Podcast #264: A Theory of Everyone
Iona Italia talks to cultural evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna, author of ‘A Theory of Everyone,’ about the human dual inheritance—part inherited, part taught—and about how energy availability underpins everything.
Introduction
My guest this week is Michael Muthukrishna. I talk to Michael about his new book The Theory of Everything, a wide-ranging account of how human societies evolved and what we require to flourish as a species. We focus in particular on two of the central ideas in his book. The first is dual inheritance theory—we inherit not only genes but culture and that capacity for extensive cultural transmission is a key tool that largely differentiates us from other animals. The second central idea is that energy availability is the central factor that permits the development of life—Michael argues that energy abundance is necessary for scientific and technological innovation as well as for social harmony. The podcast begins with Michael reading a fairly long passage from his book: if you prefer to skip the reading, fast forward to around the 9 minute mark.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael Muthukrishna.
Michael Muthukrishna: Okay, so A Theory of Everyone, it’s got two parts to this book. The first part is … if you’ve read Joe Henrik’s Secret of Our Success, or any of the other books on cultural evolution, you might be familiar with it. It lays it out in a slightly new way, and it emphasises energy. But other than that, it’s an introduction to the science of cultural evolution. But then part two of the book deals with what are the implications of that. So if we really do have this “theory of everyone,” as I call it, something approaching a periodic table, moving from alchemy to chemistry, an underlying theory for human behaviour and social change, then that should mean that we can separate sense from nonsense in terms of policies, of what are we doing? What could we be doing better now that we know what we’re doing. So, part two of the book, I thought I’d read the introduction for that bit to you:
Biologist E.O. Wilson once wrote that we have created a Star Wars civilisation with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. He was eloquently juxtaposing our individual limitations against the astonishing achievements of humanity. In part one, we discovered who we are and how we got here: the four laws of life that describe all of life on this planet and the theory of everyone that describes our species. Thus armed, we can begin to understand ourselves in our societies, our intelligence and our creativity, our capacity for both cooperation and cruelty.
Rousseau believed that human nature was naturally good but corrupted by society. Hobbes believed human nature was nasty and brutish but civilised by society. Hobbes was wrong. So was Rousseau. They weren’t even asking the right question because we now know that there is no single human nature. Human nature is deeply nurtured. How we nurture comes from our nature. We now know that the nature versus nurture debate for human behaviour makes about as much sense as a right leg versus left leg debate for human walking.
We have a dual inheritance, inextricably entwined. Human nature is co-evolved with our norms and institutions, all of which have been moulded by the laws of cooperation, energy and innovation. From this vantage point, we can marvel at the space of the possible created by the energy we’ve unlocked and put to work for us. Our productivity increases when we marshal vast energy budgets to do our bidding. Fossil fuels astronomically expanded our energy budgets. Excess energy fuelled the evolution of technologies and social innovations in efficiency and cooperation.
The future of our energy budgets will determine what comes next. Where we’re going is not inevitable. It is a choice. Who will make it and how?
Armed with our theory of everyone and the laws of life, we can bring new solutions to all problems. We can understand ultimate systems-level causes, look ahead to the challenges coming our way, and apply the science to create new solutions. We will go as far as the science can take us and then go a little further.
It has been ten generations since the Industrial Revolution. Up until now, our energy ceiling has been in the rising phase of growth and abundance. That ceiling has been so high for so long that almost every generation alive today has lived through a period where it felt limitless. Nobody alive today can remember the before times. The data is too abstract to truly appreciate. Instead, our economic systems invented after the Industrial Revolution are focused almost entirely on innovations and efficiency: how to do more with less energy, the law of innovation, ignoring the total available amount of excess energy, the law of energy. But our energy ceiling is falling. The era of growth is over and we are living through a great stagnation in productivity as we run out of ways to improve efficiency through non-energy expanding technological innovations.
The energy ceiling matters far more than the technological innovations in efficiency. There’s a limit to how much more efficient we can make the heating system of a house. At the end of the day, some minimum amount of joules of energy are needed to keep it warm. Energy has been abundant for so long that we have taken it for granted why our larger, smarter collective brains innovated greater efficiencies that did more with less.
Now, as the energy ceiling falls and innovations and efficiency hit limits, the space of the possible shrinks. The squeeze is cracking and even breaking societies. The coming century will determine if we support, then raise the ceiling, clean up our planet and set the stage to become a space-faring galactic civilisation, or if the ceiling crashes down on a failed species unwilling to look up and now forever stuck on a chaotic climate-changed Earth being slowly depleted of the highly available energy-dense high-EROI resources needed to spring forward to the next energy level.
In the first decade of the 21st century, droughts in Syria turned previously fertile land into desert. Failing crops led people to move from farms to cities. Insufficient resources and the sudden influx of migrants led to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction led to protests. Protests turned into civil war. It wasn’t long before the troubles spilled beyond Syria’s borders into Europe. Like hosts who hadn’t brought enough groceries for unexpected guests, Europe scrambled to accommodate the refugees.
Not everyone was pleased at the influx of newcomers leading to a rise in prominence and power of right-wing populists across the continent. At the height of the crisis in 2015, 45 percent of Brits said that the refugee crisis on the continent made them more likely to vote Leave in the Brexit referendum. Xenophobia was a strong predictor of voting Leave. The crisis was not the cause of Brexit, but it may have been enough to tip the scales. In 2016, Britain voted to break away, declaring itself an economic and political island.
