PART I
Who We Are and How We Got Here
Who are we? How did we get here? These most profound of questions have been pondered by generations of philosophers, theologians, and college roommates. Scientists have also been studying these questions, developing better theories and more convincing evidence for how our species evolved, the secret to our creativity and intelligence, how we work together to create corporations, governments, and other structures within our societies, and how these elements interact with one another. This ‘science of us’ is studied in different ways by different disciplines within the human and social sciences. But up until very recently, it was most accurate to describe both the human and social sciences as ‘young’ sciences.
A young science behaves like a child. It spends most of its time observing the world and coming up with explanations for what it sees, some wilder and less credible than others. It gets into everything, plays with switches, knobs, and runs whatever experiments it comes up with. But it doesn't yet know how to properly make sense of what it sees, how things connect with one another, or how to confidently act in the world.
A young physics was Galileo thinking comets were atmospheric disturbances akin to aurora borealis, the northern lights. A young chemistry was when the wise sages across Eurasia tried to turn lead into gold. A young biology was Lamarck assuming that giraffes grew their necks through generations of stretching to reach leaves high on trees.
Like those of a child, the claims of a young science aren't always trustworthy. Did young Alex really see a fox or was it the neighbor's dog? Are supermarket Santas really Santa or one of Santa's helpers? Will a watermelon grow in my stomach if I swallow a seed?
Nutritional science, for example, is still a young science. Even its most carefully planned studies can't be trusted. Different investigations uncover different findings, and the young science seems to be perpetually changing its mind.
But not as bad as red wine, which is actually quite good for your health.
Unlike bacon, which will cause cancer.
For a science to become a mature adult science, it first needs to go through puberty. Like human puberty, this is an exciting, embarrassing, and often awkward affair, and requires some major changes. Chief among these is the discovery of an overarching theoretical framework that can sift sense from nonsense, make trustworthy and useful predictions, and offer pathways from discoveries to technologies. Some scientists and philosophers of science would argue it is only really after the discovery of this mature theoretical framework that a science can even call itself a science. As the French polymath Henri Poincaré put it, ‘Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.’
The house in Poincaré's analogy is the theoretical framework, the architecture that tells us what to expect, what not to expect, why and how things work, and how to intervene. The theories that can be derived from a mature theoretical framework are like underground subway maps, road maps, and topographic maps, reducing the reality of the world in different ways to highlight and hide different information so as to get us to where we need to go.
Sometimes theory comes before the data, the data distinguishing between competing theories. This is what happened when Einsteinian physics revealed the limits of Newtonian physics at the turn of the twentieth century. Newtonian physics works very well for calculating how fast a tennis ball will fall based on the angle, speed, and spin with which it's hit given the acceleration caused by the pull of the Earth's gravity. Einsteinian physics taught us that the Earth's gravity isn't pulling the tennis ball at all; it's warping the fabric of space-time.
According to Einstein's theory, a large mass like the Sun ‘bends’ space-time. Newton's theory makes no such prediction. This warping of space-time leads to phenomena such as ‘gravitational lensing’ where the light of distant stars appears to be in different locations when they pass by a large mass like the Sun. We don't normally see this lensing because stars aren't visible during the day when the Sun is out, but a solar eclipse in 1919 allowed scientists to observe what the Sun's gravity was doing to the light from distant stars. The stars around the Sun appeared to have moved from their normal positions in the night sky. The shift was much larger than Newton's theory predicted, but exactly in the positions predicted by Einstein's theory. Sorry Newton!
Sometimes data seems disconnected and theory helps make sense of it. The discovery of elements in the periodic table turned alchemy into chemistry. The discovery of Darwinian natural selection turned butterfly collecting into modern biology. When we get the theory right, it completely revolutionizes our understanding of what was previously confusing, inconsistent, and seemingly unrelated.
The human and social sciences are going through puberty. Its curves are showing; its muscles are growing. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. This scientific revolution is a theory of human behavior that, when combined with theories of social evolution, is close to being a theory of everyone. This theory of everyone is as profound as the revolutions in these other now adult sciences. It is a revolution that is bringing order to chaos and laying the path from science to technology – in this case, policy applications. For the first time, it is enabling us to see the causes of the problems we face and what we need to do to overcome them. The human and social sciences are moving from alchemy to chemistry.
Once upon a time the physical world seemed chaotic. It was a world of apples falling to the ground to be closer to the Earth and capricious gods creating the weather. Then folks like Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein brought order to this chaos. It's astonishing that at a time of muskets, whale oil, and horse-drawn carriages, Maxwell was able to write down equations for electromagnetism. This was before Edison and Tesla developed technology that allowed us to control electricity. A popular meme of Maxwell's equations says:
Today, physics is arguably the oldest of the grown-up sciences. The weather is still difficult to predict, but at least we now understand how it and other aspects of the physical world work. This understanding allows us to predict a clear day and the motions of celestial bodies precisely enough to launch a rocket and land a spacecraft on Mars. Thanks to the laws of physics, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – a particle decay producing more of one particle than another – from what is unusual and probably wrong – neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.
