The Billion Dollar Proposal for Applied Cultural Evolution

This is an essay written on June 8, 2018 when I was the director for the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution I am reposting it as part of the original 3-part series from that time. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Let me begin by acknowledging those who came before me. The runner-up for a 1 billion euro grant from the European Union nearly a decade ago was FuturICT with their vision for modeling complex social systems to avoid (or manage) future economic collapses. So I am not the first person to propose that a massive effort is needed to (a) integrate the social sciences; and (b) do so with motivation to apply what is learned to address extremely difficult problems in the world.

With that said, let me now offer my billion dollar proposal that follows in FuturICT’s footsteps. At the time they were competing for substantial funding, I was working with the International Centre for Earth Simulation to build its billion dollar (over a decade) vision for a high-performance computing facility that models the entire Earth in its full complexity. It is from these projects that I draw inspiration for this essay.

Also, a fact that should cause you to sit up straight. The annual budget for CERN (the high-energy particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland) was roughly 1.2 billion dollars in 2017. So what I am calling for here is what the European Union spends every single year on the search for fundamental particles for all of humanity to instead address the global ecological crisis and safeguard the future of our species.

Think about this for a moment before you continue reading this essay. It really should cause you to pause and reflect about our current priorities as human beings.

What I propose now is a framework for guiding humanity through the sustainability bottleneck as we navigate the planetary-scale systemic collapse outlined in the previous two essays in this series. If you want to hear me talk through this proposal in a recorded talk, I invite you to watch the 90 minute video on YouTube for a version that I presented to the cognitive science department at the University of California, Merced earlier this year. This essay will go into more detail about the vision I’ve been cultivating for a global network of culture design labs that — as argued in previous essays — I no longer believe is possible to build in the world.

Note the paradox of that last sentence. I am not writing this because I believe it will come to be. I am writing it to make clear for others that this is what I was trying to build for the last 18 years. I have good reason to believe it won’t come to pass. But I feel it best honors all of the wonderful people who have supported me over the years to write down what I have been attempting to do this whole time. This is my way of saying “thank you” to all of you. This also gives me the chance to share with you the “grand vision” so you can cut and tweak from it any usable parts for smaller scale social change endeavors that are still fully within the realm of possibility.

Why do I believe cultural evolution is the key to managing the global crisis? Listen to this podcast to hear the words from my own mouth. The summary statement is this: the global ecological crisis is an unintended consequence of “runaway cultural evolution” and this fact has been missed or overlooked by nearly everyone who grapples with challenging issues like mass poverty and global warming (with a few exceptions, people like William Rees and David Orr come to mind).

In brief:

Humanity has gone through three developmental stages throughout its multi-million year history. We had a period where several hominid lines emerged who used tools to alter the selection environments for evolutionary change. This goes back at least to the Oldowan Tools that were used for a million years by our ancestors. We then emerged as a distinctly modern species — homo sapiens — with sophisticated cultural capabilities who lived in hunter-gatherer societies for somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 years. This was followed by the “age of empires” that grew out of the birth of agriculture. In this third stage, there were complex societies that developed increasingly sophisticated management systems, urban environments, and technologies. This third stage came to an end in the last 100 years when we became a planetary species. Now the imperial model of conquest and territorial expansion is a recipe for extinction so we must learn how to wisely manage cultural evolution if we want to avoid this outcome.

At the heart of this historical process was what researchers call gene-culture coevolution and the formation of social niches. Described simply, changes in things like tool use and social behaviors altered the evolutionary trajectory for our ancestors as they gained increasing capacities to alter their environments to serve their own needs. The complex interplay of environmental changes, biological (or genetic) changes, and cultural (tool-based, social learning, cooperative abilities, etc.) all together have given human beings the unprecedented ability to adapt to diverse environments while simultaneously altering these same environments so that they become more conducive for our survival.

Seen in this way the current planetary-scale ecological crisis is nothing more than an extension of what our ancestors have been doing with controlled use of fire, cooperative hunting, accumulation of knowledge about foraging techniques and food processing, and so forth. What has changed is the scale at which these processes now play out in the world. We have ratcheted up our cultural capacities to alter landscapes to the point that we are now crossing planetary boundaries of self-regulation for the Earth Systems that make our complex societies possible.

Without going into more detail right now, I will simply say that we need to learn how to guide the collective evolution of communities and ecosystems if we want to survive and thrive in the future. This is a big statement with serious implications, so I invite you to think about ways to challenge me here. This essay series is not written to be easily digested (it isn’t for “the masses” as it were) but I also attempt to make these arguments concise (while based on a lot more information than will be written down) for ease of reading by everyone who has an interest in these proceedings.

