In this second of three posts on exaptation I am going to continue to build on reporting discussions and ideas that came out of the Durham conference. In the final post I’ll pick up on what I presented (and what I wish I had thought of presenting at the time) on managed serendipity. Probably the […]
The feather original evolved for regulation of temperature, but then evolved for flight. In 1942 a scientist at Raytheon was testing a magnetron, a key component of radar, and noticed that a candy bar melted in his pocket. The next day he experimented with a egg which burst and spattered hot yolk over his face; […]
Brunelleschi or other architects of the renaissance did not set out to design spandrels, those curved triangular areas between the arches supporting cupolas. Even if later on spandrels turned out to have their own utility, they appeared initially only as byproducts of adaptations. The same happens in evolution: not everything adaptive today appeared because it […]
Psychology, mass media research, and even behavioral economics have of late become very interested in the phenomenon called priming or framing: the fact that being exposed first to one stimulus biases one’s response to a second stimulus. Priming and framing prevent us from discovering and consciously exploiting the current utility of byproducts of previous adaptations. […]
Today was a bit of a saga travel wise, but the destination was worth it. My day started at 0815 persuading my wife to take me Swindon Station. from thence to Paddington, Circle Line to Liverpool Street and the Stanstead Express. After the normal queues in Britain’s worst airport the Ryan Airflight to Milan Bergamano […]
“ The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. ” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez I’ve had a few requests recently for further reading post a presentation and I put this together – but I know it’s not […]
Several interactions over social media have left me somewhat frustrated by the inability of several people who could know better (I exclude the odd attention-seeking troll from this) to understand one of the key aspects of complexity namely managing the nature of a system to encourage emergence. The minute you imply any intentionality they immediately […]
In yesterday’s post, I reminded readers of three critical aspects of a complex adaptive system: (i) it is necessary, but not sufficient, for there to be many elements; (ii) rich, short-range interactions between those elements are necessary and probably sufficient; (iii) the elements are not aware of the whole, necessary but not sufficient. That […]
I’ve been much occupied of late, developing the methods and tools around Estuarine Mapping, the third sense-making framework along with Cynefin and Flexuous Curves. As a part of that, I’ve also been working on a range of typologies which includes enhancing constraint mapping from its very early days six years ago to the EU Field […]
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