In 2011 neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light was precisely what was found by the CERN OPERA experiment when it fired particles through a tunnel from Switzerland to Italy. The Swiss particles arrived earlier than the Italians expected, indeed faster than the speed of light. Nothing is supposed to travel faster than the speed of light and so physicists knew something was up. The experiment received a large amount of scrutiny not because it violated intuitions nor because physicists don't like being wrong, but because the speed of light, rather than being a purely experimental discovery or an isolated theory, is at the heart of a rich and mature theoretical framework that explains so much of our world. If neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light then the science of physics would be shattered across so many subdisciplines. It turned out to be a measurement error.
We see the same pattern in the history of chemistry. Once upon a time the chemical world seemed chaotic. Metals mixed with liquid to create gases. Sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter could be combined to create gunpowder. But no matter how hard even Newton himself tried, we couldn't turn lead into gold. Then folks like Lavoisier, Mendeleev, and Meyer brought order to this chaos. The periodic table and an understanding of elements and chemical reactions arrived. Alchemy grew up and became chemistry.
More complex compounds, such as proteins, are still difficult to predict, but at least we now know how they work. We know why lithium fizzes and sodium explodes in water, and why lead cannot be turned into gold. This understanding allows us to develop material sciences, a world of plastics, and to turn crude oil into fuel, medicines, and Vaseline. Thanks to the periodic table, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – an AI predicting a protein's shape from its amino acid sequence – from what is unusual and probably wrong – paraffin dissolving in water.
And we see the same pattern in the history of biology. Once upon a time the biological world seemed chaotic. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why some animals laid eggs and others had live births or why the peacock had a giant elaborate tail while the peahen was a drab brown. Then folks like Darwin, Fisher, Wright, and Hamilton brought order to this chaos. Biology grew out of merely counting, classifying, and measuring and became a mature science.
Species are still difficult to predict and ecologies are still chaotic, but at least we now know how they work. This understanding allows us to develop gene editing and mRNA vaccines. Thanks to the theory of evolution, we can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting – a new human species – from what is unusual and probably wrong – a mammal fossil found in the Precambrian geological record.
We now see the same pattern in the human and social sciences. A scientific revolution is starting to bring order to the chaotic world of human affairs. Everything is starting to make more sense. Sapiens are still difficult to predict, but at least we now know the rules by which we work. We know the rules that govern how people decide whom to trust and learn from, how organizations and societies discover new innovations in norms and technologies, and the rules that shape our actions in helping or harming others and determining who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. We can use these rules to improve ourselves, our technologies, our governments, companies, schools, and societies; to develop strategies, policies, and interventions – social technologies – to chart a better future. We can go beyond intuitions based on life experience or purely the results of past experiments to make predictions and distinguish what is unusual and interesting from what is unusual and probably wrong.
The theoretical framework – the periodic table – of human behavior and social change is studied under different labels that describe its different elements.
Dual inheritance theory refers to the two lines of inheritance humans have – genes and culture. Our ability to transcend instincts and become cleverer than our short lifetimes should allow is a result of acquiring accumulated cultural information from our societies – beliefs, values, technologies, institutions, know-how. Culture makes us a new kind of animal.
Culture–gene co-evolution refers to the way genes have adapted to our cultures and cultures to our genes.
The extended evolutionary synthesis refers to the extension of the biological theoretical framework beyond genes into socially transmitted information and environments.
And cultural evolution refers to the way in which companies, countries, and other aspects of our societies change, adapt, and evolve.
Physicists refer to a unifying theory that connects diverse effective theoretical frameworks, such as general relativity – the physics of the very vast – and quantum mechanics – the physics of the extremely tiny – as a theory of everything. I shall refer to this revolutionary body of work that links genes, culture, learning, and the environment as a theory of everyone.
At the heart of this theory of everyone is a quest for the capture and control of energy. All organisms, including humans, harness the energy around them – from the rays of the sun to the movement of the wind and water – to evolve. Humans have evolved an entirely new way of capturing and controlling energy through cultural evolution. But ultimately energy is at the heart of all that we do and all we can do. And when we see energy in this light, we are like the fish finally seeing the water around us. Suddenly our experiences and potential futures come into clearer vision.
All life has been on this quest for energy since its beginning. This quest is so central to all that happens that the way in which energy is captured and controlled, through genetic mutations, new technologies, cooperative norms and institutions, and evolutionary dynamics, is best described as the laws of life.