional agent, be it a vital principle, and animal soul or a divine creator." Demarest, Boris & Wolfe, Charles. 2017. "The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond." HPLS. 39:2. P. 11.
"Urban has come to mean what modern scholars want it to mean. It may have functional connotations; or contain sociological empirical distinctions, highly influenced by Western societies; or be viewed from the perspective of seats of power; practice theory; the Weberian division into consumer, producer and merchant city; or indeed Fletcher’s global model of settlement growth. This list is very long." Gaydarska, Bisserka. 2017. "Introduction: European Prehistory and Urban Studies." J World Prehist 30:177-188. P. 179.
"Two factors are identified whose structuring effect has important implications for delineating sites in a relational framework. The first one is centrality. Central places are understood variably in archaeology: as properties of geographically-inspired Thiessen polygons; as meaningful nodes in the landscape; as the dominant part of a core-periphery model; or as a gateway community integrating a centre with its hinterland.... "The second factor is intensification of what Cowgill calls variables: the economic basis (production, distribution, consumption); ideology (political, ritual, civic, the ‘Big Other’, and the ways in which values are negotiated); investment projects (stone architecture, ditches, ramparts); exchange networks (staple goods, exotic goods, prestige goods); inter-personal relations and social power (relational, heterarchical, hierarchical); conflict (competition, warfare); utilization of social space (at site level and at landscape level, including the use and ownership of land); and cultural memory and representation (mnemonics, writing, performance)." Gaydarska, Bisserka. 2017. "Introduction: European Prehistory and Urban Studies." J World Prehist 30:177-188. Pp. 180-1.
"This essay traces the origins and legacy of this scientific commitment to a universal family of man in postwar evolutionary theory, and elaborates how scientists ... sought to reframe the politics of human evolution by claiming that the principles governing the physical past of humanity differed fundamentally from those that would matter in the coming decades, centuries, or even millennia. They argued that when humans became human, a new form of evolutionary process came into being. Our capacity for culture, language, and ability to manufacture complex technologies, signaled a pronounced break with the past and necessitated a new set of conceptual scientific tools for thinking about humanity’s possible evolutionary futures. Whether they called it cultural, creative, or social evolution, liberal scientists endowed humanity’s escape from our physical past with hope and self-determination." Milam, Erika L. 2016. "The Ascent of Man and the Politics of Humanity’s Evolutionary Future." Endeavour. V 40. N 4. P. 225.
"The origins of humanity lay in a quantum evolutionary transition, he [Dobzhansky] wrote–a ‘pronounced break in the biological continuity’–that ushered in a ‘third kind of history.’ Cosmic history described the physical evolution of the universe and then everything changed when the origins of life created biological evolution. The origins of humanity changed things again." Milam, Erika L. 2016. "The Ascent of Man and the Politics of Humanity’s Evolutionary Future." Endeavour. V 40. N 4. P. 233.
"There are a number of different ongoing research questions associated with the major transitions, which we can organize into three classes. The first asks how transitions occur: what are the mutations or other changes that first get the process going and then drive it along?.... "Secondly, we can questions [sic] about why transitions occur – for what reason does a population sometimes change from State One to State Two [groups formed from State One entities]? In other words, what sort of fitness benefits are made available by moving to a higher level of organization? Calcott calls this the problem of ‘generating benefit’. What is it about the proximate mutations/novel traits that makes them selectively advantageous?... "Finally, we can ask questions about how the higher-level organization is maintained, especially what protects cooperative interactions among the parts of a new higher-level organism from invasion by free-riding cheats. What makes the spread of the novel traits robust? In virtue of what are the objects in State Two evolutionarily stable?" Clarke, Ellen. 2014. "Origins of evolutionary transitions." J. Biosci. 39(2) April. 303-317. Pp. 305-6.
"Across human cultures, ritual displays the hallmarks of costly signals: indexical, analogue, repetitive, energetic, multimedia, and emotional in effect. Speech, by contrast, is conventional, digital, low-cost, and dispassionate. Whereas in ritual, the receiver’s focus will be on performance, in speech, the focus shifts to underlying intention: what is the speaker meaning to say?" Power, Camilla. 2014. "Signal evolution and the social brain." Pp. 47-55. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. Pp. 48-9.
"The cost of a signal can be divided into a component of ‘efficacy’ cost–what is needed to ensure the information can be perceived–and ‘strategic’ cost–the extra handicap which ensures honesty. In the case of speech, extraordinarily, all the costs appear to fall into the efficacy component; the efforts of both speaker and listener are channelled into distinguishing between contrastive phonemes, combined and recombined on a second digital level where semantic meaning emerges." Power, Camilla. 2014. "Signal evolution and the social brain." Pp. 47-55. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 49.
"Where all non-human signals evolve to alter behaviour in the real world, and are affected by factors of Darwinian behavioural competition for food and mates, language is designed instead to alter what is inside a listener’s mind, operating in that sense in a virtual world." Power, Camilla. 2014. "Signal evolution and the social brain." Pp. 47-55. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 50.
"BaYaka seek to speak as many ‘languages’ (djoki) as they can. Their speech is incorporative, open, encompassing, and inclusive. It is a skilful multi-modal deployment of a range of capacities inherent to human bodies that serve to establish relationships with as many creatures as possible." Lewis, Jerome. 2014. "BaYaka Pygmy multi-modal and mimetic communication traditions." Pp. 77-91. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 85.
"Ian Cross’ suggestion that music and language are part of a human communicative continuum is useful. Mbendjele have adapted each to different purposes: language to express individual intentions and needs, and to organize and negotiate interpersonal relationships and activities; music to structure groups and enable them to ‘speak’ to other groups as collectives rather than as individuals. "When Mbendjele group together in ritualized ways to sing and dance, they speak as one. If only one spoke for them all, it would imply leadership. If each talked at once nothing would be understood. But when all sing, the message is reinforced and repetition strengthens the point rather than tiring listeners. Crucially, a singing group can say things that no individual in the group could say without fearing repercussions." Lewis, Jerome. 2014. "BaYaka Pygmy multi-modal and mimetic communication traditions." Pp. 77-91. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 88. Reference: Cross, Ian. 2005. "Music and Meaning, Ambiguity and Evolution." Pp. 27-43. Miell, D., R. Macdonald & D. Hargreaves (Eds). Musical Communication. Oxford UP.
"Just as each sex employs different reproductive and productive strategies, so too do they differ in their use of similar propensities for mimicry. Based on insight from Mbendjele, women’s mimicry is aimed outwards to ward off dangerous animals, and inwards against individuals who don’t respect the moral order. Women’s mimicry depends on their solidarity for its success: in the case of keeping dangerous animals away, they group together and mimic the forest and each other to produce overlapping sounds that deceive animals about the size of the group. In the second case, they use mimicry to collectively shame those who have behaved in socially unacceptable ways and so impose a normative order on society.... "Both these uses of mimicry enable high levels of trust to be generated and maintained between members of the social group. This enables deceptive signals normally aimed at outsiders to be redeployed for social reasons within the trusting group. So men returning from the hunt could use acoustic and gestural animal mimicry to share their experiences–for instance in describing an accident to non-participants back at camp–and with repetition, establish early lexicon." Lewis, Jerome. 2014. "BaYaka Pygmy multi-modal and mimetic communication traditions." Pp. 77-91. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. Pp. 90-1.
"... all the other systems [of communications such as paintings, films, etc.] work with what I call the experiential strategy. They provide materials for the interlocutors to experience with their senses. Language, on the other hand, works with a radically different strategy: it is dedicated to the systematic instruction of imagination. It allows speakers to intentionally and systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended experience, as opposed to directly experiencing it." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 106.
"... I agree ... that language and intersubjectivity are very closely interrelated, and that early humans must have gone through an entire stage of evolutionary development, before language, that resulted in the emergence of a co-operative, mimetic, intersubjective species." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 108.
