Sublime

Cooperation…is its own evolutionary force that contributes to an organism’s immediate survival but also creates the possibility for adaptive responses to future challenges.

Just a small fraction of the animal kingdom is capable of tapping into the evolutionarily modern Green state to handle problems via social solutions.

When we do, we assume the politicians are clients in a patron–client relationship, and we assume their obligations will cloud their impartial judgment.

Earlier we heard Sherlock Holmes present the axiom of emergence: while individuals remain puzzles, man in the aggregate “becomes a mathematical certainty.”

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

social complexity ultimately emerges from people behaving in terms of the body-state imagery of their shared social metaphors. (If you habitually imagine your community as a family, and you have experienced loving parents, then surely your leaders have your best interests at heart.) In social

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.