Podcast #264: A Theory of Everyone

Introduction

My guest this week is Michael Muthukrishna. I talk to Michael about his new book A Theory of Everyone, 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.