"I will call the sharing of experience experiential communication. Systems of experiential communication do not attempt to bridge the experiential gap between the two sides: they only become functional where the gap itself is reduced. There are two types of systems of experiential communication: the great majority are what I call presentational. These allow the communicator to behave in a way that is, at the very same time, determined by his or her experience and made available for experiencing by the receiver. A cry of pain, a frowning expression, a smile, a hug, a kick, a threatening posture, demonstrations of physical strength, different forms of mimesis (and teaching through mimesis), manual gestures, grunts and screams, music and dance–all these employ the strategy of presentation. Many other systems of communication, invented and used only by humans, employ a different but related strategy: they are re-presentational. They allow for displacement of the experiential type. In such systems–drawings, paintings, maps, musical recordings, photographs, and movies–the sender’s experience is recorded, frozen in time, delivered from the here-and-now of the sender’s experience into the receiver’s here-and-now, where it is ‘melted back’, so to speak, brought back to life in his or her mind. The products of re-presentational communication are iconic: they provide their receivers with echoes, or silhouettes, of what they would perceive had the original experience been directly presented to them. Just like presentational systems, re-presentational systems do not attempt to bridge the experiential gap between the sender and the receiver. They use various technical means to allow for the displacement without actually bridging the experiential gap." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 110.
"In experiential communication (presentational and re-presentational), the sender communicates: ‘This is my experience’. In instructive communication, the sender communicates: ‘My experience is of this type–try to imagine’." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 111.
"... language actually allows for communication across the experiential gap: with language, speakers can make the others imagine things without presenting them with any perceptual material for experiencing. This allows for displacement, and also for the communication of inner experiences that are very difficult to communicate in experiential ways: interpretations of reality, causal generalizations, plans for action. This, I suggest, is the specific function of language, and it is the essence of the linguistic revolution in the evolution of humankind." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 111.
"Within my model, language consists of two components: the symbolic landscape and the communication protocol. The symbolic landscape is what we usually think of as the lexicon, but it is much more than just a list of words and constructions. It is a huge semantic web, a radically simplified model of the world of experience, which reflects the entire history of negotiation and struggle, within the linguistic community, over what should be properly thought of as a normative worldview. The communication protocol is a set of socially negotiated, prescriptive procedures for the process of linguistic communication. Just like the signs of the symbolic landscape, the procedures emerge from the struggle over norms–this time, the norms of communication. The two components allow speakers to channel, through the symbolic landscape, skeletal descriptions of their private experiences–which the listeners then imagine into experiential interpretations." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 111.
"What is important to see in this flow chart is the fact that it redefines the relationship between the mental and the social. What happens inside the mind of the speaker is the socialization of the private intent. What takes place inside the listener’s mind is the privatization of the social message. Language mediates between private experience and the social world. This is what it does as a social technology. This is how it bridges the gap." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 114.
"With systematic pointing and eye connection, bodily and vocal mimesis, manual demonstration, bodily movement and posture, facial expression and uniquely human social emotions, individuals in these [pre-linguistic] societies co-operated in unprecedented ways, taught each other and learned from each other, negotiated complex social relations and divisions of labour, and led highly sophisticated lives–with increasingly higher rates of collective innovation, stabilization and retention, alloparenting, music, dance, pretend play, ritual, and so on. A major component of all this was the stabilization of mutual identification as such–the ability to synchronize perception (always partially)–within the here-and-now of communication events. These societies, then, have developed experiential communication to its functional limit: communicators could systematically and reliably direct their interlocutors to a very wide variety of experiences–provided that they could be made (within a very short time range) to experience them by themselves. Handling situations in which the thing to experience was outside the experiencing range of the receiver, however, lay beyond the functional limits of the system as such. This was the Rubicon." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 116.
"Humans had to reach the limits of experiential communication, and build communities complex enough, dependent enough on communication, and sophisticated enough in terms of collective innovation to begin the exploratory search for means of communication that could bridge the experiential gaps between the communities’ members." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 118.
"For instructive communication, however, it [dissecting experiences into recognizable signs] would be vital: every advancement would provide speakers and interlocutors with more precise tools to work with. It stands to reason, then, that following the language’s initial stabilization, speakers would begin to spend more collective energy on the ongoing process of experiential mutual identification, dissection, and categorization. More and more types of experiences would be isolated from the continuum of private experience, and highlighted by social agreement." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 120.
"On the analogue continuum of experiential communication (both at the mimetic and the pre-mimetic level), vocalic and emotional variability between individuals plays a central part in the exchange. It is functional. The instructive strategy, however, would require speakers and listeners to abstract away from all this (very partially in the beginning, and then very gradually), and learn to produce and identify the same vocalizations or gestures across the continuum. In this state of affairs, every change in the arsenal of vocalization and gestures that would produce higher levels of perceptual distinctiveness would be adopted (to the extent that it could be repeated and learned), and the small changes would eventually accumulate to produce a categorical and combinatorial phonetic system." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 121.
"The same thing, then, would begin to happen at all three levels: the specific function of instructive communication would force speakers gradually to isolate language from everything else that was already part of their experiential worlds. Their experiences of linguistic sound would be gradually demarcated from their experiences of experiential vocalizations; their experiences of linguistic communication would gradually be demarcated from their experiences of experiential communication (mimetic and pre-mimetic); and the socially constructed worldview of their symbolic landscape would gradually demarcate itself, in their minds, from their worlds of private (and collective) experiencing. Language would be making its first steps towards autonomy." Dor, Daniel. 2014. "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology." Pp. 105-125. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. Pp. 121-2.
"Another possibility is to emphasize that the categories that humans recruit in making sense of the world are, in general, not restricted to the traditional ontological dichotomy of objective vs. subjective. They also include categories of fact that may be termed ‘ontologically intersubjective’, in that they exist in virtue of group consensus." Wyman, Emily. 2014. "Language and collective fiction: from children’s pretence to social institutions." Pp. 171-183. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 181.
"The ability to jointly imagine and subscribe to a set of fictional statuses that we subsequently use to guide our interactions in normative terms is qualitatively different from anything observed outside our own species. Indeed, the whole framework of collective intentionality, in which we share attention to aspects of the environment, share goals and plans for collaborating together, and subscribe to shared fictions that then further govern our interactions, indicates an evolutionary environment in which the threats of competition and social exploitation became outweighed by the necessities of cooperation and trust." Wyman, Emily. 2014. "Language and collective fiction: from children’s pretence to social institutions." Pp. 171-183. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 183.
"Symbolic culture is an environment of objective facts–whose existence depends entirely on collective belief. To use language is to navigate within that imagined world." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 228.
"To determine whether a signal or statement is ‘symbolic’, a simple rule can be applied. Is it patently false? If not, symbolism is absent. Expressions are symbolic, according to Sperber, to the extent that they are literal falsehoods serving as guides to communicative intentions. Metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and much verbal humour illustrate the principle–‘saying’ one thing while ‘meaning’ another. This communicative strategy relies on listeners’ inferential and imaginative abilities; it is central to all linguistic communication. Language in some form must have begun evolving from the moment when, for whatever reason, our ancestors first began deploying and decoding patent falsehoods in communicatively helpful ways." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 233. Reference: Sperber, D. 2005. "A Pragmatic Perspective on the Evolution of Mindreading, Communication and Language." Paper delivered to the Morris Symposium on the Evolution of Language. New York: Stony Brook.
"Words are cheap and therefore unreliable. Communal investment in repetitive and invariant (purposefully ‘inefficient’) ritual is the solution to this problem. At the apex of any congregation’s hierarchy of symbols is its ‘ultimate sacred postulate’–that article of faith which lies beyond possible denial. Without the community’s confidence in that symbol of itself, faith in the entire system of interconnected symbols would collapse." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 233. Referencing work of: Rappaport, R. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge UP.
"Putting all this together, it seems that language is digital for the same reason that it isn’t real. Its field of operation is exclusively the imagination. Its zero-cost features can prove socially acceptable and evolve only under highly unusual conditions–namely, those internal to a ritually bonded community whose members cannot benefit from lying. "Combining the insights of Chase, Sosis, Donald, Sperber, and Rappaport, we might summarize by defining symbolic culture as a domain of transparent falsehoods whose social acceptance depends on levels of trust generated through the performance of costly ritual. We might add that once the relevant fictions are socially accepted, they qualify automatically as ‘institutional facts’. Whether in language or elsewhere, institutional facts are digitally contrastive by logical necessity. You cannot be more or less someone’s wife, more or less a knight in chess. X either does have status Y or it doesn’t: there are no shades of grey." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 236.
