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PARTISAN REVIEW
and provide an information backbone to run experiments. So the first
paradigm shift took billions of years, and then, with the advent of DNA,
the Cambrian explosion only took a few tens of millions of years. Bio–
logical evolution kept accelerating,
Homo sapiens
evolved in only a few
hundred thousand years, and then technology continued, again indi–
rectly, using one of its products,
Homo sapiens.
A combination of cog–
nitive skill and an opposable thumb to manipulate our environment
ushered in another evolutionary process, that of human-directed tech–
nology and cultural evolution. There the first steps took tens of thou–
sands of years, a speed-up over biological evolution, stone tools,
language-the most important of our technologies which enables us to
have a species-wide shared knowledge base that is itself growing expo–
nentially. A thousand years ago a paradigm shift like the printing press
took a hundred years, and we've accelerated ever since. Technology evo–
lution continues very much in a straight line from biological evolution
on this double exponentia l chart. People look at the underlying data and
they say, we ll , this isn't really right, the Cambrian explosion didn't take
ten million years, it took twenty-five million years. So we start moving
the points around. Because of the nature of exponential charts, it's still
a straight line. T he underlying phenomenon is very powerful.
60
10
55
10
50
10
45
10
40
10
35
10
30
10
25
10
20
10
15
10
10
10
5
10
10
-5
..
. .
10
.
10
10
I
I
I
I
I
I
1'.....----"
1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 2D4D 2060 2080 2100
EXPONENTIALSCALE
