Gregory Stock on Metaman

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EQ_jTZDIyY

Description

David Sloan Wilson:

"The concept of humanity merging with technology to form a global superorganism began to take shape in Gregory Stock’s mind in the 1960s, though his book Metaman wasn’t published until 1993. He was unaware of Teilhard’s writings on the evolution of the Noosphere until he was well along in development of his own ideas, but when he did read Teilhard, he was impressed by his prescience: I was going, “Oh, my God. How could somebody see that in the 1920s?…I was thinking, the things that felt, to me, very prescient back in the 1960s…and now seems almost obvious, the global brain, the global mind, all of these frameworks that are quite dispersed…to have seen it at that time was extraordinarily impressive. The concept of a superorganism has an even deeper history. The term was first used by geologist and naturalist James Hutton in 1789, though in the context of geophysiology. Hutton was also one of the first scientists to glimpse some of the principles of natural selection, and influenced Charles Darwin’s later work. Hutton’s ideas about a geophysical superorganism influenced James Lovelock’s development of the Gaia Hypothesis. His co-developer of the Gaia Hypothesis, Lynn Margulis, is famous for her groundbreaking work on endosymbiosis, the evolution of a superorganism on a much smaller scale—the coming together of prokaryotes to form the first eukaryotic cells. However, what most clearly unites Gregory’s vision of Metaman and Teilhard’s of the noosphere is the integral role of technology and human activity in the next stage of life on Earth. Teilhard described these coevolving biological, social, and technological components in terms of the noosphere’s anatomy and physiology."