"Human volitional control over vocal signalling, he [J. Lewis] suggests, did not evolve initially in contexts of human social interaction. Instead, it was used initially to deceive prey animals who would prove vulnerable again and again to such fakes. Humans co-operating with one another to deceive external targets wouldn’t be predicted to resist one another’s deceptions. On the contrary, they should echo and amplify them. In Lewis’ account, vocal simulations redeployed internally within the community laid the basis for vocal humour, children’s games, choral singing, narrative fiction, metaphor, religion, and so forth. Humans successfully ‘deceived’ the forest and then constructed the symbolic domain as that forest’s own echo, now directed back into the human social world." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 237.
"Distinctively human cognition evolved in this female kin-coalition context, as mothers probed potential allocarers for their co-operative intentions. Infants monitoring the intentions and feelings of mothers and others became adept at perspective-taking and integrating multiple perspectives. Offspring more skilled in reading the intentions of others and eliciting their help were better nourished and more likely to survive. Female strategies of co-operative childcare can explain how and why humans became cognitively and emotionally ‘modern’." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 241.
"In the absence of countermeasures, mothers who are pregnant or lactating may be at risk of losing male investment to the cycling female. The rapid increase in neocortex size characteristic of human evolution over the last half million years meant that mothers–now burdened with correspondingly heavier childcare costs–could no longer tolerate rampant philandering; it was in their individual fitness interest to prioritize future economic security over short-term sexual favour-seeking. Counter-dominant female coalitions on this basis responded by ‘painting up’ with false signals representing all members of the coalition as uniformly ‘fertile’. Investor males–whose offspring might have better chances of survival–had a fitness interest in colluding with the corresponding fictions. The evolutionary stability of female strategies of cosmetic bonding and adornment culminated in the transition to symbolic ritual, and–as a consequence of dramatically increased levels of in-group trust–the earliest beginnings of language-like communication." Knight, Chris. 2014. "Language and symbolic culture: an outcome of hunter-gatherer reverse dominance." Pp. 228-246. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 242.
"Many norm-governed social institutions assist children in the acquisition of language. Moreover, many aspects of language use are normative, for example (1) symbolization, which involves accepting arbitrary signs as appropriate labels; (2) most pragmatic phenomena, such as speech acts, grasping communicative intent, and displaying conversational skills (e.g. turn-taking, handling interruptions); and (3) understanding the normative context of discourse, which can transform questions into commands, requests into demands, and so on. "Language use is thus clearly affected by the normative background and the normative skills of speakers, yet, reciprocally, norms are affected by language. Acquiring social norms is often affected by linguistic cues (e.g. ‘Only women are allowed to go inside.’, ‘You shouldn’t do that!’, ‘Why did you to that ?!’) and thus by the explicitly normative vocabulary and categories that are available (e.g. ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘may’, ‘allowed’).... "Thus, language affects the normative capacity of individuals and the kinds of norms that can be established, while norms and the normative capacities of individuals affect language acquisition and use. This bi-directional interaction, I will argue, leads to co-evolutionary dynamics that are important for understanding both of these fundamental human abilities." Lamm, Ehud. 2014. "Forever united: the co-evolution of language and normativity." Pp. 267-283. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 268.
"Social facts, however, transcend the individuals who originate them, and even the entire set of individuals involved. Individuals in society are always already both recipients and exemplars of the normative and linguistic structure of their society and new members acquire current conventions and further perpetuate them. This continuity marks both language and norms." Lamm, Ehud. 2014. "Forever united: the co-evolution of language and normativity." Pp. 267-283. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 275.
"Being able to acquire the appropriate norms, and, just as importantly, to recognize signs such as frowning or grunting that indicate that your behaviour is judged by others as inappropriate, giving you a chance to make amends, are critical skills.... Noticing a violation, as well as being found by others to be a violator, involves emotions such as anger, condemnation, blame, guilt, and shame. There will be an evolutionary pressure for appropriate emotional responses, for greater emotional control, for recognizing emotional cues from others, for rationalizing and reflecting on emotional responses, and for ‘emotional engineering’ skills, such as displaying appropriate signs of contrition and humility or telling jokes." Lamm, Ehud. 2014. "Forever united: the co-evolution of language and normativity." Pp. 267-283. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 278.
"... there is little common ground to understand the term complexity in the field of animal behaviour and cognition." Cochet, Helene & R. Byrne. 2015. "Complexity in animal behaviour: towards common ground." Acta Ethol. 18:237-241. P. 237.
"This [imagining future scenarios] allows us to flexibly prepare and weigh options to take advantage of opportunities, manage threats before they manifest, and shape the future to our design. In short, episodic foresight is tremendously powerful and can be regarded as a quintessential human adaptive strategy." Suddendorf, Thomas. 2017. "The Emergence of Episodic Foresight and Its Consequences." Child Development Perspectives. V. 11. N. 3. 191-195. P. 191.
"As this metaphor [theater metaphor where many acting/directing roles equate to mental faculties to work together for episodic foresight] should make clear, episodic foresight is not an encapsulated module, but a faculty that draws on complex cognitive processes (e.g., working memory, recursive embedding, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, metarepresentation, executive functions, and language) that work together." Suddendorf, Thomas. 2017. "The Emergence of Episodic Foresight and Its Consequences." Child Development Perspectives. V. 11. N. 3. 191-195. P. 192.
"Deliberate practice refers to our capacity to engage in repeated actions with the intention to improve our future skills." Suddendorf, Thomas. 2017. "The Emergence of Episodic Foresight and Its Consequences." Child Development Perspectives. V. 11. N. 3. 191-195. P. 193.
"We postulate that the crucial selective advantage mental time travel provides is flexibility in novel situations and the versatility to develop and adopt strategic long-term plans to suit individual selected goals." Suddendorf, Thomas & M. Corballis. 2007. "The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 30: 299-351. P. 302.
"Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes." Suddendorf, Thomas & M. Corballis. 2007. "The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 30: 299-351. P. 302.
"When it comes to establishing solidarity bonds, individuals prefer those who successfully demonstrate their informational capacity and their experience with unexpected events. In our species, those who know first or who can draw highly relevant events from their past experience make potentially good allies. Natural selection favored not only this preference, but also the narrative skills that allow any of us to display these qualities. Episodic memory, in this context, is a crucial tool that enables us to produce the most relevant story at the right time. It has been tailored for this purpose, as demonstrated by the fact that the factors that favor memorization, such as unexpectedness and atypicality, are exactly the factors which increase tellability. "This account explains why remembered episodes are communicated, instead of remaining private; why they remain coherent in memory (instead of being dismantled for creative synthesis of future scenarios); why they systematically involve various details and precision; why we keep on memorizing episodes throughout our entire life; and why even slight failures in episodic memory (as those that occur with aging or in certain pathologies) have dramatic influence on social relations. It also explains the uniqueness of episodic memory, which was not selected for increasing planning efficiency, but as a tool in support of language performance." Dessalles, Jean-Louis. 2007. "Storing events to retell them." Commentary to Suddendorf, Thomas & M. Corballis. "The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 30: 299-351. P. 321.
"... we argue that the Oldowan culture, 2.6 to 1.5 million years ago, constituted an ecological niche that enhanced the ability to mentally represent a possible future. MMM [mental time travel] might to some extent already have been in place as a result of earlier selection pressures in the social life, but changes in hominin ecology chiseled out the more advanced ability that we seem totally dependent upon nowadays. The main components of the Oldowan culture are recognized as (1) the manufacturing and use of stone tools; (2) the transport of artifacts (at least stone tools); (3) the transport of pieces of carcasses; and (4) the use of accumulation spots. A significant advantage of this culture is that it enabled a much wider exploitation of meat resources. "Savannah conditions offered some hominins a wider variety of food sources, and these food sources were more transient and scattered than those exploited by other primates. Therefore, the day ranges of the early hominids were more extended than those of extant apes. The Oldowan life style was signified by an extension in time and space. The fitness of the hominids in this niche increased with adaptations for long ranging, as indicated by the skeletal remains. These morphological adaptations must have been related to behavioral adaptations, which could be a result of an evolving mental time travel." Osvath, Mathias & P. Gaerdenfors. 2007. "What are the evolutionary causes of mental time travel?" Commentary to Suddendorf, Thomas & M. Corballis. "The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 30: 299-351. P. 330.
