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Of Monkeys and Men
As science, knowledge transfer, and technologies all advance, how come it feels as though human nature is so stubbornly and perplexingly resistant to the changes these things enable?
Famed sociobiologist E.O. Wilson had it right when he said,“the real trouble with humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technologies.”
His truism is utterly maddening, because some part of me has always weakly hoped that our relentless creation of life-changing systems and technologies would exert a positive influence over both our institutions and our behaviors.
It now seems like a child’s folly to think that way, similarly to how hoping you’ll catch the tooth fairy in action invariably results in disappointment.
To understand how those god-like technologies (and ideas!) emerged in spite of our evolution-resistant emotions, we need to turn to another luminary whose clever use of a centuries-old device manages to explain our advancement in the context of resistance.
To illustrate how new ideas, practices, or products spread through a social system over time, sociologist Everett Rogers’ “Diffusion of Innovations” theory employed what most of us know as the…
