A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going

Praise for A Theory of Everyone

‘A Theory of Everyone flavorfully mixes a stunning breadth of scholarship with an impressive knowledge of pop-culture and current issues, boldly going where most social scientists fear to tread. Lucidly discussing ideas surrounding IQ, race, sex differences, inheritance taxes, religion, Microsoft and even monogamy, readers are treated to a fascinating intellectual flight that thoughtfully offers many new perspectives on old issues. Buckle up!’

Joseph Henrich, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University and author of The WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success

‘The best book I've read in a decade. A sprightly page-turner that entertains with specifics, astonishes with universals, and reframes the big issues facing humanity’

Robert Klitgaard, author of Controlling Corruption and Tropical Gangsters

‘Buzzing with ideas, A Theory of Everyone encourages us to rethink what it is to be human. A compelling and essential read for anyone interested in building a better, more sustainable future’

David Bodanis, author of The Art of Fairness

‘There is a truly wonderful idea at the heart of this book: that by exchanging things and thoughts, human beings became capable of doing and knowing far more than their meagre brains would have otherwise made possible. It is not an entirely new idea, but Michael Muthukrishna explores its extraordinary and hopeful implications with rich and thrilling energy’

Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything

‘Do you know your own species? You might think so, but Muthukrishna will make you think again. With clarity, humor, and energy, he opens new vistas on how genes and cultures shaped who we are and how we can improve our lives together. A Theory of Everyone is for everyone’

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics, Duke University, author of Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

‘A Theory of Everyone uses the latest social science research to answer the critical question of how all human communities can be made to work better. Magisterial in scope and practical in application, this book should be required reading for CEOs, community organisers, head teachers, and Presidents’

Jamie Heywood, CEO of zolar and former head of Uber, Northern & Eastern Europe

‘A Theory of Everyone is your guide to some of the most important advances in the social sciences, written by a foremost researcher, beautifully illustrated, and positively overflowing with fascinating facts and ideas’

Erez Yoeli, Director, Applied Cooperation Initiative, MIT, co-author of Hidden Games

‘Michael brings the reader up to date on this powerful theoretical framework – including much of his own innovative work on corruption, cooperation, and collective intelligence – and thoughtfully discusses how this framework can be applied to address pressing societal issues, ranging from diversity to taxation to free speech’

Moshe Hoffman, Visiting Lecturer on Economics, Harvard University, co-author of Hidden Games

‘This book, which I read with great fascination, shows how we can move beyond neoclassical economics with a firmer foundation in the natural sciences and energy. This is extremely important as the world soon, and Europe now, increasingly faces critical energy shortages. I hope this book helps more people understand the critical importance of energy in generating our current affluence, and its diminution as a probable root cause of future inflation. A failure to understand these relations is likely to cause our societies to become impossible to govern’

Charles Hall, ESF Foundation Distinguished Professor at State University of New York, inventor of the EROI metric & author of Energy and the Wealth of Nations

A Theory of Everyone

The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going

MICHAEL MUTHUKRISHNA

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2023 Salgado Muthukrishna Consulting Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Illustrations on pages 19, 24, 42, 57, 73, 83, 84, 115, 116, 165, 251, and 293 created by Veronika Plant in collaboration with Michael Muthukrishna.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

This book was set in Janson Text LT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd., Falkirk, Stirlingshire, UK.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Muthukrishna, Michael, author.

Title: A theory of everyone : the new science of who we are, how we got here, and where we're going / Michael Muthukrishna.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023007538 (print) | LCCN 2023007539 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262048378 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262375795 (epub) | ISBN 9780262375788 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooperation. | Social change. | Evolutionary psychology. | Human behavior.

