Jan
27
2009
Barbara Marx Hubbard founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution talks with
Tom Munnecke and others on the night Obama’s inauguration. She discusses her campaign for the vice presidency 25 years ago, and how her dreams and visions of that time are coming to fruition with the new shift in direction. She talks about her notion of Peace Rooms, ways of finding out what’s working, how to develop grass roots organizations that also feed information to centralized ones. Tom talks about the network effects of goodness, and how all this might “go viral.” Heather Wood Ion, Jim Pinto, Prapanna Smith, Nancy Walsh, and Carla Gerstein also participate. Video by Robert Foxworth, music by Kevin MacLeod, editing by Tom Munnecke. Taped Jan 20, 2009 in Encinitas, Ca. See also
James Fowler’s Interview on the positive effects of Social Networks. This interview has been
permanently saved at the Internet Archive.
Jan
22
2009
Jamais Cascio at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle Workshop in Encinitas, CA is co-founder of
WorldChanging.com. Produced by Tom Munnecke, music by Jim MacKay.
Jan
22
2009
Judith Rosen talks about her father Robert Rosen’s work bridging the gap between physics and biology as well as the role of anticipatory systems theory.
Jan
22
2009
John Smart talks about accelerating change at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle workshop.
Jan
21
2009
Ben Goertzel of Novamente talks about the singularity, artificial intelligence, and conscious evolution at the 2007 Good Ancestors workshop.
Jan
18
2009
Victor Cortez, UC Irvine Class of 2010, talks about his efforts to teach science at the Noah Teen Center in Santa Ana. Interviewed at Nataional Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Symposium
In Light of Evolution III Two Centuries of Darwin. Produced by Tom Munnecke, music by Kevin MacLeod.
Jan
14
2009
Darwin taught us all about the survival of the fittest – the “fitness function” by which life has evolved 
over the past 4 billion years or so. However, we are the first generations of the first species to reach a point of intelligence that we can understand and affect our own evolution. This is not your grandfather’s evolution. The birth control pill in the 60′s allowed us shift our species’ hormones and triggered a sexual revolution. Our understanding of DNA and the human genome poises us for fantastic new vistas in medicine.
This brings up the question: just what is our new fitness function as we consciously shape our own evolution? The tried-and-true formula that nature has used until now – maximizing the number of your surviving offspring – is not going to work. We won that race, and now have 6.5 billion homo sapiens sapiens on earth. Blindly increasing that number is not going to work.
Scientists in China have just announced that they have sequenced the DNA of the Giant Panda – surely the mark of distinction the millions of species in the world today. But why the panda? According to Jun Wang, the institute’s associate director and professor, they chose the giant panda it’s cute and therefore able to capture the public’s attention.
Never mind that the Panda is one of the most “brittle” species on earth, locked into a single food source (bamboo), and a single climate. But what about the trillions of lowly earthworms, constantly refreshing our soils. Darwin recognized this: “it may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures.”
But they aren’t cute.
Perhaps saving the most mediagenic species has a lot of sex appeal to some, but perhaps we need to move to the Survival of the Wisest, not the Survival of the Cutest. A great visionary, Jonas Salk, coined this phrase. I think we need to pay more attention to it.
Jan
10
2009
Jonas Salk said, “The most important question we can ask ourselves is, “are we being good ancestors.” Here is a summary of the Uplift Academy’s 2007 Good Ancestor Principle Workshop held in Encinitas, Ca. Feb, 2007. Produced by Tom Munnecke. Includes comments by Jonas Salk, David Brin, Frederick Turner, Heather Wood Ion, Jamais Cascio, Tom Munnecke, Mark Frazier, Michael Strong, Judith Rosen, and Diedre Taylor. Music by Jim Mackay, editing by Silas Haggerty of Smoothfeather Productions, Tom Munnecke, and Rob Constantine.
Jan
07
2009
This is conversation between UC San Diego Political Scientist
James Fowler with
Tom Munnecke and Heather Wood Ion on James’ research of happiness, obesity, drinking, and more based on the Framingham Heart Study data. He provides some provocative evidence that social networks might propagate happiness in a contagious fashion, more powerfully than unhappiness. We also talk about the spread of loneliness, ways of researching empathy, centralized “smart center” networks vs. smart edges, group selection, the work of happiness and elevation by Jonathan Haidt, and ways we might construct networks of uplift. Videography by Robert Foxworth, music by Kevin MacLeod. Taped Jan 6, 2009 at the UC San Diego Faculty Club.
This video is also archived at the Internet Archives.
