human-capital

Nature or nur­ture? well, both of course…but maybe the ques­tion itself is leav­ing out a crit­i­cal com­po­nent: our free will and poten­tial to tran­scend, and influ­ence, both.

My wife Lisa and I just came back from a relax­ing and stim­u­lat­ing 2‑week vaca­tion. One of the high­lights was to par­tic­i­pate in the open­ing, at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Cen­ter,  of the exhi­bi­tion Envi­sion­ing Change, orga­nized by The Nat­ur­al World Muse­um (NWM) in part­ner­ship with the Unit­ed Nations Envi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UNEP) in hon­or of World Envi­ron­ment Day 2007.

Star­ing at so many inspir­ing pho­tographs  and sto­ries of Win­ners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and read­ing Alfred Nobel’s sim­ple yet pow­er­ful will that estab­lished the Nobel Prizes, I could­n’t avoid but think­ing what a beau­ti­ful exam­ple they have become of the pow­er of an indi­vid­ual to tran­scend both our genes and our “memes” (our cul­tur­al and envi­ron­men­tal influences‑a term coined by biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins).

See Dawkins beau­ti­ful para­graphs (The Self­ish Gene, last 2 para­graphs of the chap­ter on memes):

• “When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes…But if you con­tribute to the world’s cul­ture, if you have a good idea, com­pose a tune, invent a spark­ing plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dis­solved in the com­mon pool.”
• “The point I am mak­ing now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that indi­vid­ual man is fun­da­men­tal­ly self­ish, our con­scious fore­sight-our capac­i­ty to sim­u­late the future in imag­i­na­tion- could save us from the worst self­ish excess­es of the blind repli­ca­tors. We have at least the men­tal equip­ment to fos­ter our long-term self­ish inter­ests rather than mere­ly our short-term ones…We have the pow­er to defy the self­ish genes of our birth and, if nec­es­sary, the self­ish memes of our indoc­tri­na­tion. We can even dis­cuss ways of delib­er­ate­ly cul­ti­vat­ing and nur­tur­ing pure, dis­in­ter­est­ed altru­ism-some­thing that has no place in nature, some­thing that has nev­er exist­ed before in the whole his­to­ry of the world. We are built as gene machine and cul­tured as meme machines, but we have the pow­er to turn against our cre­ators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyran­ny of the self­ish replicators.”

Here you can read the will that cre­at­ed the meme of the Nobel Prize-one page worth read­ing, with this core para­graph: [Read more…] about Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture