As in nature, as in society, as in business: it is a tough world out there. Only the strongest, fittest, best survive. You need to have talents, in terms of raw strength or in extrovertness or blind ambition. If not you will not make it in the world, be it the biological or the business world.

This assumption, intimately linked with a kind of innate, imprinted mindset of neo-classical economics, prevails the attitude of most if not all business decision makers. A few days ago I was at a meeting around sustainable economy, and to my surprise this mindset prevailed even there, among thinkers and workers for a new economical paradigm.

We need to talk and publish more about a different mindset, a different way of thinking, but most of all: a different way of seeing. The unconscious level on which we are all imprinted with the survival of the fittest paradigm needs to be accessed, opened up, and made explicit. This is the only way in which we can possibly hope to create that new economy, introduce new ways of working inside and between enterprises, or transform enterprises themselves into responsible citizens of a better society.

Let's first try to explain a little on the biological arguments. This is sometimes called Darwinian evolution theory. Be it far from me to question the theory of evolution in itself, I think it is very important to be aware of recent developments in biology and evolutionary theory. Every "real" scientist knows that science knows so very little. But to the public some scientists think it is wise to radiate an aura of authority, of great scientific breakthroughs, and an impression of deep understanding how things work. I think this is not wise at all. Sometimes it feels to me that science does this in a vain attempt to boast as much authority as religion tries to do. Everybody should be aware of the fact that, yes, we begin to understand more about, say, the immune system. But we are nowhere near "understanding" as is meant by the term, we know so little, and what we think we know is mostly conjecture and intermediate concepts.

Back to evolution: even in biology the neoclassical economy has permeated. It seems en vogue to deride romantic theories about the "balance of nature" and that life is constantly "repairing" imbalances, mostly initiated by evil human activities. Those biologists talk about nature and life as a constant struggle and perpetual unbalance. About processes that might be irreparably damaged, resulting in a run-down of the ecology to what is called mass extinction events. Five of these have been listed, and some biologists are arguing that we are heading for a new one, this time initiated by ourselves, the human species.

But the scientific "fact" is we know so very little about the processes that we call "life" on this planet. Only recently it has become known that life even exists many miles below the surface of the earth, and I am not talking about the deep sea, but the solid surface layer, in what is called the earth's crust. We discovered recently that genetics is not just replication of DNA, but that a much more important factor is the activation/deactivation of DNA by RNA "switches" (called Transcriptional Activators and Repressors). We are only just starting to realise the importance of epigenetic modifications of DNA. We learned about the importance of "infections" by bacteria that eons ago established a symbiotic relationship with eukaryotic cells and are now part of the cellular apparatus, such as Golgi Complex, Reticular System and Mitochondria, also called organelles. These organelles still have their own DNA!

Life as we know it is impossible without these cellular elements, especially multicellular organisms. All these genetic elements are, by the way, only propagated through the female ancestral line in sexually reproducing species. To put things in perspective, a human sperm cell has a radius of about 2 μm, while a ovum has a radius of about 200 μm. So the female contributes about 1,000,000 times more "information" in cellular mass than the male!

We learned that not only "regular" mutations (accidental rearrangement of DNA coding) can cause changes in genetic make-up, but that living organisms can change their genetic properties by viral infections (as retroviruses do), or even (as bacteria consistently seem to do) by transferring beneficial genetic properties to other cells. Bacteria are able to do so with astonishing speed: modified genetics in bacteria in the ocean near the American west coast are detected in Japan within days!

The fact that this vast infrastructure of viruses and bacteria constantly communicates with such astonishing speed should make us consider. Why is it that there is such a thing as a virus in the first place? They seem such a rudimentary thing, not really alive at all, just a strand of DNA that gets injected into host cells of living creatures on which the virus is totally dependent.

To me this vast communicating network does not feel like a battlefield in which only the fittest survive and get a chance in propagating their genes to the next generation. It feels much more like a vast neural network. Like any complex system it exhibits emergent behaviour. To any system thinker life on this planet will evoke this image of a networked, interdependent, aligned, moving in sync, entity.

Maybe in this article I helped evoke this image in such a way that you, as a reader, can see this too. We need to see things differently, not only do things differently. The thing we want to accomplish, a better world, new business models, new financial and economic systems, can only become real after we change our vision. Challenging established ways of seeing is part of that. Envisioning new ways as well.