"Interestingly, the barks used by females [chimpanzees] toward badly behaved males are internally redeployed versions of the very same ‘mobbing’ calls which they use to intimidate external threats such as pythons." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 305
"The Mbendjele word massana, as we have seen, means both ritual and play.... From a Mbendjele standpoint, ritual grades imperceptibly into play, which in turn overlaps at many points with language." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 309.
"In our evolutionary model, mothers with increasingly large-brained babies faced heavier and heavier childcare burdens, prompting them to resort to co-operative childcare. No sooner had they got together to share childcare burdens than something else happened: women began discovering the collective capacity to square up to dominant males. Female-led resistance to dominance and sexual exploitation culminated eventually in ‘reverse dominance’, outlawing violence or physical threat as a viable reproductive strategy for males. This liberated human creative potential in many ways. Up until this point, play had remained largely restricted to immaturity, since the transition to adulthood invariably brought sex and sexual conflict into the equation. Once sexual violence had been marginalized, imaginative play was free to extend without a break into adult life, increasingly embracing it and structuring it–to the point of becoming ‘a foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 310.
"Turning to concrete examples [of behavioral reversals inside a safe coalition from threat-derived behaviors to a playful use of the same behavior], it is widely believed that the distinctively human smile evolved in some such way, originating in the nonhuman primate ‘fear grin’–a gesture of tense, nervous submission. The relaxed human version of this primate facial expression–the good-humoured smile–would then be a fear-grin under reversed social conditions, once the threat originally provoking it had dissolved." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 312.
"Listeners must be prepared to give speakers the benefit of the doubt, evaluating ‘truth’ not signal by signal but on a longer term basis, postponing judgement until the entire utterance or conversation is complete, focusing at each point not on surface meanings but on underlying communicative intentions." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 314.
"Above all, we have sought to explain why the falsehood [e.g. women pretending to mob men with cries as if they were a dangerous animal] was not immediately rejected, as signal evolution theory would predict. We have identified a candidate fiction which was collective, essential to the survival of the collectives–and aimed at an ‘enemy’ who might have reason to collude. "These are tight constraints–so tight that in the animal world, they exclude the very possibility of language. Since language exists, the solution must somehow have been found. Returning to the Mbendjele, let’s look again at Ngoku [a ritual of pygmy women where the female communal spirit is invoked to insult men while being erotic and making fun of men attempting sex] . Those women fresh from ‘singing for their lives’ in the forest have now returned back to camp. They redirect their singing toward a different, internal ‘enemy’–their own menfolk. They do all they can to express erotic desire while resisting male desire. "At this point, something without evolutionary precedent ocurs. The ‘enemy’ suddenly gives up and joins in. There are good Darwinian reasons why men might accept ‘defeat’ at the hands of women who are nursing their own genetic offspring. It is men’s willingness to yield which distinguishes them as fully human for the first time. Just as the fear-grin morphs imperceptibly into the smile and vocal mobbing turns into laughter, so women’s defiant, boisterous singing and dancing–designed to make sexual violence unthinkable–collapses and reverses, yielding something else. That other thing, we suggest, is language-based human society." Knight, Chris & J. Lewis. 2014. "Vocal deception, laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance." Pp. 297-314. Dor, Daniel, C. Knight & J. Lewis (Eds). The Social Origins of Language. Oxford UP. P. 314.
"Re-experiencing events from one’s past and imagining events in one’s future is referred to as ‘mental time travel.’" Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 220.
"Thus, while researchers have teased apart behavioral concomitants that may be representative of different forms of future thinking, much of the evidence in animals remains controversial. Although various animals appear capable of future cognition, there are at present little grounds to suppose that non-humans display mental time travel akin to humans, leading many to conclude that mental time travel, particularly into the future, is unique to our species." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 221.
"Although the evidence for culture in animals is clear, there is a lack of compelling evidence that past generations’ behaviors have undergone modifications to ratchet up their complexity or efficiency. Consequently, at present, the notion of cumulative culture in animal species remains speculative. This inevitably raises the question of why humans and not other animals display cumulative cultural evolution." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 223.
"The most probable answer to the question of why animals lack cumulative culture is that this process rests not on one specific learning process, mechanism or demographic detail, but that it is the combination of all these (and other) factors that has led to its presence in humans. Indeed, recent empirical considerations suggest this is the case, with a suite of socio-cognitive factors identified that appear to underlie human cumulative learning abilities. These factors include, in addition to those mentioned, human prosocial motivations and the human capacity for shared intentionality. Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 224.
"Specifically, Tulving proposed that a fundamental precondition to human cultural niche construction, that is our heightened capacity to change our environment to adapt it to ourselves, is the conscious awareness of ‘a future’, not just for ourselves, but also for generations to come. ...instead of the past just influencing the present and the present the future, present behavior can also be influenced by the future." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 224. Reference: Tulving, E. 2002. "Chronesthesia: Awareness of subjective time." Pp. 311-325. Stuss, D & R. Knight (Eds). Principles of frontal lobe functions. Oxford UP.
"Thus we tentatively suggest that, without the emergence of episodic thought, large social networks, which characterize human societies and promote high levels of cultural exchange, would be curtailed as specific social exchanges would neither be remembered or influence future exchange, thus posing constraints on cumulative cultural evolution." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 225.
"To the extent that human teaching does not rely purely upon past experience (i.e. knowledge gained by the teacher in the past which is then transmitted), but is guided by imagined futures and our planning for the future of our students, we suggest that mental time travel and future planning may have facilitated cumulative culture by improving this complex social learning mechanism." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. P. 226.
"We propose that a link exists between humanity’s cultural accomplishments and the capacity for mental time travel. Human modes of future thinking seem well positioned to (I) promote cultural innovation, (ii) facilitate knowledge exchange by enabling larger social networks, (iii) enhance teaching capabilities through their orientation to pupils’ futures, and (iv) increase human investment in domains such as learning and long term goal pursuit.... It is also worth noting that mental time travel may have influenced human culture in ways not considered here. For example, episodic memory and episodic foresight would seem essential for economic trade to succeed on a large scale, are likely to have influenced the formation and maintenance of cultural institutions and played an important role in cooperation and social regulation (.e.g. rules, norms and law maintenance though the prospect of future punishment or reward).... Thus, we hypothesize that mental time travel constitutes one of a suite of abilities that play a role in our extraordinary cultural accomplishments." Vale, GL, E. Flynn & R. Kendal. 2012. "Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?" Learning and Motivation. 43: 220-230. Pp. 226-7.
"Intersubjectivity is what makes we-awareness possible. By referencing a realm between or encompassing multiple people, intersubjectivity raises the question of whether knowing, thinking or being aware are at base matters of individual consciousnesses or collectivities." Stahl, Gerry. 2016. "From Intersubjectivity to Group Cognition." Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 25: 355-384. P. 355.
"Merleau-Ponty adopts Heidegger’s view of being-there-with-others as fundamental to the human condition. However, he does so more concretely and persistently. He refers to the perception of the other’s body as material, meaningful and expressive. He cites evidence from child development that infants exist in a shared world without even differentiating themselves from others–so that subjectivity is seen to be a derived and learned phenomenon, not a Cartesian starting point." Stahl, Gerry. 2016. "From Intersubjectivity to Group Cognition." Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 25: 355-384. P. 363.
"Until Hegel, human nature and human cognition were conceived as based in the individual person, as fully determined from birth ahistorically or universally–not dependent on one’s biography or social context. The theories that minds develop (Freud), that social relations transform (Marx) or that humanity evolves (Darwin) all came after Hegel–in process-oriented sciences inspired by his philosophy.... "Hegel outlined a dynamic view, in which mind develops all the way from primitive sense perception to sophisticated self-consciousness and cultural world-view." Stahl, Gerry. 2016. "From Intersubjectivity to Group Cognition." Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 25: 355-384. P. 365.
"The resultant, unevenly woven urban fabric is today assuming extremely complex, polycentric forms that no longer remotely approximate the concentric rings and linear density gradients associated with the relatively bounded industrial city of the nineteenth century,...." Brenner, Neil, & C. Schmid. 2014. "The ‘Urban Age’ in Question." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. May. V. 38.3. 731-755. P. 743.
"The urban is not a universal form but a historical process." Brenner, Neil, & C. Schmid. 2014. "The ‘Urban Age’ in Question." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. May. V. 38.3. 731-755. P. 750.
"Within this extended, increasingly worldwide field of urban development and infrastructural equipment, agglomerations form, expand, shrink and morph continuously, but always via dense webs of relations to other places, whose historical patterns and developmental pathways are in turn mediated ever more directly through their modes of connection/disconnection to the hegemonic zones of urban concentration." Brenner, Neil, & C. Schmid. 2014. "The ‘Urban Age’ in Question." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. May. V. 38.3. 731-755. P. 750.
"Urbanization has become a planetary phenomenon. Today, urbanization is a process that affects the whole territory of the world and not only isolated parts of it. The urban represents an increasingly worldwide, if unevenly woven, fabric in which the sociocultural and politcal-economic relations of capitalism are enmeshed. This situation of planetary urbanization means that even sociospatial arrangements and infrastructural networks that lie well beyond traditional city cores, metropolitan regions, urban peripheries and peri-urban zones have become integral parts of a worldwide urban condition." Brenner, Neil, & C. Schmid. 2014. "The ‘Urban Age’ in Question." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. May. V. 38.3. 731-755. P. 751.
"... comparative concepts of urbanisation that captured a number of common eatures and dynamics. We eventually elaborated and finalised nine of them: popular urbanisation, plotting urbanism, mass housing urbanisation, bypass urbanism, multilayered patchwork urbanisation, laminar urbanisation, industrial urbanisation, incorporation of urban differences and production of centralities." Schmid, Christian, O. Karaman, N. Hanakata, P. Kallenberger, A. Kockelkorn, L. Sawyer, M. Streule & K. Wong. 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach." Urban Studies. V 55(1) 19-52. P. 21.
"Following Lefebvre we can distinguish three basic dimensions of the production of (urban) space: (1) the production and transformation of material elements and structures (perceived space); (2) processes of territorial regulation and representation (conceived space); and (3) socialisation and learning processes (lived space)." Schmid, Christian, O. Karaman, N. Hanakata, P. Kallenberger, A. Kockelkorn, L. Sawyer, M. Streule & K. Wong. 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach." Urban Studies. V 55(1) 19-52. P. 29. Reference: Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Blackwell. "In distinction to popular urbanisation, in which collective action, political organisation and self-help play decisive roles, plotting urbanism is mainly defined by three different characteristics: first, the relationship to the land is based on a territorial compromise that allows for the conflict-ridden co-presence of multiple systems and scales of regulation and land ownership regimes. Second, market mechanisms and commercialisation intervene into the process in a fundamental way, which also creates specific social relationships between landlords or rentiers, who often still live in the area, and their tenants. Finally, the process proceeds in a piecemeal and incremental way, plot by plot without overarching planning, which creates a great variety of local situations. We therefore called this process ‘plotting urbanism’ in order to stress the fundamental role of the plot, but also allowing some allusions to the strategic and dubious inferences of ‘plotting’ in the sense of scheming for individual gain." Schmid, Christian, O. Karaman, N. Hanakata, P. Kallenberger, A. Kockelkorn, L. Sawyer, M. Streule & K. Wong. 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach." Urban Studies. V 55(1) 19-52. P. 37.
"We characterise intersubjectivity as the meaningful engagement between subjects... That this is not the sum of two individual perspectives is clarified by the idea that interactions can take on an autonomy of their own and that interactions as such influence, form and transform their participants." De Jaegher, Hanne, B. Pieper, D. Clenin & T. Fuchs. 2017. "Grasping intersubjectivity: an invitation to embody social interaction research." Phenom Cogn Sci. 16: 491-523. P. 492.
"Finally, a note on the notion of embodiment, a term so often used nowadays that it may start to lose sense. One of its sharpest critics is Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who has again and again rallied against the trend of ‘embodying’. She worries that embodied accounts of mind and cognition neglect what she calls ‘animate experience,’ and is concerned that the use of the word ‘embodied’ and its variations does not capture the dynamic ‘synergies of meaningful movement created by animate organisms’." De Jaegher, Hanne, B. Pieper, D. Clenin & T. Fuchs. 2017. "Grasping intersubjectivity: an invitation to embody social interaction research." Phenom Cogn Sci. 16: 491-523. P. 501. Reference: Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2015. "Embodiment on trial: a phenomenological investigation." Continental Philosophy Review. 48(1). 23-39.
"... at least six definitions [of intersubjectivity] are in circulation. Most simplistically, intersubjectivity has been used to refer to agreement in the sense of having a shared definition of an object. Going beyond simple sharing, it has been defined in terms of the mutual awareness of agreement or disagreement and even the realisation of such understanding or misunderstanding. Cognitive approaches have used the term to refer to the attribution of intentionality, feelings and beliefs to others. Yet other approaches emphasise the embodied nature of intersubjectivity, conceptualising intersubjectivity as implict and often automatic behavioural orientations towards others. The situated, interactional and performative nature of intersubjectivity is emphasised by researchers such as Goffman, Garfinkel and Schegloff. And finally cultural and dialogical researchers have used the term to study the partially shared and largely taken-for-granted background which interlocutors assume and against which things can be said and done. While some of these definitions may be incomplete accounts of intersubjectivity, we suggest that they are not mutually exclusive and that each captures a different and important aspect of the phenomenon. Accordingly, we adopt an inclusive definition. We conceptualise intersubjectivity as the variety of relations between perspectives. Those perspectives can belong to individuals, groups, or traditions and discourses, and they can manifest as both implicit (or taken for granted) and explicit (or reflected upon)." Gillespie, Alex & F Cornish. 2010. "Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. V 40(1). March. 19-46. P. 20.
"When objects take on significance beyond their immediate ready-to-hand functionality, they begin to acquire other connotations and thereby fulfil mnemonic functions, becoming externalized loci of memories which act as ‘prompts’ for and records of the social relationships in which those objects are entangled." Coward, Fiona. 2016. "Scaling up: Material culture as scaffold for the social brain." Quaternary International. 405: 78-90. P. 80.
"Such externalized loci of memory [example: souvenirs] serve to outsource some of the cognitive demands imposed by keeping track of relationships not just among those individuals encountered every day, but those who – as in larger, more fragmented fission-fusion societies – may often be absent, perhaps for extended periods of time. Incorporating material culture into our social networks therefore allows the construction of social networks which are remarkably temporally and geographically extensive – indeed, as we have seen, potentially global in scope." Coward, Fiona. 2016. "Scaling up: Material culture as scaffold for the social brain." Quaternary International. 405: 78-90. P. 81.
"If Acheulean technology requires high levels of technical and cognitive skill, then the demands of prepared-core technology (PCT), known from Africa and Eurasia after around 300bp and most commonly associated with the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa and the Middle Palaeolithic of Neanderthals in Europe, are commensurately higher. PCT undoubtedly requires considerable forethought and planning as well as technical skill, which of course places further demands on the social skills required to learn and teach." Coward, Fiona. 2016. "Scaling up: Material culture as scaffold for the social brain." Quaternary International. 405: 78-90. P. 82.
"Similarly, I would argue, humans were able to complement their brainpower by relying increasingly on the mnemonic, metaphorical and indeed at some point symbolic properties of material culture: off-loading and externally networking social – and ecological – information and thereby reducing the marginal cost of negotiating and maintaining the increasingly extensive social networks that may have been required during the Late Pleistocene, providing them with the edge they needed to expand successfully beyond their ancestral African environments." Coward, Fiona. 2016. "Scaling up: Material culture as scaffold for the social brain." Quaternary International. 405: 78-90. P. 84.
