Like Matt Ridley, I am also tempted to use the term collective intelligence to describe what is being examined below, namely that by playing a game of human interaction according to certain rules (the best version of which being represented by the rule of law) human beings are able to produce, disseminate, and use vital information that in its entirety is not known to any single mind, yet can be fruitfully tapped into by everyone to help create and maintain the highest level of civilisation yet attained.
The term "collective" will hardly mislead the reader in the below context; as used by the author, it is not referring to a supposed advantage and primacy of the collective over the individual; to the contrary, what I prefer to call catallactic intelligence or the cybernetic hyperintelligence of liberty is the very outcome of the rules that protect and foster personal liberty. The term catallactic is derived from the ancient Greek verb catallein, which has three connotations: to trade, to welcome someone into the community, and to turn an enemy into a friend:
When did human beings start to use collective rather than individual intelligence?
Seeking an answer to this question the author discovers that
... the entire field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek badly. Their debates about what made human beings successful, and what caused the explosive take-off of human culture in the past 100,000 years, simply never include the insight of dispersed knowledge. They are still looking for a miracle gene, or change in brain organization, that explains, like a deus ex machina, the human revolution. They are still looking inside human heads rather than between them.
[...]
There was no sudden change in brain size 200,000 years ago. We Africans—all human beings are descended chiefly from people who lived exclusively in Africa until about 65,000 years ago—had slightly smaller brains than Neanderthals, yet once outside Africa we rapidly displaced them (bar acquiring 2.5% of our genes from them along the way).
And the reason we won the war against the Neanderthals, if war it was, is staring us in the face, though it remains almost completely unrecognized among anthropologists: We exchanged. At one site in the Caucasus there are Neanderthal and modern remains within a few miles of each other, both from around 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal tools are all made from local materials. The moderns' tools are made from chert and jasper, some of which originated many miles away. That means trade.
Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That's the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.
At first it was a peculiarity of us Africans. It gave us the edge over Neanderthals in their own continent and their own climate, because good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network.
[...]
[Trade] creates a collective innovating brain as big as the trade network itself. When you cut people off from exchange networks, their innovation rate collapses. Tasmanians, isolated by rising sea levels about 10,000 years ago, not only failed to share in the advances that came after that time—the boomerang, for example—but actually went backwards in terms of technical virtuosity. The anthropologist Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia argues that in a small island population, good ideas died faster than they could be replaced. Tierra del Fuego's natives, on a similarly inhospitable and small land, but connected by trading canoes across the much narrower Magellan strait, suffered no such technological regress. They had access to a collective brain the size of South America.
Which is of course why the Internet is such an exciting development. For the first time humanity has not just some big collective brains, but one truly vast one in which almost everybody can share and in which distance is no obstacle.
The political implications are obvious: that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the individual is not—and has not been for 120,000 years—able to support his lifestyle; that trade enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that there is nothing so antisocial (or impoverishing) as the pursuit of self-sufficiency; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress.
The source.
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