As you read In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You you may have wondered if I hated poor Henry David Thoreau. Not at all. He inspired me at the young and impressionable age of sixteen and has powered my engines ever since. There's a good chance that he did the same for you. But brace yourself for irony. Thoreau is the perfect example of the positive aspects of consumerism.

What is consumerism? It’s the flaunting of surplus. It’s the conspicuous display of surplus time, of surplus energy, and of surplus luxuries.

And what was Thoreau doing at Walden Pond? He was flaunting a small flood of hidden luxuries. He was flaunting the surplus time that the wealth of his father’s pencil factory had given him. He was flaunting his ability to escape the web of commercial trade and the meshwork of human technologies. He was celebrating his ability to ditch the conventions other rich kids followed - the obligatory trip to Europe and a permanent plunge into the newly-quickening madness of city life.

There's a rule of science we normally overlook. That rule? Challenge your assumptions. See what you can derive from a new point of view. Buck the normal. Today, it is normal to hate consumerism. It's normal to loathe what consumerism has done to us...and what it has done to the planet. So as good scientists, let's go anti-conventional. Let's sing an ode in praise of consumerism. Let's see if reversing the normal point of view will produce any surprises.

In praise of consumerism? I know what you're thinking; this is a great subject for the brain-dead or folks who utterly lack a moral compass, like Donald Trump and Paris Hilton. But it’s certainly not a good subject for you and me.

You’re not consumerists, and neither am I, right? We’re idealists aiming at high spiritual and intellectual goals. We scrimp and we save to gain the freedom to think and to pursue higher meanings in nearly everything we do.

Or are we?

In Screw 'Sustainability' - And I Am Here To Tell You Why we discussed the fact that Mother Nature is a bloody bitch. She is the mother of catastrophe. She has nurtured brilliant innovations like cells and DNA but she has also given us 142 mass extinctions, 80 glaciations in the last two million years, a planet that may have once been a frozen iceball, and a klatch of global warmings in which the temperature has soared by 18 degrees in ten years or less.

Mother Nature has sunken the pleasant habitat of land creatures to the bottom of swamps and has lifted the havens of sea creatures --ocean bottoms -- to the mountain tops. She has very seldom given us a Garden of Eden, a green and sunny utopia in which she and we live together in harmony and peace.

Nature tosses us challenges and dares us to survive. More properly, she challenges us to thrive.

What’s more, evolution is all about breaking Mother Nature’s rules — defying gravity when a lizard stands, denying buoyancy when a fish controls its depth in the sea, and saying “no” to gravity when a bird has the audacity to fly. That audacity is Mother Nature’s way of feeling out new paths of growth and radical new possibilities. How do we know? Birds have been paid off big time for their insolence. There are four times as many species of birds as there are of us land-lubbing mammals. Each species represents another victory over nature, another corner of nature’s maze turned into a new niche. Each triumph is another of nature’s own victories in the breakthrough biz.

That's why talk about 'sustainability' today is riddled with problems — and with the seeds of self-defeat. The lowest periods in recorded human history have come when society tried to maintain a status quo.

Why screw sustainability?

Because the word implies merely hanging in there, merely surviving, merely sustaining. It implies a penny-pinching earth, a miserly existence, a nature that punishes change, and a nature that prefers small tribes to large groups of human beings.

This sort of attitude has traditionally led to ignorance and to self-inflicted poverty. It pitched Europe into misery from the fall of Rome in 476 ad to the revival of optimism, technology, and entrepreneurialism in 1100 ad. That 600-year-long slump was the famous dark ages of the West. An attitude of self-denial and an urge to return to the past also led to an age of darkness in the Islamic Empire starting in 1566. For the first time, Islam saw its limitations more clearly than it saw its possibilities. How did it respond? It banned every new technology, shunned every new idea, and withdrew into fantasies of a past mistakenly viewed as a paradise.

It's taken weeks to get here but we've covered 13.7 billion years of cosmic quirks. We've gone from The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture through Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture to The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements.

We've seen the beginning of mass behavior among quarks, the proto-memory of atoms, and a strange preview of culture long before life arose. We've run a background check on Evolution (aka Mother Nature) and have discovered her track record of violence and destruction. Destruction from which she's pulled enormous leaps of creativity.

We've sifted through Nature's murderous past looking for the lessons we humans must learn if we are to have a future. And in the end it all comes down to two fundamental realizations--that climate stability is radically unnatural and that we aren't running out of resources, we're running out of ingenuity. Ingenuity that we can get back.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed. In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory and in The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements we got into how that retained memory and supersynchrony really kicked things into overdrive.

In our last exciting episode we discussed how huge new atom communities, RNA and DNA, used membranes as fortifications, no-go zones, corrals within which RNA, DNA, and their membrane-weaving partners could maintain a specialized mini-sea, a Jell-O or Gatorade rich in vitamins, organic molecules, enzymes, sugars, carbohydrates, fatty acids, and proteins.

The Big Burp had produced cells. And each of these cells was a working community of 10^11 atoms(80)— a hundred trillion atoms combined to pursue a highly complex common purpose. But, more important, a hundred trillion atoms with a heritage passed on from mother to daughter, a past recorded in a literal inner-circle, an interior ring of genes.(81)

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.

