Category: collaborative intelligence
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Glossary
A abiogenesis — scientific term for the generation of life from inorganic matter, as distinguished from “spontaneous generation” (e.g. maggots arising spontaneously from rotting meat), which was disproven by Louis Pasteur; today refers to hypotheses about the chemical origin of life, as from a primordial sea, via self-replicating molecules abduction — “an inspired inference,” term…
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Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, later Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a distinguished professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. His advance over Aristotle’s static Scala Natura, or Great Chain of Being, was to introduce the dynamic concept that life’s behavior propels the ongoing evolution of species in a theory he…
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Cities as Organisms
Barcelona is seen from the air in the daylight (above). Barcelona had an innovative vision for digitizing their city. Urban leaders gathered data on what caused people to leave the city and why jobs were lost. Cleanliness, safety, reliable transportation and urban services emerged as issues that mattered in citizens’ experiences of their city. People…
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Volvox – early collaborative intelligence
Volvox is a genus of freshwater green algae often found in ponds, ditches, or shallow puddles — one of the earliest communities manifesting collaborative intelligence. Volvox played a unique role as a precursor of multicellularity, illustrating how collaboration came very early in evolution. Volvox diverged from unicellular ancestors about 200 million years ago. Antonie Philips…
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Rainforests: Collaborative Intelligence Ecosystems
The rainforest manifests “collaborative intelligence” in a co-dependent ecosystem. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that 70 percent of the anti-cancer plants identified to date are rain forest plants. A new drug under development by a private pharmaceutical company, possibly for treating HIV, is Calanolide A, which is derived from a tree discovered on Borneo,…


