Dears, Well, as Roy says, we are off to the races. My 2-cents worth is to note that real creativity comes from real conversation. (One can make the same point about economic creativity itself, and argue that it's the language-using of humans---not "information"---that makes for new ideas in talk.). That's why I couldn't get much out of Randall Collins' astounding opus on philosophical schools. It seemed like a massive diagram of "influence," a subway map of students, which is not I think such a grand idea in intellectual sociology, especially for really creative conversations, as against epigones gathered at the foot of The Master. Look at the Scottish Enlightenment. Or Malthus-Ricardo correspondence. Or Cambridge (Eng.) in the 1930s. Or Chicago in the 1970s. Regards, Deirdre McCloskey