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.