Chapter 7: Technology's Rhythm

1. One scholar has argued that when the amount of knowledge required to survive exceeded that which could be learned by a single individual, there was less pressure for individual increases in intelligence. Once this threshold of accumulated knowledge had been crossed, natural selection began to act on groups instead of individuals.

2. In biological terms, we might think of a machine as a fossil representing the state of technological information at the time it was made. They are durable byproducts of the only thing that is ever truly alive - coded information.

3. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the record shows that technological progress is not smooth and gradual, but sporadic and disjointed.

4. The experts today are still choosing up sides in this debate between technological catastrophes and gradualists. Never having studied biology, they remain unaware that punctuated equilibrium has resolved the debate.

5. For those who want to understand how economic change works, the lessons in biological and economic history are particularly instructive. Even though the pace of punctuated change is far faster than it once was, the fundamental processes of change remain the same.

6. The punctuated equilibrium of unexpected, erratic change across an immense variety of technologies is terribly frustrating for those who want to plan and control the economy.

7. The sensational political changes now underway around the globe reveal the immutable power of economic forces that classical thinking cannot explain.

8. After decades of bitter experience, the world's socialist countries have discovered that when people are denied the opportunity to satisfy their self-interest, the natural processes of technical advance collapse.

9. Only by dismantling the bureaucratic superstructure of state planning will there be any hope of revitalizing moribund economies. By moving to capitalism, these countries are unshackling the natural phenomena of economic evolution.

10. Unless the spontaneous, unpredictable character of evolutionary economic change is understood, there is a strong possibility that many of today's economic reforms ultimately will be undone.