Communications

Contents:

Articles, Videos, Recommended Reading

Our ape lineage is great at communicating, using multimedia symbols, gestures, expressions and sounds that include the songs and pair-bonding dances of gibbons, the moaning wails of orangutans, the twittering of bonobos, the chest-slaps of gorillas and the pant-hoots of chimpanzees. Our own species, though, has a mutated forebrain that can handle the computer needs of true language, in which blarney and blather, incantations, poetry, lies, songs and truth-telling bond us into clans and ethnicities through which we can each make a try for prosperity and posterity. It is communication that makes us greater than the sum of our species' parts, giving us the opportunity to organise against the greatest threats. As we teeter towards the gulf of doom, we can at least share each others' fears. But maybe we can hope for much more. A billion heads are better than one, and there are already more of us than that using the Internet. - By Dr Julian Caldecott

Videos:

Recommended Reading:

High Noon By J F Rischard
In this age of instant communication and biotechnology, on this ever-smaller planet, what kinds of problems have we created for ourselves? How do we tackle them in a world where the accustomed methods used by nation-states may be reaching their natural limits? In High Noon, J. F. Rischard challenges us to take a new approach to the twenty most important and urgent global problems of the twenty-first century. Rischard finds their common thread: we don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems that our increasingly crowded, interconnected world creates. Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past.