Classification: LCC HD2963 .M89 2023 (print) | LCC HD2963 (ebook) | DDC 334—dc23/eng/20230509

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007538

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007539

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

publication supported by a grant from

The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven

as part of the Urban Haven Project

To

Robert Mathes,

Alexandra Lucille,

and Gabriele Elizabeth,

may this book guide you in leaving the

world a better place than you found it

Contents

Introduction

PART I: Who We Are and How We Got Here

1: Laws of Life

2: The Human Animal

3: Human Intelligence

4: Innovation in the Collective Brain

5: Created by Culture

6: Cooperation

PART II: Where We're Going

7: Reuniting Humanity

8: Governance in the Twenty-first Century

9: Shattering the Glass Ceiling

10: Triggering a Creative Explosion

11: Improving the Internet

12: Becoming Brighter

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Index

Introduction

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’

The novelist David Foster Wallace told this story in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. Wallace's point was that there are some things that are so familiar, so integral to one's perception of the world, that we don't notice them any more. They melt into our experience, permeate our senses, and become part of what we might call the background conditions of life.

This book is about the species called Homo sapiens, who are in precisely this position. From ancient bacteria-like life forms, humans have evolved through various laws that we shall explore in this book. But the forces that shape our thinking, our economies, and our societies have become invisible to us. And this leaves us with a deep, potentially existential problem. If we do not know who we are and how we got here, we cannot choose where we go next. If we cannot perceive the forces that shape us, we are impotent to shape these forces.

Fish can't live without water. It's part of their background, cheerfully ignored in favor of what biologists call the four Fs of life: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. But if the water suddenly changes then the fish will notice.

We can feel in our bones that the world is breaking – that something is wrong. America – until recently widely regarded as one of the most successful modern democracies – is teetering. Civil conversations in which we agree to disagree have given way to enraged moralizing aimed at those who hold beliefs different to our own. Polarization is on the rise almost everywhere. We are in the midst of yet another economic crisis, and for the first time in a long time the lives of our children will be less abundant, lower in opportunity, and just more difficult than our own. A war in the West – civil or international – once more feels plausible, if not inevitable. One crisis seems to melt into another.

A number of books have been published predicting a looming cataclysm, and even if they seem alarmist, they speak to a sense that we face trouble ahead. Many thinkers, myself included, believe that this century could be the most important century in human history.

In this book we will start with the single most important quantity in the universe: energy. Energy is an abstract notion even in physics but it is central to life; in fact to everything. We cannot move without energy, cannot reproduce, cannot do anything at all. And yet since the Industrial Revolution, which unlocked unfathomable quantities of unexploited energy in the form of fossil fuels, we have stopped thinking about it.

To simplify only a little, we have come to take energy for granted. We flip a switch and lights go on. We fill our cars with fuel and go where we need to go. We microwave leftovers without ever worrying about where the food came from or how easy it is to feed ourselves.

We thought that energy was the gift that would keep on giving. Our models of the economy have what we earn and what we buy continually cycling between companies and people like a perpetual motion machine with no inputs. Our models of economic growth hide the limits on technology and the ultimate constraints on labor and capital. We imagined that we could keep doing more and more, growing our economies, becoming more prosperous, and developing ever more fantastical technologies, without realizing that we were exhausting the cheap fuel that made it all possible.

Energy is to the human species what water is to the fish in Wallace's metaphor.

But this is not a book solely about energy. It's not just about fossil fuels versus renewables or electric versus gas cars. It's about the way in which energy breakthroughs across the grand timescale of our species have led to periods of abundance that have in turn led to increases in the number of people and the scale at which they work together, which in turn have led to scarcity and conflict. This dance of energy and evolution eventually turns abundance to scarcity, but along the way it offers opportunities for critical social and technological breakthroughs. When these breakthroughs raise the energy ceiling then we reach a new threshold – a new period of abundance begins. The details of how this happens are the key to ensuring an abundant future.

Energy may be the key to understanding our current predicament, but to grasp how to use it more effectively and to harness new sources, we also have to understand the fundamental dynamics of human behavior. Why do we sometimes go to war and at other times work in harmony? Why are we both cruel and kind? And what determines which of these instincts win out?

These are just some of the questions we will tackle in this book. By understanding the constraints imposed by energy, we will transform the way we think about economics, politics, and conservation. But by deepening our understanding of human behavior, we will develop original insights about how to more effectively exploit energy in ways that help increase our prosperity and reduce the risks of conflict, both within and between societies. By the end we will have a theory that encompasses both; a unified theory of human affairs. A theory of everyone.

But why, you may ask, am I writing this book? What's my story?

