netwerktheorie opkomst & evolutie van creativiteit

=

IN
the
Foundation Trilogy,
Isaac Asimov placed psychohistorian Harry Seldon so far into the future
that Earth, the birthplace of the Galactic civilization,
has been forgotten.

Indeed,
Star Trek 's teleporting characters
appear far more grounded in reality
than Seldon's mathematical equations
that accurately predict the multigalactic society's fate
thousands of years
into the future.

TODAY,
when reports about quantum teleportation fill the pages of the best physics journals,
we wonder how long it will be until a REAL Harry Seldon produces an accurate mathematical theory
of human behavior.

It may be hard to believe,
but conditions for such a quantitive approach are increasingly in place.
Indeed, records of human actions ate already stored in numerous data-bases.
E-mail and phone records document our social and professional interactions;
travel records and GPS navigation systems capture our travel patterns and physical locations;
credit-card companies maintain records of our shopping
and entertainment habits.

Although in the wrong hands,
these data sets represent Orwellian tools of power,
for scientists they offer incredible insights into human behavior.
Combine the capability with the sophisticated tool of network theory,
which analyzes relations between millions of individuals,
and you get a glimpse of an unprececented opportunity
to quantify human dynamics.

Although a mathematical theory of social complexity remains a pipe dream,
it is not as farfetched as it may have appeared in 1942, when Foundation was first published.
By taking advantage of publicly available data sets from both artistic and scientific fields,
some authors offer powerful insights into the mechanisms governing
collective human behavior.

Traditionally,
the achievements of individuals such as Darwin and Einstein
have dominated the public's image of science,
yet today some of the most groundbreaking work
is collaborative in nature.

But HOW do suchcreative teams come about?
ARE THERE discernible differences between collaborations that are sparklingly CREATIVE
and those that are LESS inventive?

We can use network theory to answer these questions.

Our starting point is a collection of fascinating data sets:
a century-long record of Broadway musicals and the publication records of several fields of science.
THESE data sets allowed us to reconstruct the collaborative history of the individuals who contributed to a particular show or research publication.

The investigators
document a changing creative enterprise in which advances require an increasing number of contributors.
The history of broadway is particularly illuminating: the team size responsible for producing a show increased until the 1930s, afterw hich it leveled off, fluctuating at around seven contributors for the past 70 years.

In contrast,
science continues to search for its optimal collaborative set-up:
the number of coauthors in each scientific field has increased monotonically during the past decade.
It is anyone's guess WHEN and WHERE
it will reach a maximum.

For centuries,
creative individuals were embedded in an invisible college,
that is, a community of scholars whose exchange of ideas represented the basis for scientific advances.
Although intellectuals built on each other's work and communicated with each other,
they published alone ...

MOST great ideas
were contributed to a few influential thinkers: Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein [f.i.] ...
THUS, the traditonal scientific enterprise is best described
by many isolated nodes?

In the 20th century,
science became an increasingly collaborative enterprise,
resulting in such iconic pairs as the physicist Crick and the biologist Watson,
who were responsible for unravelling DNA's structure!

The joint publications
documenting these collaborations shed light on the invisible college,
replacing the hidden links with published coauthorships?

ALTHOUGH it is
unlikely that large collaborations
- such as the DO team in particle physics ot he International Huamn Genome Squencing Consortium -
will come to dominate science,
MOST fields NEED such
collaborations!

Indeed,
the SIZE of collaborative teams is increasing,
turning the scientific enterprise into a densely interconnected network
whose evolution is DRIVEN by simple
universal laws ...

UNTIL the late 1990's,
the bulk of network research focussed on static properties,
which do not change with time.

Yet a proper understanding of most networks
requires that we characterize the assembly process that generated them: indeed, a map of such networks is NOT sufficient to understand the structure of the World Wide Web - we must describe HOW documents and links are added and removed.

Uncovering ALL interactions between proteins
is only the first step toward understanding cellular networks
- we must also explore the importance of gene duplications
between proteins and genes.

SIMILARLY,
to comprehend the structure of the collaboration map,
we must understand HOW people form FRIENDSHIPS
and ALLIANCES.

En waarschijnlijk
vinden sommigen
OOK DIT alweer veel te raar,
te moeilijk vatbaar en
te lang?

In feite
gaan AL mijn mydiverhaaltjes over 'hetzelfde':
in de loop van tienduizenden jaren leren mensen om,
beter dan hun voorouders dat deden,
allerlei werktuigen te hanteren
[gebaren, stokken & stenen,
boeren & nomaden, spreektalen & schrijftalen, mydiverhalen en het vervolg op het vervolg],
zodat WIJ NU o.a. onze 'pc' hanteren om 'iets' duidelijk te maken
of duidelijker te krijgen via datgene wat we voelen, denken,
doen en laten [voor onszelf EN
soms ook samen]
met anderen!

KAN 'het'
nog eenvoudiger/simpeler/gemakkelijker
doeltreffender/sneller/directer
EN 'menselijker'?

Kortweg gezegd,
je hebt in principe TWEE mogelijkheden:
OF je blijft 'gewoon' homomachobonobochimp
& gaat moordend en/of neukend vrolijk verder door 't mydileven,
OF je geeft meer ruimte aan de geschetste ontwikkelingen zoals 'de profeten',
Yehosjoea, 'zelfkennis' en 'wetenschap' [gnosis] die mogelijk maken
in de vorm van 'menswording' en 'verdergaande
menselijker evolutionaire
ontwikkeling[en]'!