On 14 May 1610, at 16h, Ravaillac assassinated Henri IV, King of France, in the rue de la Ferronerie in Paris. The historian Michel Cassan studied the town archives of 240 French towns. He found that the towns along the postal network set up by Sully received this important piece of information on the same day. By 21 May, all the towns in France had received the news (7 days later). On Wednesday 8 September, the news of the King's death reached Mexico via Spain, more than 3 months later.
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| Ravaillac killing King Henry IV. Painting by Gustave Charles Housez |
Compare the speed of information transmission in 1610 with the instantaneous coverage of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon on 20 July 1969. Billions of people around the world saw the event at the same time.
In the 21st century, most information takes less than 150 milliseconds to travel around the world.
This is what Buskes calls a fundamental difference/advantage of the Third Evolution over the Second Evolution: :
"Apart from the different trajectories, there might also be significant differences in speed by which cultural information is transmitted. In small prehistoric populations of hunter–gatherers the mode of transmission was probably mainly vertical and one to-few, resulting in a relatively slow stream of information and a corresponding sluggish pace of evolution. In our modern world, however, the situation has dramatically changed. With the advent of writing, printing, the internet and the social media, the mode has changed from predominantly vertical and one-to-few to horizontal and one-to-many, resulting in an ever-increasing flow of information
racing around the globe with lightning speed."
This difference is not better intrinsically, but it means the Third Evolution takes over, as speed has become a key adaptation feature.
Ref:
Michel Cassan, La grande peur de 1610. Les Français et l’assassinat d’Henri IV, 2010
Patrick Boucheron, L’histoire Mondiale de la France, sous la direction de, Seuil 2017, Stéphane Van Damme, p. 292
Darwinizing Culture: Pitfalls and Promises, by Chris Buskes, about Peter J. Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen (eds): Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013, 485 pp, ISBN: 978-0-262-01975-0
