Sublime

Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the ear

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The United States wasn’t the only country facing a rubber drought. Germany had the same problem. As a major industrial power whose colonies had been confiscated after the First World War, Germany depended profoundly on foreign markets for crucial raw materials. It held coal and wood in relative abundance, but when it came to rubber, oil, iron, and

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“The Global Economy as an Adaptive Process,” at seven pages and zero equations, is well worth a read. Holland recounts many, now familiar, difficulties in mathematical analysis of economics that assume linearity, exclusively negative feedback loops, equilibria, and so on, before proposing that the economy is best thought of as what he calls an adap

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The great dispersal from Africa, and migrations of modern humans across the planet, culminated in the birth of permanent settlements in dispersed villages and the so-called Neolithic revolution—the advent of farming around eleven thousand years ago. Initially, a small proportion of humanity took up the permanent cultivation of crops. Over time, mor

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When a loose tribe held together by weak glue grows bigger and bigger, it also gets looser and looser until it can’t hold itself together anymore, and it splinters.This imposes a natural ceiling on human giant size—and therefore on human power itself.Except I’m currently sitting in an eight-million-person city that’s inside of a 325-million-person ... See more

Whatever object humans chose as a store of value, its value would rise, and because more of the object can always be made, others would produce more of the object to acquire the value stored in it. The Yapese had O'Keefe bringing explosives and advanced boats to make more Rai stones for them and acquire the value stored in the existing stones. Afri

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