Really? A Billion Dollars?

A great frustration for me has been the smallness of responses to the epically huge challenge of our current predicament. The standard wisdom for social entrepreneurship is to create a “minimum viable product” and bring it to market, then do the hard work of scaling it as it evolves in changing contexts. This approach works great if your goal is to succeed in status quo activities. But when the status quo itself is what threatens humanity with extinction, this simply will not do.

So when I say that we need a billion dollars to put in place the capacities for navigating planetary collapse, I am actually selling myself short. Think of this as my minimum viable product. I don’t think what we create with a billion dollars will be sufficient for all of humanity or the entire planet. What I DO think is that an amount comparable to this might be enough to prototype the creation of a “solutions platform” and deploy it to diverse regions around the world. Then the platform can work its magic of cultural evolution (likely with more funding as it expands and matures) to do what I believe is necessary and sufficient.

For comparison, U.S. taxpayers have invested more than $2 billion over the last 40 years in prevention science research. This has been done mainly through the National Institutes of Health as randomized control trials for a wide array of now-vetted social interventions. Most of these interventions have not been implemented at societal scales for political reasons (mainly that beneficiaries of the status quo are only as wealthy and powerful as they are because they keep the majority impoverished and powerless). The REACH Institute at Arizona State University has observed that 98% of proven family interventions have not been implemented, as one example among many that could be named.

If $2 billion has been invested by U.S. taxpayers (only 5% of the world population) for knowledge that is largely unused at present, think about how small $1 billion is for global humanity to do the rest of the work implementing what is already known but not-yet-implemented. This is what I am proposing to do now.

The Proposal :: A Global Network of Culture Design Labs

If you have read my blog articles in the last three or four years, you will know that I am advocating for building a network of culture design labs — where every location on Earth that social change is being managed or attempted can potentially become a field site for applied cultural evolution research. This essay is nothing more than a clear articulation of what I see as vital for such an agenda to materialize in the world.

First is the timeline. Global change processes (explored in the previous essays) require that we build institutional capacities for managing planetary-scale collapse during a continuing period of intensifying harms. Cultural entrenchment of our current institutions will guarantee that more fossil fuels are burned, more topsoils depleted, more plastics dumped into the World Ocean, and so forth — at least for the next few decades. So what we need to build is the transitional infrastructure that can replace these institutions as they falter and fail due to financial and ecological shocks that are now inevitably part of our collective future.

I have used large infrastructure projects like the construction of power plants and light rail transportation systems to acknowledge that most of them are built on timeframes of a few decades. Some are built in two years and run for thirty. Others are built over 20 years and run for 50 to 100 years. This gave me the heuristic that we need to go through the following sequence:

• Now to 2020 :: Build a prototype for community-scale cultural research facilities that help change practitioners guide their cities or towns toward greater health and resilience. Test it in parallel at three to five locations.
• From 2020 to 2030 :: Expand and continually improve this prototype as a research support platform for monitoring and guiding changes at community scale to roughly 100 cities and towns around the world — with diverse cultural and ecological settings represented in the global network to make the learnings as broadly applicable as possible.
• From 2030 to 2050 :: Use this global network of field sites as it continues to expand and mature to guide the evolution of local, regional, and national institutions toward a configuration of regeneration and principles of living systems. The outcome being that all major institutions on Earth are geared toward healing of bioregions and communities after several more decades of ecological and social decline.

There are a lot of assumptions in this timeline. Many of them contradict the detailed list of challenges written out in the last two essays. For example, all of this must occur as the wealth hoarders continue to co-opt and corrupt governing institutions and while extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires wreak havoc on communities around the world. I don’t think this timeline is particularly achievable — but that won’t stop me from saying that I see it as essential to be met all the same. If we have to move metaphorical mountains (like getting rid of tax havens, which no one sees as possible right now) to do this, then so be it.

As I said earlier, this is not a time for small thinking. So do with this obstacle what you will. I am no longer impressed by small efforts that ignore giant elephants in the room. Either we behave like scientists and take empirical evidence seriously or we place our heads firmly in the sand and ignore the real world. I personally choose to be brave and look defiantly into the ugliness of reality as it exists at present.