"Living in at least semi-permanent villages [during the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic], however, they were nevertheless required to interact on a daily basis with virtual strangers – potentially stressful, complicated and liable to strain the fabric of social order to the point of fission. The use of material culture environments made this considerably easier by off-loading some of the social cues required." Coward, Fiona. 2016. "Scaling up: Material culture as scaffold for the social brain." Quaternary International. 405: 78-90. P. 85.
"... the four original faculties–theology, law, medicine, and philosophy–it was in the latter two that research specialization occurred, and especially in philosophy (the highest research degree is still a PhD). One key feature of this process was a bifurcation into sciences and arts that commonly resulted in division into two separate faculties housing very different disciplines (lower research degrees are still called Msc or MA). The differences existed in both research subject matter (non-human–human) and research practices (nomothetic-idiographic).... "The social sciences began to emerge in the late nineteenth century as a sort of in-between research category combining the research subject matter of the arts with the research methods of the sciences." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 125.
"There are three key points that arise from this construction of social science [economics, political science, and sociology]. "1. The basic units of analysis were defined by state territories–empirically the abstract concepts of economy, state, and society were all nationalized... "2. The knowledge produced by the three disciplines covered all modern behaviors–this was a knowledge monopoly position.... "3. This was nomothetic knowledge of modern, rational behavior and therefore it initially only applied to modern, rational economies, states, and societies in advanced regions of the world where the modern universities were located. It was a social knowledge of modern us, with the un-modern them initially excluded. The exclusions were in both time and space and, being un-modern, they could only be studied idiographically (i.e., outside social science)." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 125.
"Most importantly the world changed with decolonization so that development (a property of states) replaced progress (a property of modern civilization only)." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 126.
"Recent resurgences in urban economics and economic geography have focused on the advantages of cities for economic development. Two main processes have been postulated. First, localization refers to the knowledge-related benefits of firms from the same industry clulstered together. This relates to industry-specific opportunities thus stimulating creativity and innovation.... "Second, there are agglomeration effects of multiple firms from a wide range of industries co-locating in a city or region." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. Pp. 126-7.
"Cities abhor boundaries. Their raison d’etre is being strategically connected within complex spaces of flows, which is antithetical to being neatly ordered within state territories." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 129.
"The discipline’s [archaeology’s] obvious locale would be as a time discipline alongside history with ancient history. However its formal location in universities is mostly with anthropology. This makes some sense to the degree that anthropology treats hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies, and such societies dominate the pre-history that archaeology investigates. This is to locate archaeology in the outer reaches of comparative anthropology with an inevitable neglect of concern for cities." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 130.
"Traditionally, states have been interpreted as the outcome of increasingly complex governance processes, consequent upon class formation and widening material inequalities.... Enhanced complexity is represented spatially by central place hierarchies with three settlement tiers indicating the key complex chiefdoms that generate states in civilizations. An alternative model ... The starting point is settlements in a trading network that morphs into a city network via the Jacobs process of import replacement. The more successful this network becomes, the more cosmopolitan are the cities. It is this unprecedented social complexity with consequent intergroup conflicts that generates a demand for new stronger governance structures." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 133. Reference: Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. Vintage.
"... traditional interpretation of the rise of cities: a simple sequencing of settlements by size culminating in cities. In this argument the latter first occur in Mesopotamia because improvements in agriculture (irrigation) increased production, thereby generating a food surplus large enough to feed cities.... The alternative model ... is a classic case of import replacement. Hunter-gatherer-traders were exchanging food products within new trade networks but found it hard to keep up supply as city networks emerged. In this situation people in cities invented agriculture to replace and enhance the hunter-gatherer-trader food supply. Thus hinterlands were created around cities in which to produce food." Taylor, Peter. 2017. "Knowledge in Disciplines and Cities: An Essay on Relations Between Archaeology and Social Sciences." Pp. 123-137. Jons, Heike & P Meusburger. (Eds). Mobilities of Knowledge (Knowledge and Space). Springer. P. 134.
"Although Aristotle placed substance at the center of his metaphysics, he, too, had vestigial processist commitments. In a way, he, too, inherited Heraclitean doctrines, seeing that the Aristotelian cosmos manifested stability only at its outer limits with the fixed stars and that all else is pervaded by change. For Aristotle, however, this change itself conforms to inherently natural–and specifically biological–patterns, so that the Plato’s transcendent ‘forms’ are no longer required. "While Aristotle’s metaphysics of substances and natural kinds was an emphatic substantialism, Aristotle’s metaphysics nevertheless also deployed a considerable array of processist elements. For, so Aristotle insisted, the ‘being’ of a natural substance is always in transition, involved in the dynamism of change. Dunamis (potency), energeia (activity), kinesis (motion), and metabole (change) are fundamental categories of Aristotelian metaphysics, and he conceives of his particulars developmentally–an acorn is less a stable thing than a stage of an evolving organism moving continually if all goes well, along its predestined journey toward its eventual condition as an oak tree. The programmed directedness of Aristotelian processual particulars that enmesh them in a developmental tendency toward a telos (end-state)–and even beyond to decay and death–is a characteristic feature of Aristotelian metaphysics. The natural world, as Aristotle sees it, exhibits a collective dynamism that effects the transit from mere possibilities for a sector of nature to the realization of its full potential, its perfection (entelecheia). The Aristotelian view of things is pervasively processual. "Aristotle’s position was accordingly something of a halfway house, seeing that his ontology was less one of substances pure and simple than one of substances-in-process." Rescher, Nicholas. 1996. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. State University of New York Press. P. 11.
"The major transitions: "Replicating molecules to populations of molecules in compartments "Unlinked replicators to chromosomes "RNA as gene and enzyme to DNA and protein (genetic code) "Prokaryotes to eukaryotes "Asexual clones to sexual populations "Protists to animals, plants and fungi (cell differentiation) "Solitary individuals to colonies (non-reproductive castes) "Primate societies to human societies (language)" Szathmary, Eors & J.Maynard Smith. 1995. "The major evolutionary transitions." Nature. V. 374: 227-32. March 16. P. 228.
"It was of concern to generations of Platonists that nothing should be predicated of the supremely divine which might in any way imply diminishment or limit, or be construed as so doing. For some, that meant placing God even beyond being, or at least declaring that to say that he is, is not to say of him anything which tells us what he is. Alternatively, some thought it allowable to speak of God’s being, if his Being was clearly distinguished from the sort of being possible to things in the world of sense, or even the intelligible world. This kind of refinement was possible in Greek thought in part because the Greek language allowed it to be expressed." Evans, G. R. 1993. Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages. Routledge. P. 55.
"Both the Platonist and the Aristotelian legacy, then, created an atmosphere of heightened awareness about talk of the being or existence of God. That is to say, his existence could not be equated straightforwardly with his being; nor could the available Latin vocabulary for conducting the discussion pass without intimate scrutiny. One solution was to refuse to attempt to talk of God’s existence or being at all, or to try to say anything at all about him in a positive way." Evans, G. R. 1993. Philosophy and Theology in the Middle Ages. Routledge. P. 57.
"... linguistic symbols liberate human interaction from the temporal and spatial immediacy of face-to-face and bodily coordination and thus radically expand the interaction space." Tylen, Kristian, E. Weed, M. Wallentin, A. Roepstorff & C. Frith. 2010. "Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds." Mind & Language. V. 25. N. 1. February. Pp. 3-29. P. 6.
"Consider the utterance ‘Are you picking them up today?’ Though the sentence is composed of high frequency words in a conventional interrogative construction, and at first glance seems perfectly meaningful, in fact the utterance makes little sense when detached from the situational context in which it is spoken.... What is at stake in the sentence is thus merely a (re)organization and profiling of the already existing state of affairs (e.g. ‘is it me or you?, ‘is it today?’, etc.). In this example, the role of the linguistic symbol string in the communicative event is thus not primarily to represent meaning, but rather to structure, guide and constrain joint attention and perspective-taking in an already existing, shared meaning space." Tylen, Kristian, E. Weed, M. Wallentin, A. Roepstorff & C. Frith. 2010. "Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds." Mind & Language. V. 25. N. 1. February. Pp. 3-29. P. 8.
