The Next Renaissance?

I've been thinking lately about the Renaissance ever since I saw that Pop!Tech's theme this year is The Next Renaissance, seeing that Frans Johansson's book The Medici Effect which looks at the explosion of ideas at "The Intersection" was just released (check out his blog, Stories from the Intersection), all of Hugh of GapingVoid.com's talk of The Revolution, and then this quote:

Paul Tillich once commented, “What we call the ‘Renaissance’ was participated in by about one thousand people.” (via Ken Wilber's The Integral Institute site)

Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, in a personal email answers a question I have and says that perhaps one thousand "super-creators" may have initiated the Renaissance, but most certainly it was participated in by far more people and its effects rippled far and wide.

Margaret Heffernan refers to a "parallel universe" in The Naked Truth. A parallel universe of entrepreneurs and free-agents and internal change agents that aren't out to directly convert corporate America but are busily creating their own parallel universe that abides by a different set of values and a different set of rules.

The blogosphere itself is a sort of "parallel universe." The super secret start-up (merely a facetitious codename) is as well.

And then Al and Laura Ries in The Origin of Brands explain Darwin's thoughts about (r)evolution. (Hint: It's not about continuous improvement nor merely 'Renovation'.)

Charles Darwin did not use the word evolution in the original edition of The Origin of the Species. As a matter of fact, he only used it reluctantly in later editions when it became obvious that the word evolution would forever be connected to his work.

To Darwin, the divergence principle was equally as important as the principle of gradual change. If nature took an "evolutionary" path only, that would mean that many species would be so closely related that it would be hard to tell one from another. Is that animal a cat or a dog? Well, it's hard to tell. Could be one or another...

Darwin's genius was in recognizing that species like cats and dogs might have a common ancestor, but that they had "branched off" or diverged in response to environmental changes...In Darwin's terms, "nature favors the extremes."

If "evolution" were the only thing that ever happened in the history of Earth, the world would be populated by the biggest, strongest, toughest single-cell individuals you can possibly imagine.

Comments

[Laurent Bervas]

I agree with you, Evelyn, and I wanted to remind others that Renaissance means "rebirth" in French. I feel there will be a rebirth of doing business more fairly ...

[laurent bervas]

continuing about renaissance...
Who are our artists ?
I think they are software designers.

News ideas are comming from IT world : P2P, opens source, extrem programming, etc...
The revelotion is here