Sublime

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

Economically relevant information is discovered from experimentation, not deduced from a model.

studying the motivations of individuals in isolation: the patterns we see are a fundamentally social affair. More, as Anderson

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

Natural selection “is very much about advantages in the here and now, not in the distant future. Traits conferring long-term advantages emerge because they also work well in the lives of individuals and produce positive feedbacks.”

In the first, lowest level we find Darwinian creatures, with their competences pre-designed and fixed, created by the R&D of evolution by natural selection. They are born “knowing” all they will ever “know”; they are gifted but not learners.