Let's go back to 1997. I am a young boy crouching in my bedroom furtively sneaking peeks through my window at the angry men armed with M16s screeching by in military trucks. They are on their way to Papua New Guinea's Parliament House, an arrow-shaped edifice adorned with carvings and artwork reflecting traditional architecture and the hundreds of tribes without a common language now forged into a nation. Our house, set within the confines of a barbed-wire walled compound, is just 500 yards to the south of Parliament. I try to calm the cries of my eight-year-old sister as gunfire, looting, and explosions turn PNG's capital, Port Moresby, from an everyday level of deadly threat – on an ordinary day, armed robbery and rape are so common that they are rarely reported – to a violent coup that later became known as the Sandline Affair.

Sandline referred to the British mercenary corporation, Sandline International. Prime Minister Julius Chan, the Australian-educated son of a Chinese trader and a native from PNG's New Ireland province, had lost control of the military and the Bougainville region. His solution: bypass the army by hiring mercenaries. Violent protests and a military coup followed. Chan was replaced by Bill Skate, a well-known gang leader who was caught on tape boasting, ‘If I tell my gang members to kill, they kill . . . I'm the godfather.’ In many countries Skate would be a wanted criminal; in PNG he was the new prime minister.

Papua New Guinea, like it's pidgin English creole official language, is a chimera. Australians had brought a British parliamentary system to the most linguistically diverse country on earth. The 5.5 million people who lived in Papua New Guinea were split by over 840 distinct languages. Australia and Papua New Guinea are both rich in natural resources and share the same governmental institutions. But unlike Australia, Papua New Guinea was and is poor, violent, and unstable. As I grew up, I needed to understand why.

During my time in PNG I had a front-row ticket to a terrifying clash of Western institutions and tribal politics. But it wasn't my only formative experience, or even my first.

In Sri Lanka, where I was born, I learned how two peoples who looked so similar to outsiders – Tamils and Sinhalese – could come to hate each other. I learned how ordinary everyday existence can be, even during a civil war. Wallace was right about fish ignoring the water until it changes. Oppression, military checkpoints, or even the ever-present danger of explosions and sudden chaos can all fade into the background until punctured by the reality of violence. My grandmother worked across the road from the Central Bank when it was rammed by a Tamil Tiger truck loaded with 440 pounds of explosives. That was the first time I saw my father cry. First from the uncertainty and then from the relief when he brought her home, still wearing clothes soaked with blood from exploded shards of glass; shaken but alive.

I spent most of my childhood in Botswana, South Africa's northern neighbor. My memories are filled with the dusty streets of Gaborone, camping deep in the Kalahari Desert under the unobstructed majesty of the Milky Way, and the splendor of South Africa during the nineties. I loved the beautiful plateaus of Table Mountain, framing the sprawl of Cape Town as it met the sea; the smells of fusion foods – biltong jerky, braai BBQ, potjiekos stew, bunny chow curry – devoured on Durban's expansive white sandy beaches; the bustle of Johannesburg; the excitement of Sun City. I also remember the exhilaration and trepidation as South Africa transitioned from apartheid. Splashed across every television and newspaper was the powerful image of the last white Afrikaner president, a somber F. W. de Klerk, his face set with a faint smile next to the beaming new President Nelson Mandela, their arms raised and hands clasped together as they ushered in a new era filled with hope and uncertainty.

The waters of the world may be very different, but they are all part of the same ocean.

I was in London when bombs exploded on three busy Underground trains and the top deck of an iconic red double-decker bus. It was a coordinated attack designed to terrorize ordinary British people on an ordinary Thursday on their ordinary commute to work. But what struck me most was the identity of the bombers: ordinary British citizens. Unlike 9/11 four years prior, this was not an act committed by outsiders. Three of the terrorists, Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and Shehzad Tanweer, were born in Britain. The fourth, Germaine Lindsay, had moved to the UK when he was five. I couldn't shake the sound of Khan's thick Yorkshire accent as he explained in perfect English, ‘Until we feel secure, you will be our targets.’ The ‘you’ he refers to in his grainy video are his fellow Brits; the ‘we’ are a people who live thousands of miles away in countries that he had only briefly visited yet to whom he feels a greater connection.

