This story provides an interesting explanation as to why humans made the jump from hunting/gathering to agriculture. The question has been bothering me ever since I first read Guns Germs and Steel.

I was recently challenged to predict the future. I was surprised at how quickly I drew a complete blank, and soon realized how very little I think about the future these days. There have been times in the past when I've felt almost prophetic, but very rarely, and only for ideas that seem very obvious, like ubiquitous unlimited bandwidth and social networking APIs.

However, one aspect of the past that especially interests me is human evolution, both physical and social. Thus given what I've read about past human evolution, I do enjoy speculating on the future of us all as a species.

The trend in human evolution has been towards "gracilization," or lighter bone structure. The far east seems to be slightly "ahead" of the rest of the world in this trend, which I believe is due to the effect of significantly higher population density over time. As average population densities increase world wide due to the growth of cities and the decline of the need for traditional agricultural labor, the trend towards gracilization will continue unabated. Gracilization itself is an indication of stability. As civilizations become more stable, there is less violence and therefor less need for strong skeletons and big muscles.

The human race is still unstable. At times we work with each other while at other times we work against each other. Over time we will work more with each other, much like a very large colony of bees, as cooperation appears to be a very effective approach for social species and will no doubt continue to be.

The trend towards a more homogeneous, more organized, more stable world population has many implications. Increased stability might be achieved through increased control by any number of possible means. One means of control that has been extremely effective throughout human history is religion. It is not inconceivable that there may some day be a single world-religion with a set of tenets particularly effective at achieving stability. Technological means of control will become increasingly effective as it becomes possible to track the physical location of every human wherever they are on the planet.

One route to stability might be free trade and the instant spread of good ideas via ubiquitous instant communication.

Another possibility, perhaps the most dire is that one homogeneous group of people could possibly eliminate all other groups through warfare. With instant communication available to everyone and a world-wide mono-culture, diversification of culture (and thus decreased stability) would be unlikely.

Rereading the above paragraphs, I'm shocked to see how much some of my views resemble the futures predicted by the likes of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. I'm a firm believer in free trade and individual rights, so any form of collectivism (such as might ensue from a world-religion) are instinctively unappealing to me, though I am sure that the trend will be towards stability and homogeneity.

A while back I wrote about documenting your project with Voodoopad. I realized after I posted that there is a fatal flaw to this approach: since Voodoopad uses binary files, it is impossible to merge two different versions.

I have since come upon another solution: the Plain Text Wiki bundle for Textmate. It allows you to edit a pure text wiki that is easily searchable within TextMate, as well as easily committed and merged in the context of any version control system.

http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2004/09/relationship-cycles.html

The key point I take from this article is that small differences in needs can appear to be large due to different burn rates.

I don't know the solution, but it helps somewhat to understand the cause.