If we are to build a global network of culture design labs, we will need to create standard tools for “on-boarding” new communities. This is part of the prototyping that needs to be built in phase one of deployment. What kinds of data must be gathered to establish baselines for future comparisons? How should equity and politics be handled from one cultural setting to another, especially when we acknowledge that they may be quite different from each other? What kinds of learning institutions and research programs must be created or brought into collaboration for this massive mobilization of applied social science to be viable?

These questions (and more) have sketch answers but need a lot more work. Those of you who know me are aware that I only continue to do this writing because I have generous fans who support my family with roughly $800 a month in recurring donations. I am not in a position to guide the systematic review of research methodologies without more substantial funds at my disposal. So I cannot answer questions that I am sure you have about how all of this might work. You will just have to forgive me for being a working-class change maker on this point. Just as the world doesn’t fit the idealizations needed for this proposal to materialize, I too am a flawed human being just like everyone else.

Continuing on, there will need to be data analysts and anthropologists, econometricians and group facilitators, gatherings of people and teach-ins, and a whole lot more. So if we are to build a capacity for community-scale interventions that alter the course of cultural evolution, we will really have our work cut out for us.

One vital piece of the puzzle will be to create a curriculum on applied cultural evolution. A survey of the founding membership for the Cultural Evolution Society (that I was charged to create in the last three years) showed that most academic researchers in this field were partially self-taught in evolutionary studies because their formal education was inadequate to serve their needs. If university students with an interest in evolution have to teach themselves, think of the implications for change practitioners writ large! Thus we will need this proposal to include a major educational component. Core focus on training workshops and textbooks, tutorials and web videos, case studies, and so forth will be vital for the billion dollars to be well spent overall.

What Do I Mean By Field Sites?

Every scientific domain that studies the natural world has some combination of theory-building, data-gathering, modeling and simulation, and experimentation. When Charles Darwin offered his theory of natural selection, it was based on decades of his own observations as a naturalist in the field (combined with specimens gathered from many other naturalists of his day). He needed someone to go into the field and gather relevant data. The same can be said for anthropologists engaged in ethnographic studies; archeologists who dig up cultural artifacts from fallen civilizations, and so forth.

A field site is a location-based research endeavor set up to gather diverse streams of data to track changes in that place with the passage of time. A macro-economic version of this would be the Census Bureau that gathers new sets of demographic data (including location) every decade to track societal changes across long time periods. There is currently a project underway at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to build a network of field sites for anthropological research that explicitly seeks to establish multiple baselines for comparisons across diverse cultural settings. Other endeavors like the Seshat World History Databank are building massive data repositories for conducting quantitative and qualitative studies of all human societies throughout history for which archeological and anthropological data exists. The proposal I outline here would not start from scratch — but rather can be thought of as a massive blood infusion into existing efforts to rapidly grow and develop them for the benefit of humanity.

One particularly important component of this site-based approach is the ubiquity of user data from smart phones and other streaming data sources spanning our communications infrastructure. We have at our disposal a veritable deluge of information that needs to be structured, accessed, and analyzed (with the full complexities of ethics for privacy and ownership worked out) that cannot be done in piecemeal fashion. Letting private companies like Facebook and Google set the developmental trajectories for humanity’s future will not be sufficient for our survival as a species.

Combine such private data sources with existing (and expanded) research networks managed in the service to the public good and you begin to see the potential here. Add that we have tremendous government-sponsored sensor networks and data repositories (akin to those for the Earth Observing System mentioned in the previous essay) and you see how powerfully a place-based approach can be employed to strive for community health and resilience across local to regional — and ultimately global — scales.

What Happens At Each Field Site?

The figure below was created as a slide in my presentation to the University of California. It provides a summary for the major activities that would be needed for a community to learn how to see its own systemic patterns of social change and become increasingly skilled at managing them.

The principal elements for each field site are:

• Research and Evaluation :: At the heart of the field site concept is an active role for researchers who gather data, conduct surveys, set up monitoring systems, and provide analysis about social and ecological change.
• Action Research Framework :: This is fed into a process of “taking action” to learn how the systems are changing, identify barriers and opportunities, and reveal mechanisms of cause and effect. The research is embedded in daily practices of policymakers and managers throughout the community.
• Participatory Design :: Learning is treated as an ecosystem, meaning that community members inform what kinds of research questions are formulated and participate in the design of data gathering, monitoring, and analysis. In the other direction, research supports are used to co-create with community efforts.
• Community Practices and Monitoring Systems :: Just as environmental monitoring is used to support ecological management, the community practitioners who facilitate and guide change will need to draw from sensor networks to gather, analyze, and make comprehensible the emerging patters of change from research supports.
• Shared Vision and Purpose :: All of this is done to increase the health and wellbeing of communities. It will depend upon the cultivation of shared vision and purpose about the identity and values of people living in each community.
• Resilience at Network Level :: While some communities will falter and go away in the midst of global changes, others will achieve local resilience by successfully adapting to their landscapes. The network of field sites — as an ecosystem itself — will be resilient if it has enough locations and connections between communities.

