Evolution is Everywhere

Evolution is one of my great interests. I've noticed lately how evolution is implied in so much, and well beyond biology. It is found in social environments, and in business. It is possibly everywhere. Today's link shows how the same ecological process, operating in opposite directions, can be found in fiction and in non-fiction.

I'm currently reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. The title refers to the huge number of products that sell rarely if at all. However, the internet economy has now made these items viable products. The business opportunities represented by these goods are collectively comparable to the few 'hits' at the 'head' of the distribution. (See the figure, below, from www.thelongtail.com, Anderson's website.) At one point in the book, Anderson describes these goods in ecological terms. It's as if the top-selling products were always there as islands that show above the water line. Now the ocean is receding, and revealing all those other items that are now available. I read this as saying that many niches are now viable business opportunities.

What about the opposite situation? In the novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut describes what happens when a group of tourists are stranded on an island while the rest of the human race contracts a mysterious disease that prevents them from reproducing. In technical terms, the genetic pool is dramatically bottlenecked. Vonnegut mashes up time and space and life and death and ghosts in his usual hilarious format, and describes how an accident saves the human race, but leads to an unusual evolutionary twist.

Framing is amazing

The ability of framing to alter a person's perception is amazing. It was mentioned in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan as one of the classic errors that people make in prediction. If you were to ask a person the last four digits of their social security number, and then ask them the number of dentists in Manhattan, you'll find that their estimate is influenced by the answer to the first question. This and other tactics for affecting the decisions of a person were put to use in Covert Persuasion by Kevin Hogan and James Speakman. It is an applied course in interpersonal strategery.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 1

I had a series of four books in a row that gave me the idea for this blog. Here's part 1 describing the four.

Al Gore's The Assault on Reason was a great indictment on the current administration's disdain for logic- and evidence-based decision making. Only one part of the book was disappointing: where he discussed how the internet would change the future of information exchange. This is where Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat took over. He showed how the exchange of information and commerce is now astoundingly global. Both are deeply thoughtful analyses of current political and economic trends.