March of progress

People marching for progress

The March of Progress can be seen as the details of an intricate self-organizing fractal pattern revealing itself over time.

Many insist that there is no "direction" to things like history, religion, or evolution. However, this is more a result of confusing the random component of the generating equation with true randomness. While there will always be variation, the underlying theme will always reveal itself in time to be inevitable.

This is different from Teleology because it only considers the emergence of general things like evolution, intelligence, monotheism, or democracy to be inevitable, rather than specific things like the particulars of our human form and history. There are milestones that will always be reached because they represent logical adaptations to their environment.

Evolution of Species

While the specific human form is not an inevitable result of evolution, the emergence of intelligence absolutely is. Species that live in water evolve gills to extract oxygen from water, and those that live in air develop lungs. Far from being random they are necessary adaptations to the environmental conditions.

Intelligence is the ultimate adaptation and always bound to evolve just like the lungs, the eye, opposable thumbs and so many of the other things that make humans what they are. An alternate evolved intelligence could be different in many ways, but the functional components would all be there in some format. As such the eventual rise of an organism with all of these general components is inevitable.

Evolution of Religion

The number of gods humanity believes in has marched steadily downward as time goes on. Animism started out with an individual god for every important thing. These coalesced into polytheism with gods for all the big concepts. Then came monotheism where they all became a single god and the god concept was able to maximize its effect. But each monotheistic religion has its own god and so they will inevitably reduce to a single universal god.

The Big Story: Origins of Religion

Evolution of Knowledge

The Necessary Prerequisite page outlines the way that knowledge builds on other knowledge and how understanding basic concepts is necessary to be able to grasp more advanced concepts that may be important to your life choices.

It is like the fractal zoom in reverse, where individual details combine into a holistic pattern that is only revealed once there is enough data to reveal it.

Evolution of the In-Group

As our cultures interact and we are naturally more aware of the plurality of human experience, we tend to expand the circle of who we consider part of our in-group, until we reach the point of universalism and seeing the oneness of all humankind.

Evolution of Music

Access to the entire history of music will unlock the creativity of future generations. The explosion of musical styles and cultural fusions since the adoption of the internet has been a very positive thing out of a fairly mixed bag of pros and cos.

Booker T Jones - Progress

The Deer Hunter - Progress & Therma

IDLES - Progress