Nasty, brutish and …

January 12, 2008

Thanks to Thinking Meat for this article in the Economist. It challenges the idea that our Pliocene hunter gather past was some form of ideal society. Romanticism without evidence was a de facto theme of my recent concern about Dave Pollard and his polyamorous intentional communities. I have given up there by the way, see the comments here.

Now there is a lot we can learn from that past, but we need to be careful. It is not only the danger of idealism, but also of naive scientific determinism. I have the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology on the table beside me and it has some great material. However an evolutionary disposition, does not make a certain type of behaviour inevitable, it just makes it more likely with the right environmental trigger. It is the old nature/nurture argument again: nature creates dispositions, but nurture provides the stimulus, and therein lies our pragmatic responsibility.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

Knowledge management in action

The last forty eight has been an interesting period for observation of knowledge management in ...

More posts

Next >

Paddling away from Elvis

I wonder if foreknowledge of this event, created the need for the novel form of ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram