Double helix of social evolution

Visiting with a friend in San Francisco, I picked up a book which probes the posibility that information transmitted by coherent biophotonic light that living cells--including our DNA--produce, can be received in defocalized state of consciousness. It’s “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” by Jeremy Narby. What struck me is the connection of what biologists know about the DNA with the relationship between factors that drive humankind socioeconomic evolution that I tried explore and visualize here and the two slides following that one.

The following statements from Narby’s book triggered some interesting questions for me:

“One of the two ribbons is the back-to-front duplicate of the other... The second ribbon plays two essential roles. It allows the repair enzymes to re-construct the main text in case of damage and, above all, it provides the mechanisms for duplication of the genetic message... Without that copying mechanism, a cell wouldn’t be able to duplicate itself, and life would not exist.”

Interpreting--through the lens of that “copying mechanism”--the double helix of human and social faculties co-arising with our tools, we can understand how our productive and communication tools help copying and duplicating those faculties across generations and geographies. Think, for example, of how “chat systems” allow teenagers around the world to grow faster the faculties of socialization--and ultimately knowing oneself-- through trying out different roles in the different chat rooms.

Interpreting--through the same lens--the double helix of co-arising individual and collective intelligences, we can understand how the many forms of collective intelligence help duplicate and spread the features of our individual intelligences (capacity to manifest) across time and space. The great legends of oral cultures all came into being by individual intelligences weaving the story that become part of the collective intelligence which, in turn, informed the intelligence of many generations of individuals.

If tools and collective intelligence share with the second ribbon of DNA this duplicating function--in relation to human faculties and individual intelligence--then their continuous improvement is an organizational activity of the highest evolutionary value.

That improvement is the activity system through which organizations, communities, traditional and virtual nations can guide their conscious evolution. Upgrading our productive and communication tools to higher performance, we can enable new human faculties, individual and collective, that never existed before. Upgrading our collective intelligence to “CI 2.0,” we can enable the connecting of augmented individual intelligences at a scale that has never existed before.