"It thus appears that a general function of language is that it allows a speaker to continuously minimize the set of possible attentional foci in the hearer’s environment." Tylen, Kristian, E. Weed, M. Wallentin, A. Roepstorff & C. Frith. 2010. "Language as a Tool for Interacting Minds." Mind & Language. V. 25. N. 1. February. Pp. 3-29. P. 9.
"... both kinds of networks [circulatory system of a mammal or bundles of fibers in a plant] are constrained by the same three postulates: they are space filling, have invariant terminal units, and minimize the energy needed to pump fluid through the system." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 117.
"Terminal units therefore play a critical role not only because they are invariant but also because they are the interface with the resource environment, whether internal as in the case of capillaries or external as in the case of leaves." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 151.
"However, driven by the forces of natural selection to maximize exchange surfaces, biological networks do achieve maximal space filling and consequently scale like three-dimensional volumes rather than two-dimensional Euclidean surfaces. This additional dimension, which arises from optimizing network performance, leads to organisms’ functioning as if they are operating in four dimensions. This is the geometric origin of the quarter power. Thus, instead of scaling with classic 1/3 exponents, as would be the case if they were smooth nonfractal Euclidean objects, they scale with 1/4 exponents. Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 153-4.
"Unlike the genetic code, which has evolved only once in the history of life, fractal-like distribution networks that confer an additional effective fourth dimension have originated many times. Examples include surface areas of leaves, gills, lungs, guts, kidneys, mitochondria, and the branching architectures of diverse respiratory and circulatory systems from trees to sponges." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 154.
"What is shocking is how few people, even many scientists, appreciate that this sensitivity to temperature is exponential.... Consequently, metabolic rate scales exponentially with temperature rather than as a power law as it does with mass. Because metabolic rate–the rate at which energy is supplied to cells–is the fundamental driver of all biological rates and times, all of the central features of life from gestation and growth to mortality are exponentially sensitive to temperature." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 173.
"This [age at time of death] can be estimated assuming that the ultimate threshold for death is reached when the fraction of damaged cells (or molecules such as DNA) relative to the total number in the organ or body reaches a critical value, which is approximately the same for all organisms of the same taxonomic group. In other words, the total number of damages is proportional to the total number of cells and therefore to the body mass. We simply ask how long it takes for this number of damages to have happened, knowing from the metabolic rate the rate at which damage is occurring and that, on average, each cellular damage event is caused by approximately the same invariant amount of energy. The total number of damages incurred in a lifetime is just the damage rate (that is, the number of damage events per unit time which is proportional to the number of terminal units) multiplied by the life span, and this has to be proportional to the total number of cells, and therefore to body mass. Consequently, life span is proportional to the total number of cells divided by the number of terminal units. But the number of terminal units scales with mass with a 3/4 power exponent, while the number of cells scales linearly, resulting in life span scaling as the 1/4 power of mass, consistent with data." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 202-3.
"So as far as their overall infrastructure is concerned, cities behave just like organisms–they scale sublinearly following simple power-law behavior, thereby exhibiting a systematic economy of scale, albeit to a lesser degree as represented by the different values of their exponents (0.75 for organisms vs. 0.85 for cities)." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 273.
"However, of even greater significance was the surprising discovery that the data also reveal that socioeconomic quantities with no analog in biology such as average wages, the number of professional people, the number of patents produced, the amount of crime, the number of restaurants, and the gross urban domestic product (GDP) also scale in a surprisingly regular and systematic fashion,... "So in marked contrast to infrastructure, which scales sublinearly with population size, socioeconomic quantities–the very essence of a city–scale superlinearly, thereby manifesting systematic increasing returns to scale." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 275.
"Consequently, each of these urban characteristics, each metric–whether wages, the length of all the roads, the number of AIDS cases, or the amount of crime–is interrelated and interconnected with every other one and together they form an overarching multiscale quintessentially complex adaptive system that is continuously integrating and processing energy, resources, and information. The result is the extraordinary collective phenomenon we call a city, whose origins emerge from the underlying dynamics and organization of how people interact with one another through social networks. To repeat: cities are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon that has resulted from the interaction and communication between human beings exchanging energy, resources, and information." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 279-280.
"If we think of the city as the great facilitator of social interactions or as the great incubator for wealth creation and innovation, it is natural to speculate that its structure and dynamics evolved so as to maximize social capital by optimizing the connectivity between individuals. This suggests that social networks and the entire social fabric of cities and urban systems–that is, who is connected to whom, how much information flows between them, and the nature of their group structure–is ultimately determined by the insatiable drive of individuals, small businesses, and giant companies to always want more. Or, to put it in crass terms, that the socioeconomic machinery that we all participate in is primarily fueled by greed in both its negative and positive connotations as in the sense of the ‘desire for more.’" West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 286.
"A city is an emergent complex adaptive system resulting from the integration of the flows of energy and resources that sustain and grow both its physical infrastructure and its inhabitants with the flows and exchange of information in the social networks that interconnect all of its citizenry." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 295.
"The integration of these two kinds of networks, namely, the requirement that socioeconomic interaction represented by space-filling fractal-like social networks must be anchored to the physicality of a city as represented by space-filling fractal-like infrastructural networks, determines the number of interactions an average urban dweller can sustain in a city.... "The biological metaphor of the city as a living organism derives primarily from its being perceived in terms of its physicality. This is most apparent in the networks that carry energy and resources in the form of electricity, gas, water, cars, trucks, and people, and it is this component of cities that is the close analog to the networks that proliferate in biology such as our cardiovascular and respiratory systems or the vasculature of plants and trees. Combining the ideas of space filling, invariant terminal units, and optimization (minimizing travel times and energy use, for example) results in these networks also being fractal-like with infrastructural metrics scaling as power laws with sublinear exponents indicative of economies of scale obeying the 15 percent rule." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 321.
"But this [the power law increase for income, patents, etc.] can equally well be interpreted in a complementary way by viewing cities as catalytic facilitators or crucibles for social chemistry in which the increase in social interactions enhances creativity, innovation, and opportunity whose dividend is an increase in infrastructural economies of scale." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 322.
"Cities are effectively machines for stimulating and integrating the continuous positive feedback dynamics between the physical and the social, each multiplicatively enhancing the other." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 323.
"... the sublinearity of infrastructure and energy use is the exact inverse of the superlinearity of socioeconomic activity. Consequently, to the same 15 percent degree, the bigger the city the more each person earns, creates, innovates, and interacts–and the more each person experiences crime, disease, entertainment, and opportunity–and all of this at a cost that requires less infrastructure and energy for each of them." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 323.
"In infrastructural network systems, such as transport, water, gas, electrical, and sewer lines, the sizes and flows in the pipes, cables, roads, et cetera, systematically increase from terminal units that service individual houses and buildings up through the network to major conduits and arteries that connect to some central source, place, or repository, in much the same way that the sizes and flows in our cardiovascular system systematically increase from our capillaries up to our aorta and thence to our heart. This is the origin of sublinear scaling and economies of scale. In contrast, in socioeconomic networks–those responsible for wealth creation, innovation, crime, and so forth–the inverse behavior is at play as was explained when we discussed the hierarchy of Dunbar numbers. The strengths of social interaction and the flows of information exchange are greatest between terminal units (that is between individuals) and systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures from families and other groups to increasingly larger clusters, leading to superlinear scaling, increasing returns, and an accelerating pace of life." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 323-4.
"Rather than the pace of life systematically decreasing with size, the superlinear dynamics of social networks leads to a systematic increase in the pace of life: dynamics spread faster, businesses are born and die more often, commerce is transacted more rapidly, and people even walk faster, all following the 15 percent rule." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 327.
"... the total amount of time an average individual spends on travel each day is approximately the same regardless of the city size or the mode of transportation.... "So the increase in transportation speed resulting from the marvelous innovations of the past couple of hundred years has not been used to reduce commuting time but instead has been used to increase commuting distances." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 333.
