The Evolution of Human Genius

Cultures that evolved over hundreds of years were suddenly exposed to new stimuli that were to affect them in unprecedented ways. Peoples that had led traditional lives in isolated communities were now confronted with new choices and new opportunities.

The transformations brought about were multilateral and symbiotic. While those living in developing countries suddenly had greater access to the latest information about the lifestyles and dynamics of the First World, getting in effect greater opportunities to improve their own lives, the inhabitants of the post-industrialized world had a chance to appreciate and benefit from the unique perspectives of cultures that were often radically different from their own.

Even as cultural interactions have taken place with increased frequency since the dawn of the twentieth century, both their scale and scope have changed dramatically with the advent of the revolutionary communication technologies of the post-modern age. While the transfer of technology across the world occurred at different paces throughout history, often with innovative outcomes like that of gunpowder introduced to Europe, or personal computers to India, in recent years the transfer of ideas has assumed a marked pace of its own. And although business at the speed of thought (as advocated by Bill Gates) may yet be some way off, ideas today literally travel at the speed of light thanks to technologies such as the Internet.

The diverse worldviews available to the average citizen of the United States in the first decade of the twenty first century, for example, would not have been possible only a few decades earlier. While the fascination with Eastern spirituality and Indian fads in the West maybe some of the most conspicuous, superficial aspects of this cross cultural exchange – more profound developments may be taking place in the collective consciousness of humanity. The human mind may be entering a new phase in its evolution, as mass-consciousness attempts to gather bits and pieces of the civilizational experience that nature has distributed to man across his world through the thousands of years of his development.

Ancient cultures around the world apparently tend to possess certain unique features, or core competences, so to speak, that give them an edge over other cultures in specific domains. Obvious examples of such inimitable cultural features may be found in Indian spiritual and meditation techniques, Chinese martial arts, and Western technology and organizational capabilities – all unique, civilizational skills that developed in isolation, but eventually led to the enrichment of mankind's experience in totality. Sanskrit, a prosaic language especially suited to the expression of discrete ideas may have contributed to India becoming a major software powerhouse, while lyrical Arabic may have made for some of the most beautiful Urdu poetry imaginable.

Today, when a Belgian man recommends Kimchi to his fellow Web-surfers in order to improve brain power, or when a Polynesian teenager advocates the use of the Noni fruit growing on his island to improve muscular endurance, human intellect may have finally come into its own. Unique outlooks, perspectives, and specific cognitions that formed across the world as a result of centuries of human experience in isolation, may now have unprecedented opportunities to converge, restructure and even lead to the development of new forms of knowledge.

Creativity may be a particular beneficiary of such extensive, transcending forms of communication. Such new sources of information may prove to be a boon to human ingenuity, as diverse ideas give rise to richer thought, opening up new horizons for the human mind as it learns to think with greater freedom.

New paradigms may now be created by the average mind that has access to information about whole new contexts, overriding old notions. For example, an inquisitive villager in Africa may use the Internet to discover that the hardy aloe vera plant that thrives in the deserts of Australia also provides a veritable storehouse of nutrients, a reliable potential food source for the starving people of drought-ridden Sudan. The perceptive human mind now has access to new solutions, creating whole new paradigms by simply linking existing bits of information – connecting existing contexts to create new ones.

So what does all this bode for the future of our world? Leadership, for one, is bound to see major developments. Those who have the foresight to forge links between hitherto unrelated contexts will create paradigms that will be dutifully followed by the rest of their communities. In our time, one way to define leadership would be to see it as the power to actually create new patterns of thought and behavior – new ways of going about life.

This, then, may be the ultimate achievement of mankind – the end of evolution, as it were - to discover, extract, conserve, and utilize human genius as it occurs in its natural distribution across our planet. Diversity, in all its totality, is the equivalent of human genius – an aggregation of the individual pieces of thought as it developed over millennia, a collection of the countless cognitions that have occurred across the expanse of time. Genius, we may thus surmise, may not be the domain of any one individual, but the collective destiny of mankind.

"I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow," said Woodrow Wilson (ref). Suddenly, that may appear to be very true for an increasing number of individuals around the world.