These were second-generation migrants, roughly my age and who looked a lot like me. Yet somehow Khan and others like him felt like outsiders in their own country. What had gone wrong? What could be done better?

These were formative memories set against my otherwise unremarkable, if peripatetic life, living in these countries and also Australia, Canada, America, and most recently Britain. When you live in so many places, you see how we differ and how we are connected. We swim in different shoals but we are fish in the same body of water. For the last two decades I've been obsessed with understanding these differences and these connections. Why was Botswana less corrupt and on many metrics more successful than South Africa? Why was Papua New Guinea so much poorer and less peaceful than Australia? What are the differences between the multicultural and immigration policies of Australia, Canada, the United States, and the countries of Europe?

When I graduated from high school, I was on a quest to figure this all out. I enrolled in an engineering degree, which seemed like a secure, well-paid career. Unlike law and medicine, it also had international accreditation, a great fit for someone with itchy feet.

Engineering was fun and I was good at it – but engineering alone didn't seem like it could answer the questions that possessed me, so I enrolled in a dual degree. In parallel with courses on calculus, discrete math, and machine learning, I took courses in economics, political science, biology, philosophy, and psychology. In each discipline I found solutions to a piece of the puzzle.

I ended up majoring in psychology in my second degree. Psychology was asking the most relevant questions about human behavior. But it seemed to flout what I was learning about the scientific method in engineering and philosophy of science. There was little attempt to falsify predictions and the idea of selecting between theories – model selection – was difficult without a theory of human behavior. Evolutionary biology was a good candidate to develop that theory of human behavior.

When evolutionary biological theories were applied to humans, they could make good predictions about human behavior, but evolutionary theories developed in psychology independent of biology relied on too many imprecise assumptions about ancestral conditions and for some reason didn't use the powerful biological mathematical toolkit. Could we build better models of human behavior?

I eventually gave up trying to answer these questions – it just seemed too difficult. I focused instead on a dissertation about smart home technologies. But the questions kept bugging me, bubbling away at the back of my mind.

Around 2007 I saw Al Gore's climate documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore argued that we urgently needed to reduce carbon emissions. As our planet heated, so too would politics, and as places became too dry, too hot, or under water, millions of people would need to flee as their homes and livelihoods disappeared. The more I read, the more convinced I became that Gore was right about the problem but too optimistic about the solution. Would we really slow the economy to save the planet? This wasn't like the successful ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from deodorants and refrigerators that was helping to close the hole in the ozone layer. In that case, alternatives were available – the market had a solution. But for climate change, Gore was asking us to cut back our production, wealth, and lifestyles in a world where every country was trying to outcompete every other country, every company was trying to outcompete every other company, and every person wanted a better lifestyle than their neighbors’. It seemed to me that in the absence of a global government and credible enforcement, no amount of documentaries or finger wagging would work.

It made sense that we should still try to reduce our carbon footprint, but it made even more sense to also start preparing for a climate-changed world. And neither Greenpeace nor Captain Planet were asking us to pay attention to the latter. In the meantime, reports from the Pentagon and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were predicting climate fluctuations and the mass movement of displaced people from places like the Middle East, Bangladesh, and the South Pacific. I could see research on climate engineering to deal with carbon capture and wild weather, but not enough adaptation research on how to deal with mass-scale refugee resettlement or ensuing conflicts over scarce resources. We desperately needed a science of culture. One mature enough to be trusted and that could be used to develop social technologies. It was in engineering that I finally saw a breakthrough that might help us get there. And it came from the design of smart homes.

Smart homes require what are called control systems. As the name suggests, these systems control functions such as temperature and lighting. A thermostat is a simple control system that manages heating and cooling in many homes. It measures the temperature and turns on heaters or air conditioners to keep a house at the right temperature.

Control systems rely on a body of math called control theory – the math of feedback loops. My insight was that perhaps control theory could be applied to model the feedback loops of people trying to influence one another to develop a science of norms. And from a science of norms we might begin to develop a science of culture and institutions. I needed to find someone who studied the psychological foundations of culture. What do you do when you want to find someone who studies the psychological foundations of culture? You google the psychological foundations of culture.

This led me to a book with that very title edited by an evolutionary psychologist called Mark Schaller, from the University of British Columbia. I emailed Mark describing my background and goals and asking if we could meet. Mark suggested I also meet his colleagues, cultural psychologist Steve Heine, social psychologist of religion Ara Norenzayan, and in particular, former aerospace engineer turned anthropologist then appointed in economics and psychology, Joe Henrich.

Joe was working in an area called dual inheritance theory and cultural evolution, mathematical frameworks for modeling the co-evolution of human genetics and culture (our dual inheritance) and the evolution of culture and institutions. He was applying these models to psychology and economics. After a short conversation I knew that between Joe, Mark, Steve, Ara, and their colleagues, I would have an ideal team to help me tackle the questions I so desperately wanted to answer.

After completing my dissertation at the University of British Columbia a year early, having cross-trained in evolutionary biology, statistics and data science, economics, and psychology, I moved to Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and then to the London School of Economics, where I am currently professor of economic psychology and affiliate in developmental economics and data science.

Working across multiple disciplines has allowed me to take a non-disciplinary – or perhaps ‘undisciplined’ – approach, pulling on strands deep within psychology, economics, biology, anthropology, and elsewhere, tying them together into a tapestry that reveals who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

Once you see the links between energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution, you can't unsee them. These are underlying laws of life that apply to bacteria and businesses, cells and societies. Remember the parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant and try to describe it? One feels its trunk, others its tusks, body, or tail. From their individual vantage points each describes the elephant as a snake, spear, wall, or rope. By necessity, different disciplines focus on different parts of the system, but when you put the pieces together you can't ignore the elephant in the room: energy, the innovations that lead to more efficient use of energy, our capacity to cooperate for mutual benefit in the quest for greater energy, and the forces of evolution that shape all three.

But this book is not about coal, it's not about oil, it's not even about renewables or nuclear. It is about the future of humanity; about how each of our actions contributes to a collective brain. It's about how Homo sapiens can reach the next level of abundance that leads to a better life for everyone and perhaps one day a civilization that spans the galaxy. And it's about the things that stand in the way of getting where we need to be and what we can do to overcome them. Because today we stand on the shore of a sea of possibilities. We must be careful in how we address the coming waves ahead of us; waves that threaten our now precarious fossil-fueled civilizations.

In the first part of this book I zoom in on the details of the human animal and the theory of everyone. We'll discuss how one goes about building a science of us; how energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution have shaped all of life and all human activity; how we learn from one another, what shapes our intelligence, how we can become more creative and increase our capacity for innovation, how we work together and build institutions, and how the laws of life have shaped every aspect of us and our societies. That is, we will see how an unremarkable African ape ended up able to make Zoom calls across the planet.

In Part II we will zoom out to explain why the world is changing, what we can do about it, and why the twenty-first century may be the most important in human history. It is imperative that we reach a new level of energy abundance. But there are barriers standing in our way. Polarization and corruption threaten to tear us apart. Inequality can (though not necessarily) lead to inefficient allocation of our energy budget. These in turn lead to an inefficient allocation of talent and opportunity, stifling the next creative explosion that we so desperately need. There are many diagnoses for the problems we face, but fewer solutions. Yet solutions do exist. These solutions include how we can design better immigration policies or target taxes on unproductive money. Other solutions are more radical but worth pursuing, such as start-up cities and programmable politics. In essence, we will discover how this comprehensive theory of everyone can lead to practical policy applications – things you and I can advocate for to ensure that our children and all Homo sapiens who follow – have a future.

PART I

Who We Are and How We Got Here

Who are we? How did we get here? These most profound of questions have been pondered by generations of philosophers, theologians, and college roommates. Scientists have also been studying these questions, developing better theories and more convincing evidence for how our species evolved, the secret to our creativity and intelligence, how we work together to create corporations, governments, and other structures within our societies, and how these elements interact with one another. This ‘science of us’ is studied in different ways by different disciplines within the human and social sciences. But up until very recently, it was most accurate to describe both the human and social sciences as ‘young’ sciences.

