How Culture Evolves (and Why Civilizations Collapse) – Dr. Liane Gabora, DemystifySci +426

This week, we head to the woods. UBC professor of psychology Liane Gabora walks us through the deep tension between creativity and conformity that runs through every institution humans have ever built. Her work on cultural evolution reveals something Darwin never touched: ideas don't survive by competition, they survive by transformation, by honing, by the slow and sacred work of making something raw into something real. We ask why civilizations keep building towers they can't sustain, why originality is worshipped in the past tense and punished in the present, and whether the internet might finally give us the collective memory to stop repeating the oldest mistakes. This is a conversation about what creativity costs, who pays for it, and why the system would rather you just kept quiet.

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PARADIGM DRIFT

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00:00 Go!

00:04:22 Creativity and Conformity in Tension

00:06:49 Bronze Age Collapse and the Cost of Innovation

00:13:21 Why Civilizations Keep Destroying Themselves

00:25:04 Can Better Thinking Be Taught?

00:28:03 Light as a Model for Thought

00:50:54 New Ideas Need Protection to Survive

00:58:14 Cultural Evolution Is Not Darwinian

01:07:42 Why Good Ideas Lose to Bad Systems

01:13:03 Why Physics Punishes Originality

01:27:24 How to Tell a Breakthrough From a Bad Idea

01:42:52 Would Aliens Have Rock and Roll?

01:49:19 Creativity as Expanding What's Possible

#creativity #physics #conformity #culturalevolution #innovation #philosophy #naturalphilosophy #consciousness #evolution #psychology

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