What happened in Syria was not unique. In Africa, “unprecedented” and “record high” have become climate catchphrases of the new century. Both insufficient rain and flooded rivers create food insecurity, increasing violent conflict or war. The instability and disasters have led to millions of migrants spilling over into countries like Uganda and Sudan. It was easier for the West to ignore what wasn’t on their doorstep. We are not living through temporary bad times. These are all signs of the challenges ahead.
It is only thanks to the sacrifice of lifelong dead fossilised as fuel that we’re able to live in a technological wonderland today. In just a few centuries, we burn through these carbon batteries that have taken millions of years to charge, becoming more globalised and more diverse. That globalisation led to greater efficiency through specialisation, but also centralised production. Taiwan alone manufactures nine out of every ten computer chips powering the world’s cell phones, laptops, and web servers. Lithium is critical to battery technologies, among other electronic essentials to modern life. Almost half of the world’s lithium reserves are in Chile. Australia and China have a further 40 percent.
This kind of dependency is found in just about every essential mined metal that is needed to power our solar panels and build our technologies. We are not prepared for shocks to these suppliers. The cultural diversity of our societies empowers innovation, but also creates division. The world over, we have less trust in our institutions and in each other. Technological efficiencies have allowed a small feudal crew vast wealth.
In turn, wealth inequalities and power imbalances are biasing our political decision making. When that power is passed on from the original investor or innovator to their heirs, it leads to inefficient allocation over our remaining still vast energy budget. And so the allocation of our energy budget has become less efficient with each generation. If these social challenges weren’t enough, our more diverse, unequal and divided societies are tasked with dealing with sudden shocks from droughts and dry summers, drying-up hydropower in Brazil and Europe, to gas shortages leading to lower food supplies, to a global pandemic and all its consequences. And thanks to social media, we’re creating new tribes based on common interests, all of whom are more aware of each other.
As an author, my hope is that having read this book, you will find the messy, confusing, and chaotic human world a little less messy, confusing, and chaotic. You will be better equipped to push for better decisions moving forward. Because the decisions we make today will determine what our future will look like and what remaining choices are available to us.
Which of those futures is our future? In some futures, we live in perpetual zero-sum conflict forever trapped in the Malthusian dystopia of the past as EROI continues to decline, leaving us without sufficiently large and accessible energy sources to cooperate at the current large scale of diverse societies of strangers. In these futures, we are polarised into ever smaller cooperative groups that circumstances force us to pick and become entrenched in our positions, unable to think clearly or in ways that cross ideological lines. In this future, we fight with one another in an ever-escalating conflict.
As you may have noticed, we are at the beginning of this shift. Collapse doesn’t happen overnight. Collapse is a gradual decline. Our bills rise as energy becomes more expensive. As energy becomes more expensive, so too does food, transport, and everything else. For the first time, children have harsher lives than their parents, and we are seeing the beginning of more people sliding down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the creative pursuit of our full potential down to basic concerns of food, water, and housing. No amount of sustainability or cutting back can prevent the inevitable. The progress we have made in reducing poverty over centuries is being reversed in a matter of years, and our higher ideals are becoming lost as we struggle with forces beyond our control. Liberal democracy, freedom of speech, and pluralism become the ideals of a more abundant age and are seen as irrelevant to the realities of ever-present scarcity.
We are currently heading down this cold dark path, but it is not inevitable. In alternative brighter futures, we use our theory of everyone to scale democracy to deal with large and diverse populations of competing cultural groups. In these futures, concerns around inequality dissolve as each of us has the opportunity to compete in a fair competition for wealth and ultimately for control over how we allocate our vast energy budget, competition that is not rigged by the arbitrary circumstances of our birth. We reinvigorate innovation through a creative explosion and redirect all our current efforts and energy control toward bets that rocket us to permanent fusion-fuelled abundance. In this future, we head to the stars and become the first generation of a civilisation that spans the galaxy.
Which of these futures will our descendants inherit? That depends on what you and I decide today.
Iona Italia: I would like to come back later to the question of energy. First of all, I’m really interested in the idea of dual inheritance. You talked earlier about how much human beings have achieved despite human limitations. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot in regard to, for example, the Australian aborigines. Why were those groups so primitive? And it seems to me that the reason is because there were so few of them. And they were so isolated from the rest of the world. They were isolated from the general exchange of ideas, and even from each other. We know from genetics studies that even the separate tribes lived very separately from each other. And I just imagine if I had been one of those Aborigines, for example, crossing over to Tasmania, I would have had no idea how to make clothes or make a boat, let alone anything more advanced.
So you need a minimum number of people in order to ensure that you have at least a few people who are innovative enough to invent things and solve technical problems and move humanity forwards. And the smaller the group, the less likely it is that you have someone like Elon Musk in the group as opposed to someone like me who could write nice poetry and maybe do some rock paintings but wouldn’t actually help to advance humanity technically at all.
You talk a lot about this dual cultural and genetic inheritance as one of the things that characterises humans and differentiates us from other animals. And you give a fascinating example about how chimps learn versus how human infants learn. Maybe you could start there and then talk a bit more about this dual inheritance concept.
MM: The experiment that you’re referring to was run by Victoria Horner and Andy Whiten. And what they did was: they took young chimps and young humans, and they gave them a box, I think they called it a “magical fruit.” And this box, it had a hole in the top and a hole on the side. And a demonstrator, the experimenter took a stick and poked the hole through the top and poked the hole through the side so that the young chimps and the children could see this in separate conditions. And what they were able to do was then unlock a reward. So in poking their hole through the top and poking their hole through the side, the chimps got a piece of fruit and the children got a sticker. Children love stickers and chimps love fruit. So the experimenter handed this box to the chimps. And of course the chimps, being smart, they poked their hole through the top, poked through the side, got their fruit, happy chimps. And then the experimenter did the same thing and handed it to the children. And of course the children poked the hole through the top, poked through the side, got their sticker, happy kids.