A young science behaves like a child. It spends most of its time observing the world and coming up with explanations for what it sees, some wilder and less credible than others. It gets into everything, plays with switches, knobs, and runs whatever experiments it comes up with. But it doesn't yet know how to properly make sense of what it sees, how things connect with one another, or how to confidently act in the world.

A young physics was Galileo thinking comets were atmospheric disturbances akin to aurora borealis, the northern lights. A young chemistry was when the wise sages across Eurasia tried to turn lead into gold. A young biology was Lamarck assuming that giraffes grew their necks through generations of stretching to reach leaves high on trees.

Like those of a child, the claims of a young science aren't always trustworthy. Did young Alex really see a fox or was it the neighbor's dog? Are supermarket Santas really Santa or one of Santa's helpers? Will a watermelon grow in my stomach if I swallow a seed?

Nutritional science, for example, is still a young science. Even its most carefully planned studies can't be trusted. Different investigations uncover different findings, and the young science seems to be perpetually changing its mind.

Coffee is good for you.

Actually it's bad.

But not as bad as red wine, which is actually quite good for your health.

Unlike bacon, which will cause cancer.

Or maybe not.

For a science to become a mature adult science, it first needs to go through puberty. Like human puberty, this is an exciting, embarrassing, and often awkward affair, and requires some major changes. Chief among these is the discovery of an overarching theoretical framework that can sift sense from nonsense, make trustworthy and useful predictions, and offer pathways from discoveries to technologies. Some scientists and philosophers of science would argue it is only really after the discovery of this mature theoretical framework that a science can even call itself a science. As the French polymath Henri Poincaré put it, ‘Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.’

The house in Poincaré's analogy is the theoretical framework, the architecture that tells us what to expect, what not to expect, why and how things work, and how to intervene. The theories that can be derived from a mature theoretical framework are like underground subway maps, road maps, and topographic maps, reducing the reality of the world in different ways to highlight and hide different information so as to get us to where we need to go.

Sometimes theory comes before the data, the data distinguishing between competing theories. This is what happened when Einsteinian physics revealed the limits of Newtonian physics at the turn of the twentieth century. Newtonian physics works very well for calculating how fast a tennis ball will fall based on the angle, speed, and spin with which it's hit given the acceleration caused by the pull of the Earth's gravity. Einsteinian physics taught us that the Earth's gravity isn't pulling the tennis ball at all; it's warping the fabric of space-time.

According to Einstein's theory, a large mass like the Sun ‘bends’ space-time. Newton's theory makes no such prediction. This warping of space-time leads to phenomena such as ‘gravitational lensing’ where the light of distant stars appears to be in different locations when they pass by a large mass like the Sun. We don't normally see this lensing because stars aren't visible during the day when the Sun is out, but a solar eclipse in 1919 allowed scientists to observe what the Sun's gravity was doing to the light from distant stars. The stars around the Sun appeared to have moved from their normal positions in the night sky. The shift was much larger than Newton's theory predicted, but exactly in the positions predicted by Einstein's theory. Sorry Newton!

Sometimes data seems disconnected and theory helps make sense of it. The discovery of elements in the periodic table turned alchemy into chemistry. The discovery of Darwinian natural selection turned butterfly collecting into modern biology. When we get the theory right, it completely revolutionizes our understanding of what was previously confusing, inconsistent, and seemingly unrelated.

The human and social sciences are going through puberty. Its curves are showing; its muscles are growing. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. This scientific revolution is a theory of human behavior that, when combined with theories of social evolution, is close to being a theory of everyone. This theory of everyone is as profound as the revolutions in these other now adult sciences. It is a revolution that is bringing order to chaos and laying the path from science to technology – in this case, policy applications. For the first time, it is enabling us to see the causes of the problems we face and what we need to do to overcome them. The human and social sciences are moving from alchemy to chemistry.

Once upon a time the physical world seemed chaotic. It was a world of apples falling to the ground to be closer to the Earth and capricious gods creating the weather. Then folks like Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein brought order to this chaos. It's astonishing that at a time of muskets, whale oil, and horse-drawn carriages, Maxwell was able to write down equations for electromagnetism. This was before Edison and Tesla developed technology that allowed us to control electricity. A popular meme of Maxwell's equations says:

And God said:

And then there was light.

