Matthew Levinson

Technology or just biology

Published on 04/12/07
by matt

I walked up to the Teachers’ Club on Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, on Friday morning, sure of only one thing. I was going to get some good coffee. Across the street from the club’s new conference facilities is one of the top two coffee purveyors in town, Single Origin Roaster (though as this review says, the owner can be a little unnervingly friendly at times) – I needed that after radio the night before, DJing alongside SYLK and Catcall at the Oyster magazine launch the night before that, and the day job – suitably refreshed I crossed back to the Teacher’s and into the mass of people making/hoping to make new connections.

Most of the conferences I attend are organised by professionals, with months or years in the making, and this one was nothing like that. Tom Dawkins and Cassie Charlton, the organisers from Vibewire, had blu tac and posters and programs and all manner of other paraphernalia spilling out of arms and bags, and, half an hour after the keynote was to begin, the posters were still being affixed in the main auditorium. But given they had six weeks to get it together, at the same time as running their electiontracker coverage – well it was a pretty good effort getting it together.

Billowing masses of jargon clouded up the place in Mark Pesce‘s keynote, but his sharply inspiring ideas cut through the obfuscation relatively unscathed. Instead of dwelling on technology, he stepped back and looked at the way people interact socially in terms of human nature and biology. His basic premise was that left/socialist and right/libertarian philosphies, the two bookends of partisan politics, are rooted in basic biology.

The tension between altruistic and selfish behaviour.

Darwin broached it in the Ascent of Man saying morality provided no advantage to the individual, but immense advantages to the tribe or group (these quotes were abused by colonising Brits – probably a large reason why they’ve been dropped from the evolutionary canon) – and until recently biologists didn’t accept altruism as a natural phenomenon, expecting individuals to work for their own good and that of their children. Ants and bees, which don’t obey the selfish ‘survival of the fittest’ laws and yet produce highly successful colonies, were a spanner in the works for biologists, but, just this year, biologists started publishing on the idea of “multi-level selection“. Suddenly you’ve got a scientific justification for the tensions between altruism and selfishness as critical factors in natural selection – and compelling support for politics/social media/human nature taking in elements of both.

Basically social groups do better for the individual/children if they’re selfish, but they do better for the group if they behave altruistically. You need both.

Dunbar‘s work on social group size showed that humans have an optimal group size of 150. The first urban groups (1000+) appeared 10,000 years ago, and, since then, we’ve had more people in our circles than our cortexes can keep up with; competing groups, and real advantages to be gained from altruism. That’s skyrocketing. Pesce argues that, “In the network era, the benefits of altruism disproportionately outweigh selfishness.”

Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia Britannica is a good example. Now everyone, no matter how marginalised, can make a contribution to society. And (here’s the important bit), Wikipedia gives a selection advantage to everyone who reads it, simply by giving them access to the facts.

Pesce discovered a community of amateur online psephologists (via Crikey) including Poll Bludger and Possums Pollytics. By sharing their election stats knowledge, these bloggers brought readers up to a shared level of understanding – a point where all parties could take part in debates and advance the group’s knowledge.

This idea of blogging communities isn’t as neat as the wiki resource, but it’s equally important. In this knowledge sharing environment, spurred on by the thrill of conversation and competition, the group makes advances in ideas and understanding that they wouldn’t have individually. This idea holds equally true with music blogs by people like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Emmy Hennings… try it.

“Sharing is the shape, promise and danger of the world to come,” according to Pesce, a future that’s described in John Robb’s Brave New War – equal parts good and bad. There were no easy answers, just (for me at least) quite a step up in thinking about where it all fits in.

More to come…

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