"This surprising observation of the approximately one-hour invariant that communal human beings have spent traveling each day, whether they lived in ancient Rome, a medieval town, a Greek village, or twentieth-century New York, has become known as Marchetti’s constant, even though it was originally discovered by Zahavi." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 334.
"The size of an average individual’s modular cluster of acquaintances who interact with one another is an approximate invariant–it doesn’t change with city size.... "There is, however, an important qualitative difference in the nature of these modular groups in villages relative to those in large cities. In a real village we are limited to a community that is imposed on us by sheer proximity resulting from its small size, whereas in a city we are freer to choose our own ‘village’ by taking advantage of the much greater opportunity and diversity afforded by a greater population and to seek out people those interests, profession, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on are similar to our own." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 345.
"Suppose that on average 1,600 people visit the area around Park Street, Boston, from 4 kilometers away once a month. How many people visit there from twice as far away (8 km) with the same frequency of once a month? The inverse square law tells us that 1/4 as many make the visit, so only 400 people visit Park Street from 8 kilometers away once a month. How about from five times as far away, 20 kilometers? The answer is 1/32 as many, which is just 64 people visiting once a month. You get the idea. But there’s more: you can likewise ask what happens if you change the frequency of visitation. For instance, suppose we ask how many people visit Park Street from 4 kilometers away but now with a greater frequency of twice a month. This also obeys the inverse square law so the number is 1/4 as many, namely 400 people. And similarly, if you ask how many people visit there from the same distance of 4 kilometers away five times a month, the answer is 64 people." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 348.
"The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 355.
"The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment [business] for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size.... Similarly, the data also show that the total number of employees working in these establishments also scales approximately linearly with population size: on average, there are only about 8 employees for every establishment, again regardless of the size of the city." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 365.
"The data confirm that diversity [of business types] systematically increases with population size at all levels of resolution, as defined by the NAICS data set [US business typology]... However, an extrapolation of the data strongly suggests that if we could measure diversity to the finest possible resolution it would scale logarithmically with city size.... "To put it slightly differently: doubling the size of a city results in doubling the total number of establishments, but only a meager 5 percent increase in new kinds of businesses." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 365-6. "It is therefore all the more remarkable that, despite the unique admixture of business types for each individual city, the shape and form of their distribution is mathematically the same for all of them." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 368.
"The general rule is that business types whose abundances scale superlinearly with population size systematically rise in their rankings, whereas those that scale sublinearly systematically decrease. For instance, at the coarsest level of the NAICS classification scheme traditional sectors such as agriculture, mining, and utilities scale sublinearly; the theory predicts that the rankings and relative abundances of these industries decrease as cities get larger. On the other hand, informational and service businesses such as professional, scientific, and technical services, and management of companies and enterprises, scale superlinearly and are consequently predicted to increase disproportionally with city, as observed." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 370.
"This extraordinary process [supply of energy to a city], which can be thought of as the social metabolism of a city, is responsible for increasing our conventional biological metabolic rate derived from the food we eat from just 2,000 food calories a day or 100 watts to about 11,000 watts, the equivalent of 2 million food calories a day. Thus the actual energy content of the food input to the total energy budget of a city is a tiny portion of its overall consumption–less that 1 percent..." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 373.
"The superlinear scaling of metabolism has profound consequences for growth. In contrast to the situation in biology, the supply of metabolic energy generated by cities as they grow increases faster than the needs and demands for its maintenance. Consequently, the amount available for growth, which is just the difference between its social metabolic rate and the requirements for maintenance, continues to increase as the city gets larger. The bigger the city gets, the faster it grows...." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 374.
"Even though the conceptual and mathematical structure of the growth equation is the same for organisms, social insect communities, and cities, the consequences are quite different: sublinear scaling and economies of scale that dominate biology lead to stable bounded growth and the slowing down of the pace of life, whereas superlinear scaling and increasing returns to scale that dominate socioeconomic activity lead to unbounded growth and to an accelerating pace of life." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 377-8.
"The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and competition in the marketplace. Although these are interrelated they have very often been treated separately. In the language of the framework developed in previous chapters these can be expressed as follows: (1) Minimizing transaction costs reflects economies of scale driven by an optimization principle, such as maximizing profits. (2) Organizational structure is the network system within a company that conveys information, resources, and capital to support, sustain, and grow the enterprise. (3) Competition results in the evolutionary pressures and selection processes inherent in the ecology of the marketplace." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 381.
"In its extreme version the underlying philosophy of agent-based modeling is antithetical to the traditional scientific framework, where the primary challenge is to reduce huge numbers of seemingly disparate and disconnected observations down to a few basic general principles of laws;... In contrast, the aim of agent-based modeling is to construct an almost one-to-one mapping of each specific system. General laws and principles that constrain its structure and dynamics play a secondary role...." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 384.
"In the case of cities, scaling laws revealed that 80 to 90 percent of their measurable characteristics are determined from just knowing their population size, with the remaining 10 to 20 percent being a measure of their individuality and uniqueness, which can be understood only from detailed studies that incorporate local historical, geographical, and cultural characteristics." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 384.
"A crucial aspect of the scaling of companies is that many of their key metrics scale sublinearly like organisms rather than superlinearly like cities. This suggests that companies are more like organisms than cities and are dominated by a version of economies of scale rather than by increasing returns and innovation." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 391.
"Although there are significant differences, it’s hard not to be struck by how similar the growth and death of companies and organisms are when viewed through the lens of scaling–and how dissimilar they both are to cities." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 403.
"... we found that the relative amount allocated to R&D systematically decreases as company size increases, suggesting that support for innovation does not keep up with bureaucratic and administrative expenses as companies expand...." "While the dimensionality of cities is continually expanding, the dimensionality of companies typically contracts from birth through adolescence,..." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 409.
"One of the major challenges of the twenty-first century that will have to be faced is the fundamental question as to whether human-engineered social systems, from economies to cities, which have only existed for the past five thousand years or so, can continue to coexist with the ‘natural’ biological world from which they emerged and which has been around for several billion years." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 411.
"Existing strategies have, to a large extent, failed to come to terms with an essential feature of the long-term sustainability challenge embodied in the paradigm of complex adaptive systems, namely, the pervasive interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, and environmental, ecological, economic, social, and political systems...." "Almost all existing approaches to the challenge of global sustainability focus on relatively specific issues.... They focus primarily on the trees and risk missing the forest. "We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantitative, predictive, mechanistic theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the ‘natural’ environment–a framework I call a grand unified theory of sustainability. It’s time to initiate a massive international Manhattan-style project or Apollo-style program dedicated to addressing global sustainability in an integrated, systemic sense." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 412.
"Even though the growth of organisms, cities, and economies follows essentially identical mathematical equations, their resulting solutions have subtle but crucial differences arising from one being driven by sublinear scaling (the economies of scale of organisms) and the other by superlinear scaling (the increasing returns to scale of cities and economies): in the superlinear case, the general solution exhibits an unexpectedly curious property technically known as a finite time singularity, which is a signal of inevitable change, and possibly of potential trouble ahead. "A finite time singularity simply means that the mathematical solution to the growth equation governing whatever is being considered–the population, the GDP, the number of patents, et cetera–becomes infinitely large at some finite time...." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. P. 413.
"Major innovations can therefore be viewed as mechanisms for ensuring a soft transition to a new phase by circumnavigating the potentially disastrous discontinuity inherent in the black hole of a finite time singularity.... This can be restated as a sort of ‘theorem’: to sustain open-ended growth in light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations...." "Unfortunately, however, it’s not quite as simple as that.... The theory dictates that to sustain continuous growth the time between successive innovations has to get shorter and shorter,. Thus paradigm-shifting discoveries, adaptations, and innovations must occur at an increasingly accelerated pace... "We’re not only living on an accelerating treadmill that’s always getting faster and faster, but at some stage we have to jump onto another treadmill that is accelerating even faster and sooner or later have to jump from that one onto yet another one that’s going even faster." West, Geoffrey. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press. Pp. 416-8. |