Also called the Recommended Basic List of Great Masterpieces of Universal Literature (from Edmond Bordeaux Szekely). This list is from his booklet The Art of Study - The Sorbonne Method. This booklet explains a method of study employed by Szekely himself, which he claims to have learned while studying on the Sorbonne, one of the worlds most renowned universities. It contains the list of books, because, as Szekely tells us: "these books contain the wisdom of the ages" and should be read by everyone.

Some of the books are only summarily mentioned (for example: "parts of the Koran") and the list does not specify which parts.

I am happy to report that most of these "required reading" masterpieces are available on Project Gutenberg for free. I am working on providing the links below.

The books on Project Gutenberg can be read on your iPad or Kindle very conveniently.

For the iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch, I suggest using Stanza, which directly accesses Project Gutenberg from the app.

For the Kindle, currently the best strategy seems to be to use the Kindle web browser and go to gutenberg.org to search for the book you want. Make sure you select the mobi format for download (also called "Kindle format").

An alternative list to consider is the Alan Kay Reading List: 

The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students. We share it for those who want to learn more about some of the writing that influenced him and the creation of Etoys.

Alan Kay Reading List

This is a quote from Szekely's book (page 15):

The list

• The Vedas
• The Upanishads
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead
• The Bible
• The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
• Epictetus
  • Golden Sayings
• Lao Tsu: The Tao Te Ching
• The Analects of Confucius
• The Talmud
• The Kabala
• The Essene Gospel of Peace
• Confessions of St. Augustine
• portions of the Koran
• Zarathustra: The Zend Avesta
• Aknaton: Hymns
• Aristotle:
  • Ethics
  • Politics
• Buddha: Sayings
• Olcott: Buddhist Catechism
• Thomas a Kempis: Imitation of Christ
• Renan: The Life of Jesus
• Spinoza:
  • Tractatus
  • Ethics
• Pascal: Thoughts
• Tagore:
  • Sadhana
  • Gitanjali
• Gjellerup: The Pilgrim Kamanita
• Hesse:
  • Siddhartha
  • Magister Ludi
• Tolstoy: On Life.
• Pythagoras:
• Plato:
  • Dialogues, principally the Apology, Crito and Phaedo
• Xenophon: Memorabilia
• Demosthenes: De Corona
• Cicero:
  • De Officiis
  • De Amicilia
  • De Senectute
• Plutarch: Lives
• Berkeley: Human Knowledge
• Descartes: Discours sur la Méthode
• Locke: On the Conduct of the Understanding
• Bergson: Creative Evolution
• Stuart Mill: Logic
• Homer
  • Illiad
  • Odysssee
• Hesiod: Aesop's Fables
• Virgil
• Maha Bharata
• Ferdowsi: The Shahnameh
• The Nibelungenlied
• The Kalevala
• Horace
• Kalidasa: Sakuntala
• Aeschylus:
  • Prometheus
  • Trilogy of Orestes
• Sophocles: Oedipus
• Euripides: Medea
• Aristophanes:
  • The Knights
  • Clouds
• Shakespeare
• Milton:
  • Paradise Lost
  • Poems
• Dante: Divina Comedia
• Wordsworth: Poems
• Burns: Poems
• Keats: Poems
• Shelley: Poems
• Swinburne: Poems
• Walt Whitman: Poems
• Edgar Allan Poe: Poems
• Herodotus
• Thucydides
• Livy
• Xenophon: Anabasis
• Tacitus: Germania
• Flavius Josephus: Antiquities
• Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Hume: History of England
• Prescott:
  • The Conquest of Mexico
  • The Conquest of Peru
• Thomas More: Utopia
• Carlyle: The French Revolution
• Lewis: History of Philosophy
• Janet Seailles: History of Philosophy
• The Arabian Nights
• Moliëre
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
• Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote
• Marco Polo: Travels
• Schiller: William Tell
• Heine: Book of Songs
• Victor Hugo:
  • Les Miserables
  • Poems
• Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil
• Balzac: The Human Comedy
• Anatole France: Oeuvres
• Verlaine: Poems
• Verhaeren: Poems
• Rimbaud: Poems
• Carlyle: Past and Present
• Romain Rolland: Jean Chrislophe
• Henrik Ibsen: Dramas
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Knut Hamsun:
  • Pan
  • Hunger
• Algernon Blackwood: The Centaur
• Bacon:
  • Novum Organum
  • Essays
• Montaigne: Essays
• Hume: Essays
• Macaulay: Essays
• Carlyle: Essays
• Brandes: Essays
• Emerson: Essays
• La Rochefoucauld: Maximes
• Rousseau:
  • Confessions
  • Emile
• Henri David Thoreau: Walden
• Voltaire:
  • Zadig
  • Candide
  • Micromegas
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust
• Byron: Manfred
• Madach: The Tragedy of Man
• Thackeray:
  • Vanity Fair
  • Pendennis
• Charles Dickens:
  • Pickwick Papers
  • David Copperfield
• Tolstoy: War and Peace
• Dostoyevsky:
  • The Idiot
  • Crime and Punishment
  • The Brothers Karamazov
• Bulwer Lytton: Last Days of Pompeii
• Walter Scott: Novels
• Gorky: The Mother
• George Bernard Shaw: Selected Works
• G.K. Chesterton: St. Francis
• Hippocrates: Selected Works
• Galileo Galilei: The Authority of the Scripture
• Newton: Principles of Philosophy
• Darwin: The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man
• August Comte: Positivist Catechism
• Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmos
• Thomas Paine:
  • The Age of Reason
  • The Rights of Man
• Haeckel: The Evolution of Man
• Spencer: First Principles
• Karl Marx: Das Kapital
• Friedrich Engels: Anti-Dührung
• Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis
• Albert Einstein: The Theory of Relativity
• Arthur Schopenhauer:  Aphorisms
• Lubbock:  The Pleasures of Life
• Maeterlinck:
  • The Life of the Bee
  • Treasure of the Humble
• Jules Payot:
  • The Education of the Will
  • Work and Will-Power
  • The Conquest of Happiness
• Mulford: Essays