In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory; the culture of quarks, if you will. The universe had the beginnings of culture and kept them as it evolved because it wasn't stored in the cosmic train, it was stored in the rails.

Now we get into how that retained memory and supersynchrony really kicked things into overdrive.

In a random universe, we would have expected a million new forms of atoms or more. But this is a cosmos with railroad constraints, a cosmos where supersynchrony and manic mass production reign. Hence the number of new forms of atom-cores was pathetically tiny by the standard of six-monkey-at-six-typewriter randomness. And thanks to manic mass production, the number of precise duplicates of these four new atomic nuclei was vast.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed and discussed why space travel is not only becoming important for ecological reasons, it's part of a universal mandate.

Now we're going to talk about some aspects of galactic order. Infinite monkeys in a random universe? No, more like a railroad train with a lot of ways to get from point A to point B - but it has rails and the universe can never leave them.

In the aftermath of the Big Bang, particles collided and shifted with terrific force - yet protons came out of these crashes intact. This identity retention was a primitive form of memory and it was the foundation of culture.

Evolution is shouting a message at us. Yes, evolution herself. That imperative? Get your ass and the asses, burros, donkeys and cells of your fellow species—from bacteria and plants to fish, reptiles, and mammals—off this dangerous scrap of a planet and find new niches for life.

Take The Grand Experiment Of Cells And DNA, the 3.85-billion-year Project Of Biomass, to other planets, moons, orbiting habitats, and galaxies. Give life an opportunity to thrive, to reinvent itself, to turn every old disaster, every pinwheeling galaxy, into new opportunity.

Do this as the only species Nature has generated that’s capable of deliberate travel beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Do it as the only species able to take on the mission of making life multi-planetary. Accept that mission or you may well eliminate yourself and all the species that depend on you—from the microorganisms making folic acid and vitamin K in your gut to wheat, corn, cucumbers, chickens, cows, the yeast you cultivate to make beer, and even the bacteria you use to make cheese. What’s worse, if you fail to take life beyond the skies, the whole experiment of life—including rainforests, whales, and endangered species —may die in some perfectly normal cosmic catastrophe.

In our first exciting episode of Who’s Smarter: Chimps, Baboons or Bacteria? The Power of Group IQ ( Part I ) we showed how small-brained baboons can outsmart big-brained chimpanzees and how bacteria can out-innovate chimps, baboons, and you and me. We also visited an evolutionary mystery in the world of a bacterial buddy that's with you every day, the E. coli found in your gut.

In Part II we discussed how E. coli use collective intelligence to do something that the current self-proclaimed sole interpreters of evolution, the neo-Darwinians, say is impossible. E. coli take a step backward in order to adapt and take a giant step forward. We also talked about how we high-bio-tech humans have stolen the inventions of our single-celled friends and have adapted bacterias' innovations to our own needs.

In Part III we'll return to baboons and chimpanzees and examine why the smaller-brained primates consistently outsmart the bigger brained. We'll look at how baboons harness the power of Group IQ, and we'll hint at what the groups you and I belong to--from our families to our companies--can do to get smart. A hint: it involves sleeping together ⁽¹⁾.

In our first exciting episode of 'Who’s Smarter: Chimps, Baboons or Bacteria? The Power of Group IQ' ( Part I ) we showed how small-brained baboons can outsmart big-brained chimpanzees and how bacteria can out-innovate chimps, baboons, and you and me. We also visited an evolutionary mystery in the world of a bacterial buddy that's with you every day, the E. coli found in your gut.

In a lab dish, E. coli can do something neo-Darwinian theory says just can not be. Neo-Darwinism is a late 20th century, mathematically-buttressed evolutionary dogma that says all evolution comes from competition between individuals, and that cooperation is simply a byproduct of selfishness.

According to this view, all change in a genome-all change in a string of genes-- is random. To survive, each genetic change has to give the selfish members of a species an edge. Yet when E. coli are given a food their metabolism can't digest, salicin, they engineer their genome into a form that disables them. They take a big step backward. Why? So they can take their genome a step forward, re-jigger their metabolism, and turn the salicin from an obstacle in the path into a buffet.

According to neo-Darwinians, the giant step backward is impossible. How do E. coli pull it off? By using Group IQ. And what, exactly is Group IQ? That's what we're about to see.

Which have bigger brains, chimpanzees or baboons? If you guessed chimps, you’re right. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives on the planet. They share between 98.6% and 99% of our genes, depending on who’s counting. They are way up there in animal brainpower. An average chimp’s brain is more than twice as large as the brain of a baboon.

Now for question number two. Which are smarter, chimpanzees or baboons? The answer is … baboons. But how could that be? Chimps are brainier. Shouldn’t they also be, well, umm, brainier? Brighter by far? If baboons are winners on IQ measures, doesn’t that mean that intelligence is not just a matter of brain matter?

The answer is yes, there’s more to intellect than the number of neurons in your skull. So what’s the extra ingredient you need to turn brains into smarts? The answer is a bit surprising. Nimble minds need more than just a lot of synapses between brain cells. They need the power of groups. They need a force that pulses from the web of connection between group members…from the sum that’s bigger than its parts. They need what Gerardo Beni calls “swarm intelligence,” what Tom Atlee and Robert D. Steele call “Collective Intelligence” and what I call “Group IQ.“