Today, physics is arguably the oldest of the grown-up sciences. The weather is still difficult to predict, but at least we now understand how it and other aspects of the physical world work. This understanding allows us to predict a clear day and the motions of celestial bodies precisely enough to launch a rocket and land a spacecraft on Mars. Thanks to the laws of physics, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – a particle decay producing more of one particle than another – from what is unusual and probably wrong – neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

In 2011 neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light was precisely what was found by the CERN OPERA experiment when it fired particles through a tunnel from Switzerland to Italy. The Swiss particles arrived earlier than the Italians expected, indeed faster than the speed of light. Nothing is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light and so physicists knew something was up. The experiment received a large amount of scrutiny not because it violated intuitions nor because physicists don't like being wrong, but because the speed of light, rather than being a purely experimental discovery or an isolated theory, is at the heart of a rich and mature theoretical framework that explains so much of our world. If neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light then the science of physics would be shattered across so many subdisciplines. It turned out to be a measurement error.

We see the same pattern in the history of chemistry. Once upon a time the chemical world seemed chaotic. Metals mixed with liquid to create gases. Sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter could be combined to create gunpowder. But no matter how hard even Newton himself tried, we couldn't turn lead into gold. Then folks like Lavoisier, Mendeleev, and Meyer brought order to this chaos. The periodic table and an understanding of elements and chemical reactions arrived. Alchemy grew up and became chemistry.

More complex compounds, such as proteins, are still difficult to predict, but at least we now know how they work. We know why lithium fizzes and sodium explodes in water, and why lead cannot be turned into gold. This understanding allows us to develop material sciences, a world of plastics, and to turn crude oil into fuel, medicines, and Vaseline. Thanks to the periodic table, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – an AI predicting a protein's shape from its amino acid sequence – from what is unusual and probably wrong – paraffin dissolving in water.

And we see the same pattern in the history of biology. Once upon a time the biological world seemed chaotic. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why some animals laid eggs and others had live births or why the peacock had a giant elaborate tail while the peahen was a drab brown. Then folks like Darwin, Fisher, Wright, and Hamilton brought order to this chaos. Biology grew out of merely counting, classifying, and measuring and became a mature science.

Species are still difficult to predict and ecologies are still chaotic, but at least we now know how they work. This understanding allows us to develop gene editing and mRNA vaccines. Thanks to the theory of evolution, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – a new human species – from what is unusual and probably wrong – a mammal fossil found in the Precambrian geological record.

We now see the same pattern in the human and social sciences. A scientific revolution is starting to bring order to the chaotic world of human affairs. Everything is starting to make more sense. Sapiens are still difficult to predict, but at least we now know the rules by which we work. We know the rules that govern how people decide whom to trust and learn from, how organizations and societies discover new innovations in norms and technologies, and the rules that shape our actions in helping or harming others and determining who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. We can use these rules to improve ourselves, our technologies, our governments, companies, schools, and societies; to develop strategies, policies, and interventions – social technologies – to chart a better future. We can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting from what is unusual and probably wrong.

The theoretical framework – the periodic table – of human behavior and social change is studied under different labels that describe its different elements.

Dual inheritance theory refers to the two lines of inheritance humans have – genes and culture. Our ability to transcend instincts and become cleverer than our short lifetimes should allow is a result of acquiring accumulated cultural information from our societies – beliefs, values, technologies, institutions, know-how. Culture makes us a new kind of animal.

Culture–gene co-evolution refers to the way genes have adapted to our cultures and cultures to our genes.

The extended evolutionary synthesis refers to the extension of the biological theoretical framework beyond genes into socially transmitted information and environments.

And cultural evolution refers to the way in which companies, countries, and other aspects of our societies change, adapt, and evolve.

Physicists refer to a unifying theory that connects diverse effective theoretical frameworks, such as general relativity – the physics of the very vast – and quantum mechanics – the physics of the extremely tiny – as a theory of everything. I shall refer to this revolutionary body of work that links genes, culture, learning, and the environment as a theory of everyone.