Een groeiende ergernis bij het aanhoren van nieuws- en weerberichten is de gewoonte om de volgende soort uitspraken te doen:

"De temperatuur morgen is 17 graden, ca. 7 graden meer dan normaal." (nadruk van mij)

Wat is in hemelsnaam normaal? Is het normaal dat de temperatuur altijd gemiddeld is? Is iemand met een IQ van 140 abnormaal? (gezien het feit dat een IQ van 100 een standaard definitie is van de gemiddelde intelligentie). Zou het "normaal" zijn als iedereen een IQ van 100 had?

Er zijn taalontwikkelingen waar ik soms met moeite echt kritiek op kan hebben. Een voorbeeld is het verschil tussen "hen" en "hun". Maar het gebruik van het woord "normaal" waar "gemiddeld" bedoeld is, is doodgewoon fout.

Het gemiddelde is niet "normaal". Ook bij een Normaalverdeling is het niet normaal als alle waarden rond de piek zouden zitten - het zou dan immers geen normaalverdeling meer zijn maar een Uniforme distributie met slechts één waarde. Hoewel theoretisch een normaalverdeling met een variantie van 0 daarmee zou overeenkomen...

Two hundred years after Darwin's birth, the theory of evolution is still evolving — and finding relevance in realms far outside the biological.
Evolution is being scaled up to the level of populations, even whole ecosystems. Moreover, scientists say evolution is intertwined with other dynamics in ways science is just starting to understand.
"The process of evolution is fundamental to the universe,” said Carl Woese, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign microbiologist and one of the first proponents of this newly revised evolutionary framework. “Biology is the most obvious manifestation of it.”

At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution | Wired Science from Wired.com

You may know that I try to take a different approach to the theory of evolution. Especially the popularised (albeit presented as scientific) version that circulates among the populace. Since this is the year of Darwin, many articles appear on the subject.

What bothers me about these articles is that they as a rule remain on the main road, the popularised version. In that myth, evolution is the result of the battle for survival, and solely engineered through the ministrations of genes. I hold a quite different view, and actually modern biology has gone much further than the myth - but for some reason biologists don't speak up. Maybe they think "normal" people are not equipped to understand, I do not know. But this blog on Wired made at least an attempt to broaden the scope and I recommend reading it (including the links).

(btw: notice the iPod earphone wires coming from young Darwins vest ;-)