humanity as a parallel process

[doubleyou]

So lately, the more I learn about the history of science, the more I'm coming around to thinking of humanity as the embodiment of some massively distributed computational process.  Individuals often solve a certain problem at approximately the same time in history.  And this happens a lot.  It's almost as though those discoveries "needed" to happen, as though there was some pressure or force pushing them into being.  But to put it in less prosaic terms, the best explanation I can come up with so far is that multiple people, working with (presumably - for simplicity of explanation) the same prior knowledge, arrive at the same conclusions on the "next steps" to extend the body of knowledge.  Nobody is special in this scheme, and any two people of roughly equal intelligence should arrive at the same conclusions (controlling for circumstances).  It's like we naturally tend to behave as independent nodes in the same distributed computer, working on the same data set.

I'm not saying this is a revelation or anything - it may be plainly obvious to lots of people already.  Or it may be complete crap.  As usual, I make no claims as to its coherence or the validity of its claims.  It's just a transcription of one of the thoughts that's been bouncing around my head lately, and I felt the need to get it in writing before it gets forgotten.