At the heart of this theory of everyone is a quest for the capture and control of energy. All organisms, including humans, harness the energy around them – from the rays of the sun to the movement of the wind and water – to evolve. Humans have evolved an entirely new way of capturing and controlling energy through cultural evolution. But ultimately energy is at the heart of all that we do and all we can do. And when we see energy in this light, we are like the fish finally seeing the water around us. Suddenly our experiences and potential futures come into clearer vision.

All life has been on this quest for energy since its beginning. This quest is so central to all that happens that the way in which energy is captured and controlled, through genetic mutations, new technologies, cooperative norms and institutions, and evolutionary dynamics, is best described as the laws of life.

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Laws of Life

One of my favorite literary genres is what I like to refer to as The One Thing That Explains Everything (TOTTEE). Surrounded by strangers on the overcrowded London Underground, I am transported by the awe-inspiring grandeur of Guns, Germs, and Steel expounding on how the east–west geographic orientation of Eurasia led to it outcompeting north–south-oriented America and Africa; or the masterful epoch-spanning epic storytelling of Sapiens explaining how our capacity for imagination turned us into gods. I feel informed and empowered, enraptured and entertained. But when I turn the last page or hear the final end credits about how Audible hopes I've enjoyed this audiobook, I am left unsatisfied.

You and I know – and so too do the authors of these books – that the world is complicated. Arrows of causality showing what causes what split, rejoin, point in multiple directions, and even feed back on each other. No one thing explains everything.

The power of a good TOTTEE book comes from highlighting a fundamental force that shapes our world. But in the real world, especially when we move from explanation to application, there are many forces that must be understood in their relationship to one another.

Geography, for example, is no doubt important, but the thin strip of land splitting Korea into North and South cannot explain the sudden disjuncture between wealthy South Korea, its brightly lit urban infrastructure visible even from space, and poor North Korea, a dark patch on the map separating South Korea from China. To explain that disjuncture, you might need to understand government institutions.

Institutions are important, but they can't explain why different ethnic groups have different outcomes in the same country. For that you might need to understand culture and intergroup competition.

Culture is important, but it can't explain how multilingual, multicultural, multi-religious Singaporeans became the second richest people on the planet after Luxembourg. For that you might need to understand history. But history is complicated and, unlike science, doesn't offer clear causal explanation and application by itself.

This book is TOTTEE adjacent. Rather than offering a single ‘one thing’ to explain everything, it offers a framework that unifies the many forces that shape all of life. These laws of life govern multiple scales, from single-celled bacteria competing for a patch of nutrients to societies of businesses competing over market share. Of course, bacteria and businesses differ in many details, and those details matter for how we should intervene in the world. The applied goal is to identify where, when, and how we should intervene.

Is the lever we need to pull a political matter, a market challenge, a technological gap, a cultural mismatch, a psychological barrier, or some combination? All are shaped by the laws of life. To effectively intervene, we need a periodic table for Homo sapiens and we need to be able to see the big picture and then zoom in and out of different parts. What the laws of life offer is a systems-level, ultimate view.

Systems-level ultimate explanations

Systems-level thinking is essential to the creation of permanent change. One of many cautionary tales about what happens when these interconnections are ignored is the story of cane toads in Australia.

In the early twentieth century the new nation of Australia had a burgeoning sugar-cane industry. The cane crops flourished in the fertile soil, plentiful sunshine, and tropical climate of Queensland, Australia's Sunshine State. The only problem was the native Australian cane beetle, which was so fond of sugar cane, it bore its name. Cane beetle larvae feast on sugar-cane roots, stunting or even killing the plant. Something had to be done. The scientists at the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations saw an obvious problem and an obvious solution. Kill the cane beetle.

But how could they do this without hurting the plants?

In 1935, 101 assassins made their way from Hawai‘i to Australia. Not Dalmatians, but cane toads. The toads liked their new home. So much so that their numbers have grown to hundreds of millions if not over a billion. But they have found more than the cane beetle to their liking, and have thereby wrought havoc on the isolated Australian ecosystem. The cane toad is poisonous from egg to tadpole to toadlet to toad, and is thus dangerous to both those they eat and those that eat them.