If each field site is built with these elements in place, it will increasingly function as a learning ecosystem where the community itself behaves like an organism. All of the sense making capabilities for intelligently perceiving, assessing, and responding to changes in the environment would be in place. And importantly, there would be a network of these locations across which we can learn which solutions can spread from place to place and what the local constraints are that happen to be specific to the geography and culture of individual communities.

Why Am I The One Proposing This?

It should be striking that a person who (a) lacks the formal academic credentials; and (b) isn’t affiliated with most of the principle research centers in this field; is the one who is writing this proposal. The story here is very revealing for why the vision and action plan laid out here is so vitally important — yet is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

There are four categories of people who might come to the conclusion that a rigorous, fully systemic science of social change needs to be enacted across a global network of field sites. They are (1) the researchers who study cultural evolution; (2) governments who seek to improve the health and wellbeing of their people; (3) more specifically, the funding agencies with large resources for shaping and guiding applied research and education; and (4) foundations and philanthropic investors who want to be as effective as possible with their social impact investments.

The research community is entrenched in the well-known patterns of academia. While individual researchers may have a passion for being of service in this time of urgency and crisis, the incentive structures of universities and research funding agencies keep them focused on activities like attending conferences, writing and publishing peer-review papers, seeking tenure, and increasingly competitive grant-writing to secure funds that continue their work. This is not an environment conducive to visionary leadership and the build-up of cooperation across hundreds of universities around the world.

Governments similarly have competing political parties, agencies, and organizational departments that operate within constrained budgets and have long histories of policy and legal frameworks dictating how their budgets can be spent. For example, a municipal transportation department does not have jurisdiction over considerations related to housing and education (the same being said for each of these divisions). What we see is the fragmentary responses of separate entities at all scales of decision-making that preclude the emergence of geographically distributed networks for collaboration and social learning.

The funding agencies themselves — consider U.S. examples like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and Department of Education — have their own jurisdictions that are intellectual (topic area), geographic (only function at scale of the nation or sub-unit therein), and political (as influenced by appointed leaders and budgets handed to them by policymakers and executives). Here we see the fragmentation of effort akin to looking at the Earth from space and noting the absence of political boundaries. Human systems have broken apart that which must be made seamless if these institutions are to mirror the workings of nature.

Foundations and philanthropic individuals are limited by the politics of their governing boards and ideologies. Thus we do not see the Gates Foundation straying far from the Neoliberal, market-based practices that enabled Bill Gates to amass so much personal wealth, as one example that should not be surprising to anyone. Many of the smaller foundations are run by families of a wealthy individual with founding documents that indicate how the money can be spent (providing educational opportunities for low-income families in the state of Oregon, for example). Thus we do not see foundations that have been set up with ample resources to help humanity guide its way through the planetary ecological crisis.

What this brief and incomplete map of the landscape suggests is that no institutions exist with the purview and resources necessary to enact the what, where, why, and how of large-scale social change management as humanity “grows up” to be a planetary species. In the absence of such an institutional framework, we see things like the largely incapable United Nations that was built around the powerful economic institutions of the post-WWII era. While laudable in their own right, they are grossly inadequate for the 21st Century challenges we must now rally around and deal with as a global population.

And so it has been left to people like me — and I am by no means the only one — who find themselves without institutional affiliations yet build their lives around a call to serve in these unprecedented and dangerous times. This is yet another example of the cultural scaffolding (or lack thereof) that has been a major them of this essay series. Those of us doing this work are broadly unsupported and must create our own paths forward, at considerable personal costs.

Yet here is an opportunity for someone to step up and take this proposal seriously. I am not a member of the formal class of professionals. Perhaps the funding needed will come from a nontraditional or unexpected place? Only time will tell.

How Should One Billion Dollars Be Spent?

The timeline sketched above identifies two critical developmental periods — the prototyping stage that takes place in 2–3 years; followed by a decade of network-building as more communities are brought online by around the year 2030. I see the billion dollars being spent on these crucial activities.

