Paul Ehrlich has an exciting story on the SEED magazine (which I find worthwhile to follow) detailing past and recent progresses on the field of cultural evolutionism.

It is enlightening to follow Paul's journey through the parallels which can be made on the way our culture and our genes evolve as a response to our environment. Even more interesting, however, is his discussion on the differences between these phenomenons and his experiments investigating these differences using canoe-building techniques as a case study. His final remarks do a good job in summing up it all:

We directly tested a theory of cultural evolution. Our work has helped to uncover a piece of the larger, more complex process of culture change and has shown that it is reasonable to think of that change as evolution. Natural selection can operate in cultural evolution as well as in genetic evolution. Though canoe features may not be related to the genetic attributes of people who construct and use them, nor is natural selection likely the central force in cultural evolution, a comprehensive view of cultural evolution does now seem possible. And despite the daunting complexity, I believe we will one day understand how cultures evolve, and that it will help us all to survive.

An interesting story on The Economist about the myth that countries with wider spread of new technologies (in this case, broadband) should be more productive than the rest has a few interesting facts:

Paul David, an economist at Oxford University, has shown that electric power, introduced in the 1880s, did not immediately raise productivity. Not until the late 1920s—when around half of America's industrial machinery were finally powered by electricity—did efficiency finally climb.

In 1987 Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously said: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.' It was only in 2003 that The Economist felt comfortable boldly proclaiming: 'The 'productivity paradox' has been solved.'

Can the Japanese and Koreans (who finish at the top of OECD's charts) do something at 100Mb/s that the Americans, British and Germans (in the middle tier) can't at 20Mb/s? The idea that “bigger is better broadband” is orthodoxy, not economics. So is its corollary, the neo-Cartesian logic that goes: “Broadband ergo innovation.” But we have yet to see innovation happen at a high speed that couldn't happen at a slower one.

In short, though technology allows innovation, it does not imply it. Kind of obvious, after you realize it, but I think it allows for the interesting insight of understanding there are two ways for innovating, and one of them does not necessarily pass through evolving the infrastructure.