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When ideas have sex Grant Jacobs Jul 19

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Zoologist-turned-science writer Matt Ridley speaking from Oxford presents ’How ideas have sex’, how they join and recombine to form new creations.

If the title isn’t enough to draw you, try this sound bite: ’Homo erectus made the same tools for 30,000 generations.’

You’ve got to think about that.

More-or-less the same design for around a million years.

(The sheer monotony of it!)

Here’s the video, enjoy it:

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3 Comments Leave a comment

1. Tweets that mention When ideas have sex | Code for Life -- Topsy.com 1041 days ago

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Grant Jacobs, Sciblogs NZ. Sciblogs NZ said: When ideas have sex: Zoologist-turned-science writer Matt Ridley speaking from Oxford presents “How ideas have sex… http://bit.ly/dgbnKT [...]

2. 
   Grant Jacobs 1038 days ago

   When I wrote this, I meant to point out that while household incomes have apparently risen as Ridley says, I’ve seen written elsewhere that this is dominantly in the very upper portion of the income scale (i.e. almost entirely in the wealthiest people). This graph shows this for the US:

   http://lanekenworthy.net/2010/07/20/the-best-inequality-graph-updated/

   Of course, one obvious objection is relative gain v. absolute… (i.e. expressed as a percentage gain, the greater rise for the wealthy may not be as significant.)

   I’ll let others battle that out :-)

   I just want to point out that perhaps the statement in his lecture needs a few qualifiers?

3. Where do good ideas come from? | Code for Life 971 days ago

   [...] Johnson’s reference to When ideas have sex early in the presentation is to an earlier TED lecture by Matt Ridley that you can also watch on my blog. [...]