Collaboration Samples

Collaboration is key to knowledge, development and evolution

The following two examples share some similarities, yet occur at very different scales and orientation.

Progress

After decades studying a period of human history of about 200,000 years, in *The Rational Optimist*, the English biologist and zoologist Matt Ridley reports that during the first 190,000 years, little had changed, and then everything began to develop much more rapidly.

In an attempt to understand the reasons behind this, he arrives at the clear conclusion that what lifted humans out of poverty was neither the unchanged brain, nor language which had been in use for a long time, nor even agriculture which came later but rather a simple and natural strategic mechanism, as humans began to:

Deal, commerce, collaborate with stangers

Two ideas developed in isolation, separately, come into contact. Each learns from the other. Knowledge intersects, enriches itself, and produces something that neither could have achieved alone. It’s a bit like genetics.

The discovery and comparison of diverse ideas multiply the potential tenfold.

Regress

About 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia, leaving approximately 4,000 humans living on an island with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity.

Both Australians and the Tasmanians started out with essentially the same brains, language, and initial tools, with about 150 km between them.

The Australians continued to invent—boomerangs, spear throwers, fishing nets, sophisticated bone needles, war canoes, and more—expanding their technologies over centuries and millennia.

Meanwhile, the Tasmanians did not develop the technologies of their cousins and began to lose the tools they had initially possessed.

They forgot how to fish, how to make bone tools, how to make beautiful clothing, and how to make fire—which they used to transport and share among groups.

When the first European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the most modest toolkit ever recorded. Their material culture had regressed by 8,000 years.

A Harvard study proves, using a formal mathematical model, that Tasmanian brains were fully functional and that sustaining a culture—a toolkit—requires a critical mass of people exchanging their expertise on the subject.

Like everything else, learning is relative and imperfect. With each generation, a little of ancestral knowledge is lost, but with a thriving population and market, others can remember and correct it.

Below a certain threshold and without input from “outsiders,” small losses accumulate until entire swaths of knowledge are lost.

Intelligence is not a property of the mind, but a property of the networks in which the mind participates. An isolated genius produces less than a group of average thinkers engaged in intense exchange.

For 190,000 years, our ancestors had brains, but lacked interconnections.

Collaboration is the key to development