# Stewart Brand **Domain:** Publishing / Counterculture / Systems **Doc Type:** Editor and Network Builder Node **Maturity:** Evolving **Related:** [[Whole Earth Catalog]], [[Long Now Foundation]], [[Personal Computing]], [[Whole Earth]] --- ## Definition Stewart Brand is an American writer and organizer who founded the _Whole Earth Catalog_ and later co-founded the Long Now Foundation. ## Corpus Context Brand connects [[Whole Earth Catalog]], [[Access to Tools]], personal computing culture and long-horizon institutional design. ## Relationships [[Whole Earth Catalog]], [[Long Now Foundation]], [[Personal Computing]], [[Whole Earth]] - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Sources / Provenance - [[articles/Beyond the Sea|Beyond the Sea]] ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Fitness landscapes (sometimes called "adaptive landscapes") keep turning up when people try to figure out how evolution or innovation works in a complex world. An important critique by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of early optimism about artificial intelligence warned that seemingly intelligent agents would dumbly "hill climb" to local peaks of illusory optimality and get stuck there. Complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman used fitness landscapes to visualize his ideas about the "adjacent possible" in 1993 and 2000, and that led in turn to Steven Johnson's celebration of how the "adjacent possible" works for innovation in Where Good Ideas Come From.” > **— Stewart Brand**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Fitness Landscapes Explain Evolution and Innovation by Stewart Brand|Fitness Landscapes Explain Evolution and Innovation by Stewart Brand]] > “Microbial evolution, which has been going on for over 3.6 billion years, is profoundly different from what we think of as standard Darwinian evolution, where genes have to pass down generations to work slowly through the selection filter. Bacteria swap genes promiscuously within generations. They have three different mechanisms for this "horizontal gene transfer" among wildly different kinds of bacteria, and thus they evolve constantly and rapidly. Since they pass on the opportunistically acquired genes to their offspring, what they do on an hourly basis looks suspiciously Lamarckian — the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” > **— Stewart Brand**, *2011, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?”* [[reminders/Evolution/Microbes Evolve by Sharing Genes Across Lineages by Stewart Brand|Microbes Evolve by Sharing Genes Across Lineages by Stewart Brand]] > “Any gene (or set of genes) can be forced to “drive” through an entire wild population. It doesn’t matter if the trait the genes control is deleterious to the organism. With one genetic tweak to its germline, a species can even be compelled to go extinct.” > **— Stewart Brand**, *2016, Edge Annual Question: “”* [[reminders/Selection/One Germline Tweak Can Compel a Species to Go Extinct by Stewart Brand|One Germline Tweak Can Compel a Species to Go Extinct by Stewart Brand]]