Now in the key variation, it’s the same box, except that instead of being opaque where you can’t see what’s going on inside, it’s a completely clear box. And now it’s very clear to the chimps and the children that that first action doesn’t actually do anything. There’s a floor or a ceiling at the top, and it’s only the side action that retrieves the reward. But still, the experimenters took this box and they poked the hole through the top and poked the hole through the side, and they handed it to the chimps.
Chimps are smart, right? If you’ve ever watched a chimp doing this working memory game, or you’ve watched a chimp scrolling through Instagram, these are smart animals. And so they were like, “What’s this first action? Irrelevant. Go straight for the second action and retrieve the fruit.” And the chimps are happy. But again, the experimenter pokes through the top, pokes through the through the side and hands it to the children. What did the children do? Poke the hole through the top, poke the hole through the side. They copied exactly what the adults did.
So what seems to be going on with our species is that your head is filled with these recipes, right? You don’t even see them or notice them anymore. But ever since you were a child, you learned that you’ve got to brush your teeth in the morning. Some people brush before breakfast, some people brush after. And everybody’s got a story around it: you’ve got to brush your teeth before to put some fluoride and get rid of the bacteria. You’ve got to brush your teeth after because you’ve just eaten food. You’ve got these stories, but really what you have are recipes without real causal understanding of what’s going on.
In other words, we’ve deferred our understanding to the collective. We’re engaging in a kind of crowd computing, where instead of relying on hardware that allows us to figure things out over the course of our own lifetime, or figure things out just through trial-and-error learning, we can benefit from accumulated beliefs and values and behaviours and entire ways of thinking that are almost like software. They’re apps that we get to download as children and then use as adults.
And this shift from, brain hardware to cultural software opens up all kinds of new possibilities. So we acquired new skills that our ancestors didn’t have. I think my favourite example of this is just counting. So many groups count like this, “one, two, three, many.” It takes a long time before we start counting in a natural number system. What I just did with my fingers is what many groups around the world do. They use body parts to count or they use stones or something like that. But because they’re using these objects and then representing it eventually in their heads, like kids learn to count with their hands until they stop doing that, concepts like zero are very difficult to convey, negative numbers, up until the 17th century …
There’s a quote in my book from Francis Masri, this Canadian British mathematician who in the 17th century or 18th century says, “Negative numbers darken the very fabric of reality.” These are awful, awful things. And the reason that we’re able to acquire a new aptitude and then transmit that to children easily is because we moved away from objects as a way to represent numbers in our brains to movement and position. So around then is when we started using number lines. And number lines make obvious the zero point as well as give you a way of thinking about negative numbers.
So we have these metaphors, we have these ways of transmitting entire skills. If I can have another example: if p then q reasoning. We often assume that humans are very logical, the rational animal and so on. Alexander Luria goes out to Uzbekistan in the 1920s where there’s this educational revolution going on. And he asks people these syllogisms. He says, “Where it snows, the bears are white. In Nova Zemblia, it snows, what colour are the bears?” You’re going to say “white.” My six-year-old says “white.” And when he asked the Uzbeks with education, they said “white” as well. But when he asked the Uzbeks without education, they said things like, “I don’t know. I’ve seen a brown bear once—is it brown? I don’t talk about things I don’t know.”
Obviously, humans are capable of reasoning, but it’s not a grounded way of thinking that we do naturally. There is no such thing as “natural” as I gave you in that quote from my book. What is natural are acquired skills that we get from our software that become instinctual. It’s a little bit like the Stroop effect. Reading is so instinctual that it overrides colour perception, where you have to say the colour instead of read, you can’t help but read. Now, obviously we know the history of reading and that it’s a culturally acquired skill, but much of your cognition is culturally acquired. Once you realise that, once you realise, actually it’s the software that’s doing a lot of work, now you’re asking different questions. You’re like, “Well, why does this software vary between people? Why does it vary between groups? How has this software changed over time? How does it interact with our genes? How does it interact with … is it evolving? How does it emerge?” And that’s the space of cultural evolution. That’s the basis for understanding a theory of everyone.
II: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was thinking as I was reading the book about Steve Stewart Williams’ book, The Ape that Understood the Universe. He tells a story in that book of being in Borneo and he watched as an orangutan stole one of their rafts. He was punting like they do at Oxford and Cambridge. The orangutan used a pole and he was punting that raft away down the river and he’d obviously seen the humans doing this so he imitated them, very smart orangutan guy. And Steve said that his first thought on seeing that was, “Look at that ape using technology that he doesn’t understand.” And then it suddenly dawned upon him that this was equally true of us. But the difference is that the orangutan starts from scratch each time or almost from scratch. There’s no transmission of that knowledge of how to punt.
MM: Yeah, exactly. We benefit … as I say in the book, we are smarter than our short lifetime should allow for. We live in a world that not even the smartest—not even Elon Musk, if you like—could recreate. We’re building on everything that came before. And that’s really the secret to our success. It’s not by genes alone that we make any of this happen. It’s because we get the advantage of when both of us were born.
As babies, the first thing that we really had to do was to catch up on the last several thousand years of human history. And by that, I don’t mean catch up on everything that had happened. I mean, catch up on all the developments in how to think what is right and wrong, the technologies that are available to us. And we did it. Education is one of the most effective institutions for downloading this cultural package.
Formal education has been around for a while, but after the Industrial Revolution, it becomes compulsory. Truancy laws start to emerge in the late 19th century. So well after when we really took this factory model and said, “We’re going to create factory workers. You’re to sit down, kids; we’re going to start phonemes, numbers, algebra, calculus. We’re going to download this way of thinking about the world. And we’re going to do things like create deferred gratification. We’re going to teach you to sit carefully—just like you’re doing right now as I’m speaking, so that you can learn.” And you’ll not only learn these skills, but you learn how to learn. You will delay your gratification. You’ll have patience. All of these things that are not natural to us, they’re very, very trained. And because we live in a thoroughly schooled world where all of us went to school to some degree and our media assumes some level of education and so on, we just don’t see it anymore. We’re in this bubble. You have to go to far-flung places to really appreciate how much is not what it means to be human, but actually is conferred to us by our culture. And as an aside, I think this is one of the things that AI researchers need to understand, what their training is not like … it’s not like the human brain gives us immediate abilities to be intelligent. It’s that the human brain plus this cultural software. It’s like having hardware without Excel or any of the useful applications. You can’t really do much with a computer unless it has an operating system with several applications.
II: One of the interesting things is that in a way the chimps are more rational than the babies in that experiment. The chimps are figuring it out from first principles and they see you don’t need to poke the stick in the top, whereas the babies are just slavishly copying. I found that fascinating that part of what makes it possible for us to advance is that we have this social tendency to copy others rather than trying to work things out ourselves from first principles. Most of us never do that. I mean, I have enough trouble with time zones as it is, but if I had to actually try to work out from the Earth’s rotation what time zone I was in versus someone else, it would be absolutely impossible. We wouldn’t even be able to talk to each other now because I would never have figured out how to calculate it. But I have the social instinct to just go and see what other smarter people have done and accept that and follow that.
MM: Yeah, that’s right. What makes it cultural evolution and not just idea transmission, if you like, is that there’s good evidence that culture is actually evolving beyond conscious awareness in the same way that genetic evolution allows you to have design without an intelligent designer, cultural evolution is working the same way. Any evolutionary system needs just three ingredients, right? You need diversity or variation, you need faithful transmission, and you need some kind of variation reduction to selection in the direction of more adaptive and less of the stuff that’s not adaptive. Part of this is that humans have … the reason we’re different to other apes, as you pointed out with orangutans and even in this experiment, apes can imitate, they do have some ability to do that—at least some limited ability—but they don’t have the proclivity to do that. So they don’t tend to do that. And that’s because they’re not filled with a world where people actually have useful solutions that they could just copy.
We are the kids in class who cheat. We don’t need to work out why brushing your teeth works or why you’ve got to cook your meat and your vegetables a certain way in order to get a nutritious meal. You don’t have to work out any of that stuff. You don’t have to know medicine to take advantage of a hospital. So this is why the faithful transmission, this copying without understanding is actually essential to that second ingredient of evolution. If we were trying to work it out, the system wouldn’t work. We would be like chimps sitting naked in the rain.
And then we do it selectively. We’re not copying people at random. We’re looking for signs of success. People are influenced by Elon Musk because he’s demonstrated success. He makes some pretty wild claims. If those same wild claims were made by the homeless guy on the street, people would just laugh. But because he has success and because he’s prestigious, other people are copying him, because he’s wealthy, he’s got these markers of expertise. This makes him a figure that you’re copying.
So you’re not copying at random. You’re copying selectively the people who seem like they’ve got some knowledge worth paying attention to. And because of that filtering process, the population itself becomes worth copying. So if maybe you’re travelling and you go somewhere you haven’t been before and you don’t know where the public bathrooms are or how to order or what the norms are for queuing. You just look around and you do what other people do. And that’s what kids do as well. They tend to conform. This is what we call peer pressure. They just copy what other people are doing.
It’s a good thing to do. It’s a clever thing to do when most people are using behaviours that are adaptive because they’ve been filtered by generations upon generations of selective social learning. So culture becomes this evolutionary system. We had an economy before we had economists, right? We create these technologies and then we try to reverse-engineer them—even the steam engine, we got there before we got to the laws of thermodynamics.
II: That’s really interesting. It’s like other people are an outsourced brain for us. Part of our technology as humans is the collective wisdom of other people.
MM: Joe Henrik and I call this “the collective brain.” It’s meant to be an analogy, but also behind it is some sensible mathematics about. You mentioned Australia as a relatively isolated region of the world, but even within Australia, Tasmania had some of the least technologically and culturally sophisticated populations. When Europeans arrived in Tasmania, they weren’t sure if they were seeing a subspecies of human, they weren’t sure what was going on because they had lost the ability to make warm clothing. They were transmitting fire in a specific way rather than making it from scratch. They were using rafts instead of boats. They would rub fat on their bodies to stay warm. Their fishing technology, the toolkit was much smaller than even their cousins’ on the mainland.
And what was interesting is when they looked across the archaeological record, it wasn’t just that they had a smaller toolkit than their cousins across the mainland, they had less than their own ancestors. One of my first papers was an experimental test of … there’s two competing models as to how that happens. One is a kind of cultural drift model akin to genetic drift. When you have a small population, ideas just get lost. And the other model was the model developed by Joe Henrik, let’s call it “the Henrik transmission model,” where learning is lossy. If all these people are trying to learn from Elon Musk, most of them won’t be as good. There’s a reason that whoever the successful person is, is successful. They are outliers and a multitude of traits and a particular life trajectory and experiences and so on. That’s hard to recreate. And so most won’t be as good. But with some probability, as the population grows in size, there’ll be at least one person to replace that person every generation. The math implies a relationship between not actually just population size, but sociality. The size and interconnectedness of a population is connected to the level of cultural complexity that it can maintain in the absence of books and so on, which actually increase your effective population size.
