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I was reading about the history of Earth day at http://earthday.envirolink.org/history.html and found an interesting quote: "That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself." This seemed to relate directly to what we have been talking about with biological evolution, applied to a human event.

I was thinking about the comparisons between human cultural evolution and biological evolution. I wondered whether, in contrast to biological evolution, which under our current Darwinian narrative has no goal/ is essentially random, cultural evolution is fundamentally different because as active shapers/ participants in our cultural narratives and direction, we can intentionally choose to have things follow a certain path/ lead to an ultimate goal. If we give culture an overarching goal/ teleology, how does this change its evolutionary nature? Also, it seems that cultural evolution exponentially tends toward greater complexity and intelligence, evidenced by the massive technological leaps over the past two centuries. It has been said that more happened in the 20th century than in the previous 19 combined. Such massive changes in such a short time contrasts with biological evolution, which is much harder for individual organisms to be able to notice in a given lifetime. When we talked about evidence of human evolution a few weeks ago, I don't know why no one mentioned the internet - in my mind, this is the greatest evolutionary mechanism we have yet evolved by far. Talk about information as a mechanism of evolutionary change - what greater medium exists for the exchange of information?

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey after Thursday's discussion, on Prof. G's strong recommendation. I found an interesting review by Robert Ebert from 1998 in which he said that "2001 pointed the way beyond narrative." What might it mean for a human cultural creation to be non-narrative? Also, I realized the term science fiction is interesting - is science fiction more real/ realistic/ plausible than plain old fiction? It as a genre seems to blur the traditional science/ literature divide, if only if name.

On Thursday, we talked a lot about the difference between fantasy and reality. I was wondering whether fantasy is really distinct from reality, or whether we live out fantasies on a daily basis. For instance, don't people write fiction in their head all day - what else is the inner monologue, that constantly running voice inside you head? To me, perhaps the most interesting topic that arose during our conversation was the idea that, going along with Dennett's metaphor, Truth, Reality, and Objectivity are 'skyhooks' (transcendent ideas/ supernatural creations); that our wish to achieve those ideals is the crane. As Prof. Grobstein noted, we created libraries full of books and knowledge; they did not drop down out of the sky.  From this, I came away with the idea that we shouldn't seek factual objectivity because it is an ideal that we created; but we should, however, seek to be as intellectually honest and make as broad of summaries of observations as possible for us as humans (which may mean admitting that nothing we conceive of could ever be True in the universal sense, only accurate or inaccurate in a given frame of reference at a certain time in a certain place).