Copiers vs. innovators?

Mark Pagel writes:


A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.


For the pointer I thank John Brockman.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 13, 2011 01:26
No comments have been added yet.


Tyler Cowen's Blog

Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Tyler Cowen's blog with rss.