We were able to show that experimentally. So in an experimental setting, we’re able to show that, with a larger—well, actually the same size population, but more interconnected—you can first off accumulate culture faster and to a higher degree. And if you start a population like the Tasmanians did with some amount of technology, they’ll lose it more slowly if they’re more interconnected and they’ll equilibrate at a higher level if they’re more interconnected, just as we see in Tasmania. One of the things about Eurasia is that Eurasia has a very large collective brain. We’ve had ideas flowing across this continent back and forth for millennia. And so you’ve got this incredible … these ideas flowing back and forth, recombining, creating something new that the rest of the world didn’t get to enjoy. So you see far more technological and cultural complexity across Eurasia than you find on the other continents.
II: Have you read Emily St. John Mandel’s novel? I think it’s called Station Eleven.
MM: No, it was turned into a TV series, right?
II: I haven’t seen the TV series, but the novel’s premise is that there has been an apocalypse which has completely destroyed the power sources everywhere on Earth. So gradually all of the batteries run flat and none of the technology is working anymore and there is also, I think, a pandemic so many of the scientists and technical people die. And we’re following a group of actors—so these are not people who are likely to restart technological civilisation—and it’s about the loss of technology and technical knowledge and even societal organisation. Everything breaks down. It’s like the situation that happened to the Tasmanians, but on a global scale.
MM: Yeah, that’s right. The Tasmanians aren’t the only example. I think it’s in the Arctic region, this is exactly what happened. A disease came through and killed the adults. And so there’s this massive skill loss. When they were found, they lost a whole bunch of things. And it’s what would happen to us. If you’re a small country or if you’re a large country or if you just don’t do things for a long time.
Here’s an example. One of the things I’m absolutely delighted about is that nuclear is back on the agenda. In part because of AI and data centre requirements, we’re building nuclear again, which will forestall a lot of the concerns that I had in my book. But because we’ve lost a generation, we don’t have the nuclear engineers that we need anymore. And so we have to retrain those individuals in the future. I would say it’s a good bet for your kids if you’re thinking about that. But it’s an example of where it’s easy to lose these kinds of things.
II: That segues nicely over into the second major theme in your book, which is energy.
As my best friend Maia, who you’ve met, always says, “It all comes down to energy.” This is what we need in order to create more complex life and more complex societies. You talk in the book about the gap between the energy floor and the energy ceiling, that space in which all possibility for social advancement takes place. Can you say more about that concept, the limits on energy and how that has developed and progressed?
MM: I think a good entry into this is how I started thinking about energy. I was working on cooperation, which is one of the central themes of my work. And in 2005, Science Magazine labels the puzzle of large-scale cooperation as one of the top 25 puzzles for the coming quarter-century. So it’s an important topic. Economists look at it; biologists look at it; cultural evolution people, and so on. And the focus was on identifying mechanisms of cooperation. Some of your listeners might be familiar with inclusive fitness or kin selection. Genes that can identify and favour copies of themselves will spread at the expense of genes that don’t. That explains why related individuals will cooperate with one another. Direct reciprocity, reciprocal altruism: you scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours. Or an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It explains repeated encounters between individuals like in your workplace or in a small village.
Indirect reciprocity reputation system … when I met you, Iona in Australia—what a pleasure—but I’d heard about you, your reputation preceded you. So I was more likely to have a chat because of that reputation. And if I asked my colleagues in the economics department, what those institutions, the right institutions, non-extractive institutions, can sustain.
It’s not just that I’m working with my family. It’s not just that I’m working with people I know, or even people I know of. We live in societies of anonymous strangers because I pay taxes and those taxes are used for a police force and a judiciary and government and so on that sustain this very high level of cooperation. And so it seemed like the puzzle had been solved. We now understood these scales of cooperation. But when I was looking at this—well, hang on a second, hang on, hang on, hang on. All of those scales exist at the same time and they’re not always in alignment. Sometimes what’s good for my family isn’t good for the state. Sometimes what’s good for my friends is not good for meritocracy or something like that. One of the papers that I worked on in graduate school was demonstrating this. So we set up a public goods game and we set up a perfect institution in this public goods game. And then we showed that you would get the opposite predictions. If you make the institution stronger, you would get stronger cooperation unless you introduce a second scale of cooperation, which is direct reciprocity. That is effectively what bribery is. Corruption is just one scale of cooperation undermining another. It’s not actually a puzzle at all. The puzzle is how you get these higher scales. When a leader gives their son a contract, we call that nepotism, but it’s inclusive fitness undermining our institutions. If a manager gives her friend a job on the basis of that friendship, that is direct or indirect reciprocity undermining our meritocracy, for example. So if that’s the case, then identifying those mechanisms is not a solution to this. We have to explain how humanity went from operating at levels of bands to villages to princedoms, kingdoms, nations, and now unions of nation states. We have to be able to explain that.
So, I started looking over this history and thinking about the problem at the same time. I have a diverse educational background. So I was reading the energy sciences. I felt comfortable doing that just with engineering training. I was reading energy budgets in evolutionary biology, thinking about cooperation between cells and multicellularity. And I realised there is a common currency across this whole thing and that is the availability of excess energy.
That’s what turns non-life into life. Anything you can do is amplified if you have access and control over energy. If you look, the earliest life was moving at plant pace through photosynthesis. One of the major moves was the storage of that for later use. Even today, one of the problems with solar power is that you have to be able to store it for later use. Otherwise you don’t have power when the sun isn’t shining. And initially, prior to mitochondria and ATP, they weren’t able to store that. You only could move when there was heat. Once you can store things, then it opens these new spaces of possibilities. First off, there’s efficiencies: oxidation during photosynthesis, for example, I think it’s a nine times efficiency increase. Then you can also evolve new animals that don’t bother with photosynthesis but eat other animals and take their energy for themselves.
This can lead to ever increasing complexity—but there’s a ceiling on the whole thing, which is this availability of energy. So I was like, “Okay, well, if that’s true, then we should see this link between energy and the scale of cooperation.” And it’s exactly what you see. Everything’s plodding along and then you get these little leaps through energy improvement. The first one was fire. Fire allows you to pre-digest food. The best evidence of cultural evolution is that you were born into a world that requires cooked food because your jaw is too weak and your gut is too short to eat raw food. You don’t have genetic abilities to make fire. That means you require this cultural transmission of fire and cooking in order to survive. First one.
II: I absolutely don’t have any abilities to make fire. I can only strike a match.
MM: There you go. It’s hard. Agriculture was another technology. We moved from hunting and gathering to harvesting and grinding, where instead of walking around using calories to hunt game or acquire tubers or something like that, we were stationary, were sedentary. We were probably dropping seeds at first and watching them grow. And then intentionally.
These are innovations in efficiency, learning to grow these plants and hunting. Just like with the evolution of eukaryotic life or life eating other life, the agriculturalists, although they were less healthy because of that energy surplus that they suddenly had pushed the hunter-gatherers to the margins where they weren’t suitable for agriculture. So the hunter-gatherers ended up in deserts and thick rainforest where they still live today.
Then the next major shift … For the longest time, agriculturalists were fighting with other agriculturalists in this Malthusian world, a zero-sum world. And to exit that zero-sum world and enter the positive-sum world that we live in today was when we discovered stored sunlight in the ground and through innovations and efficiency, learned to put that to work. That stored sunlight was peat turned to black rock that we call coal and the cheap available coal in Britain allowed them to launch the Industrial Revolution. And then later the use of oil and natural gas, zooplankton, algae turn to oil and natural gas. These are dense carbon batteries.
There’s different metrics that are important in the energy sciences. To keep things simple, I focus on energy return on investment, which is its ROI. It’s the amount of energy it takes to get some amount of energy back. And it applies across all of these systems. If a cheetah spends more energy chasing down that game than they get back when they eat that game, that cheetah is going to die. The energy return is not high enough. With fossil fuels, the energy return was massive. And this incentivised us to use that more efficiently and do more with it. So what I call the “space of the possible” is that there’s an energy ceiling based on the energy return on investment of your energy technology and an efficiency floor.
As we get more and more efficient, we expand and are able to do it more and more. And for the longest time, we never had to think about the energy ceiling because there was so much of it. One stat I point out is just look at oil discovery rates. In 1919, one barrel of oil found you another thousand barrels of oil. It’s a massive energy return on investment. By 1950, one barrel of oil found you another hundred. And it’s not till 2010 that one barrel of oil found you another five. So now suddenly that ceiling matters and there’s a limit to the efficiency.
There’s a particular amount of Joules that’s required to heat a house, as I said. So this thing’s falling on us. And for the first time, we had to think about it. And we should be incorporating those into our models of economic growth and together, you can begin to understand. If we shift up the ceiling again, a lot of the cooperative problems happen. In the book, I talk about four laws: energy, efficiency, the cooperation that happens in that space, which is a function of working together to access more than you would get working by yourself. And then this evolutionary process means the less energy you have, the more conflict you have. The fewer resources you have, the more difficult it is to get people to cooperate and also to get people to live in harmony.
II: If you’re fighting over scraps, then that is a very unpleasant situation. What you want is maximum abundance. So you want to keep raising the floor and for that you need more energy.
MM: Yeah, it’s easier. Iona, it’s easier to be nice when there’s more to go around. And the reason that the line’s got to keep going up is that if the line doesn’t go up and if growth fails, if growth slows down, it incentivises zero-sum conditions because when growth is stagnant, or it slows down, it means that your win is my loss, because there’s only a limited amount of stuff and we’re fighting over that. That’s the return to the Malthusian world. And as the populations grow to reach that new carrying capacity, it gets less and less and it incentivises a very different psychology than when the line goes up and I can get things without you having less because the actual pie is growing.
The growth, the line can continue to go up if we’re talking about extra-planetary resources and asteroid mining and so on and making that cheap and easy enough to do. My goal is to make our species multi-planetary, but I don’t think the primary limit to that is the technology. The primary limit to that is our ability to work together, our ability to govern ourselves under conditions of mass migration, for example, that are going to be coming increasingly through climate change or wars over water or resources or whatever the case might be. This to me is what’s actually holding us back. If we can work together as countries and unions of countries, the technology is there. It’s a matter of civil will and political will to invest in them. I think it’s happening anyway in the private sector, thank goodness. But that’s what I work on, what motivates me, what gets me up in the morning: how do we create the conditions for more positive-sum conditions and how do we have better immigration policies and policies that allow diverse individuals to work together and reap the benefits without paying the costs? And how do we get away from this kind of ideological … and how do we have greater freedom of speech and greater robustness to hear ideas that we don’t like? That kind of thing. Because these are essential to accelerating cultural evolution and getting us off this planet.
II: So you talk about the fact that we’re living through what you call a “second Enlightenment” and that that has a lot to do with the internet. Can you talk a bit about what you mean by that?
MM: It’s more speculative the further you go back, but you might be able to draw a line from the Black Death to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and so on, where the Black Death in Europe, which kills about 30–40 percent of the population, we have a model of this and I talk about it in the book, which is that when you increase that space as possible, you increase the carrying capacity, so you get more people to catch up. But eventually, because of innovations in efficiency, you actually don’t need that many people. So the per person output could be better if you lost a few people. So this kind of sudden loss reorganises society, creates a middle class, shakes things up, that embeddedness of the feudal class starts to disappear and so on. Anyway, that’s an aside. So, before you get to industrialisation, you have this enlightenment, where ideas take place. You’ve got the printing press, you’ve got pamphlets flowing across, you’ve got people challenging the ideas of old. You’ve got an increase in our collective brain because of these new interconnected connections that are being created, these ideas that are now spreading across and recombining and doing all these amazing things. This lays the foundation for everything to come.
II: I wrote a book about this. This is what I wrote my first book on.
MM: Nice. So I think we’re very much on the same page. And then after that, you get this industrial revolution that empowers the technology that’s going to take advantage of the of the fossil fuels that we eventually get so that we can industrialise. So what I argue is actually what we’re living through today. People talk about the first, second, third, fourth industrial revolution. I think there was one industrial revolution and then efficiency of innovations and efficiency after that. This unlocking of energy and then ways of putting that to use. And what we’re living through today is not another industrial revolution. It is the precursor to it. It is this enlightenment that has empowered … instead of the coffee shops where the people gathered to talk to one another and the pamphlets that were shared between these coffee shops through Europe, we instead have X, we instead have social media. We instead have Substack. We instead have podcasts like this one where ideas are flowing across between people, being challenged. They’re being shared in these small spaces. They’re being discussed online. It’s laying the foundations for that technological revolution. If you look at Less Wrong, for example, you’ve got [Eliezer] Yudkowsky, who is motivating Sam Altman to try to create this world. This is the second enlightenment that’s going on.
And what hopefully comes out of that is a true second industrial revolution, which, by my definition has to be an energy revolution. So from this, we get to abundant nuclear, which is more than what we require for quite some time. And I would say potentially even fusion. As I say, fusion is always between next month and the next 30 years, but for the first time there are several viable technologies.
And there is private and public sector investment and potentially more as our energy needs increase. So that those two things or these high energy return on investment technologies could truly create that second industrial revolution because everything else will follow. You increase that space if possible. The evolutionary process itself will incentivise higher scales of cooperation because people who can get together and work together to take advantage of that will outcompete those that don’t. The agriculturalists will win—or in this case the AI people or something.
II: It’s always been the case in the past that whenever people have prophesied doom and gloom on the basis of scarcity of a particular element or a particular resource, we have always solved that problem by finding a way to do without that resource through a new and alternative and different technology. There’ve been various examples of this in the past, which I’m not recalling right now … but there have been several crises where we thought, “God, we don’t have enough neodymium” or whatever. “Society is going to have a complete breakdown.” Then along comes the next generation of technological things, and they don’t require neodymium at all. So it seems to me that even if we don’t have fusion, we will surely at some point come up with a new technology. And what we need is just to build up enough nuclear to tide us over until that discovery happens.
MM: Yeah, could be. This is why, like I said, it’s the social side of things that really needs to be solved, preventing people from going to war or at each other’s throats or society breaking down and not voting for things that lead to progress and an increase in human welfare. A lot of things are fungible. We eventually work out new technologies. There’s some … I don’t talk about phosphorus in the book, but it is a potential serious limiting agent that might not have a replacement.
In other cases, we figured new things out. I talk about Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. Fossil fuels didn’t just … they weren’t just in factories and allowing us to fly across the planet in airplanes and other vehicles. We’re literally eating our fossil fuels, through nitrogen in the air and the ammonia from natural gas. Through the Haber-Bosch process, we’re able to synthesise fertilizer that has then led to a further at least four billion people on this planet alive today. So we have the second green agricultural revolution, if you like, on the back of this energy technology. The first one was using the sun to grow stuff. The second was using this fertiliser to have the chemicals to grow stuff far more abundantly than you’re able to do without this.
One thing to say is that past results are no guarantee of future results. The fact that violence has declined doesn’t mean that it will continue to decline. In fact, one of the things in my book is I make an opposite prediction to Pinker’s decline of violence. Although to be fair to Steve, I don’t think he would say it can’t reverse. To me, World War I and World War II were not aberrations. The thing is that my take on the decline of violence is it is the corollary to the increase in cooperation.
As the size of the cooperative groups increase, it means that internally within those groups, your probability of dying from homicide or war goes down. But it also means that the scale of the conflict were it to occur is higher. So there’s actually a couple of processes … and it’s hard to detect it because the data isn’t quite there, but it’s consistent with what we can see, which is that there’s always the lower scales. It’s like the bacteria, the insurgencies that are possible. But if we have this war, it’s no longer bands against bands or even nations against nations. It’s large unions of nations now armed with incredibly destructive new technologies against other large unions of nations. And the implications of that and the setback that that can create can be a long time. There’s almost no point in saying “the arc of history bends toward justice” or “violence is declining” or whatever, if you’re about to live through a generation or fifty years of hardship, because of this incredibly destructive thing. So that’s what I think: it’s the social technologies, our ability to intervene and create the conditions for higher scales of cooperation, that is essential to ensuring that all of that technological stuff is actually used and that we avoid this crisis.
II: Yeah, that’s very important. I’m going to come back to Elon Musk once again. Sorry, he seems to be a running theme in this podcast today, but one of the things that’s irritated me is many of my friends who detest Musk because of his political opinions, because they feel he is a troublemaker and an inflammatory element in politics. I have been arguing always that what’s much more important is the technological advancements that he is making possible. If we get to Mars, it will probably be because of his ingenuity and determination, even if it’s not directly him who takes us, but some copycat competitor, say. But what you’re saying is making me feel that perhaps my friends are right to be prioritising the political, because without the political will for cooperation, none of those things can happen. We can’t make use of the technologies effectively.
MM: Yeah, but you see, I would say, first off about Musk: if somebody is doing something very innovative and interesting and different, you don’t expect this to be a normal person following the norms. You’re not expecting the person who’s like, “Yeah, I do everything that everybody expects me to do in society.” That’s not the person who’s making these breakthroughs. And I think people who downplay the … like, “He’s not the guy building the rockets.” I’m like, “Have you ever started a business? It’s not this easy thing.” That’s why if you want to explain that, you’ve got to explain why all these other space attempts have failed. And that is an evolutionary process in the sense you’ve got different billionaires trying this different stuff, but creating the space for somebody to try and succeed. That’s what I mean by the conditions for this to take off now.
MM: You might say, “Yeah, X under Musk is very divisive,” and it clearly is. Lots of people are leaving X for Bluesky or whatever. But how you deal with that division is important because you can play the—I’m trying to say this in a sensitive way—the politics of giving in. I’m sure there’s more useful way to say that. “Some people feel badly about this and we should try not to offend these people. We should just … we need to give in.” But I don’t think that’s right. I think that we ought to have robust and rigorous discussions about any topic. And if you want to show why Musk is wrong, you cannot appeal to just norms alone or your particular value set, which vary. You have to judge, you have to make cases and argument that can cross those boundaries on the basis of something that approaches an objective metric. I think that’s often where things break down. Some people are like, “I don’t care about progress, actually. I just care about concern” or something like that. But that discussion, that working out of these things is absolutely essential. You wouldn’t want Musk to be less divisive necessarily. You want to encourage the kind of discussion that he’s forcing us to have, or that he and others are forcing us to have, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be offended and upset when somebody says something you disagree with. But fact is, people disagree on things, and yet we still have to work together as a species.
There’s a line I have in my book from [J.S. Mill’s] On Liberty, that “We have to leave room for the uncustomary so that we may decide what shall in the future become customary.” We have to leave room for the crazy and offensive and truly awful so that we can decide if maybe it’s not crazy and offensive and truly awful. Because I think it’s hubris to think that in this moment right now, the particular set of values that you have are the end state of values.
Once upon a time, was offensive to upset the social order. If you look at the holy books, they don’t tell you not to have slaves, they tell you how to treat them. Now slavery for most people is unthinkable. Interracial marriage at one point upset the social order. It was just an awful thing. It was an offensive thing. But you discuss these things, and it’s fine. People have different opinions on all of these things. Maybe there are people among us who would want us to return to slavery or whatever. There might be a space … it’s what freedom of speech allows for. It allows for us to go, “Actually, that’s an awful idea. That’s terrible. And here’s the reasons why it doesn’t work out.” But it forces you to articulate that, whatever the crazy idea might be. So, when I say that we need to be able to work together, I don’t mean at the expense of truth. There’s another side to this.
II: I was just going to say that when we’re talking about cultural evolution, one of the things you require for evolution is a certain degree of natural variance within the material that you have to work with.
MM: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the other thing, of course. It’s a weird thing being someone who works on cultural evolution in the sense that I have to get out of my own value set, and just say, “Here’s what I think, but it actually doesn’t matter. All I can say is this thing is part of the variation. And if I were to look at it, I think this thing might outcompete this other thing.” And “I think it might outcompete it at a group level,” or “I think it might outcompete it at a lower level.”
When I’m intervening, of course, I might have some principles behind that but we cannot know. And by the way, what outcompetes doesn’t make it good. Sparta might outcompete Athens, or the more violent society might outcompete the more peaceful society. What I would like is, the one that is able to outcompete it with the least amount of destruction, and that continues human progress. So, if I were trying to find some value set that seems to be espoused by the major world religions and I think is a secular aspiration too, it’s higher scales of cooperation, it’s alignment where we can work together at a higher scale than our ancestors did.
II: I think that’s probably a great place to end, but is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you wish I’d asked you or anything you wish you’d had an opportunity to talk about?
MM: There’s loads of things. I wrote the book out of frustration, because I felt like there were all these ways of thinking about the world, tools for thinking about the world, that directly speak to the challenges that we face in the present moment. And it gives us a language to think about difficult topics that are sometimes taboo, that sometimes have hard answers. It’s very difficult to say “my way is better than your way” unless you have some basis upon which you can say it. My hope is that the... It’s like the movement from alchemy to chemistry, like doing silly things to actually being able to do useful things and eventually protein folding or something like that, is that you understand the rules by which the system operates.
We have a common language for talking about cultural evolution, for example. And from there, then we can start to talk about things that are difficult, about whether the divisiveness we see, let’s say in the United States, is a good or a bad thing, whether the particular policies that are being implemented … should we seal the border or is illegal immigration perfectly okay? And it’s moving beyond just looking at the data, the data alone. Because if you looked at the data alone, you wouldn’t notice the effects of energy. You wouldn’t notice it because it was so high for so long, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the limiting agent. And it was only once it started to collapse that it started to become part of the equations that matter. So I think the theory and the way of thinking about this stuff is just as important as the data. These things have to go hand in hand. that was my book is the attempt to kind of put that together and give people the language to directly target these various problems that we face.