Think of it this way. If a group of researchers, foundations, and change practitioners were to partner with 3–5 communities over a period of three years, it would be possible to build a working prototype for data gathering, considerations of equity and participation, and systems-mapping of ongoing activities that will require greater integration of function. By the end of this prototyping period a lot will be learned that can begin to be applied in other communities.

As each location is a field site for cultural evolution research, there will grow out of this prototyping stage a set of baseline measurements for cross-location and cross-cultural studies. This prototyping stage will involve the formation of a team of researchers that selects and engages with the “first mover” communities that want to become healthier and more resilient.

I see the prototyping stage as something that can be done with $10–20 million (where heavy investments are made in education and establishing core design protocols for institutional research in parallel with the community-scale prototype). The remainder of the funds will come through the upscaling of the network. Consider what happens as more universities get involved (setting up their own research laboratories for the study and collaborations around their own communities). Each new lab will require funding for equipment, data analysis, training, and staff.

As the network grows, so too does the budget. It ratchets up from the seed funds in the prototyping stage to a level of $100 million or more per year across regions around the world. For comparison, this is roughly the amount that the Seattle Childrens Hospital receives to coordinate health-related research across a small network of children’s hospitals in the United States. There will be centralized research hubs for things like open access databases, scientific visualization, modeling and simulation, and so forth. Meetings of various kinds will be needed to coordinate research and share learnings among practitioners.

In other words, this is “big science” like the Human Genome Project or CERN. Its focus is on the adaptive management of cities and landscapes as they interact with bioregions and planetary-scale dynamics. The activities from this network will grow into and feed off of other research activities (like those for Earth Systems Science, urban sustainability, and so forth).

I will not give a more detailed budget outline here because I believe it would best be created in real conversations among funders, researchers, and community practitioners. It would be presumptuous of me as a rogue essay writer to claim that I have this level of expertise for something requiring a great deal of transparency, accountability, and collaboration to have any hope of succeeding. Seed funding is needed to convene a group of people with the compositional expertise to build out this kind of budget and timeline.

In Closing, Why Is This Proposal Likely To Fail?

The two biggest reasons I see this proposal as unviable are not about the availability of funds (though this is clearly a practical concern). Nor are they about the very important concerns about logistics or the state of the science (both of which warrant careful unpacking and likely will reveal major holes in this approach). I want to make clear that I have not written this essay to convince a funder to give me money.

The intention here is merely to offer a glimpse into what I have learned about the possibilities for how we navigate the ecological crisis and that a great deal more can be done than has been attempted so far. With this in mind, it feels incumbent upon me to be honest and say that I don’t think this agenda will ever materialize for dealing with the planetary crisis we are now in.

The first big reason why it will likely fail is that most people don’t want an evidence-based approach to social change. There are good evolutionary arguments for why human psychology inclines us to be protective of our tribes, to engage in social norm enforcement that punishes norm violators, and that the kinds of rational or analytic insights drawn from the scientific method are not conducive to everyday decision-making. My experiences over the last 18 years have shown that very few people are inclined to do what is effective at system levels. Ideology and obscurity of knowledge about how the world really works are deeply entrenched and very unlikely to be resolved.

It is quite natural for human children to behave like scientists with their curiosity about how the world works. Yet it is also quite natural for them to soak up the cultural learnings that have proven beneficial to adult role-models and teachers whom they imitate without needing to learn the mechanisms of cause and effect that make such knowledge valuable. Never before has a human cultural system managed to enact scientific approaches among its members writ large. So while there may be a managerial class of expert practitioners who seek to be rigorous and evidence-based, it is unlikely to come to pass that cities in diverse cultures around the world will strive to become so in these turbulent times that increasingly drive people back into their tribal modes of defense.

The second big reason why this effort will likely fail has to do with the distinctly fragmentary and oppositional nature of the social sciences themselves. It is well known that different intellectual tribes exist within fields like anthropology and sociology — many of them are strongly anti-scientific and prone to engage in petty struggles over power, budgets, and prestige within their academic fields.

I have observed firsthand how unmotivated many of these scholars are to seek consilience and work together to achieve larger goals. Many among them are like the progressive activists who abhor power of all kinds so they refuse to participate in collaborations that might have the power to be impactful on the very same issues that drove them to their activism. It is this pernicious dynamic of self-defeat that plagues the social sciences today.

I have read eloquent and convincing accounts (and made a few written attempts myself) to convey that a grand synthesis of biology, the social sciences, and humanities is something to strive for and that can be achieved in this century. My secret hope is that a global effort to safeguard humanity finally wakes up these petty in-fighters from their juvenile spitting contests and gets them to finally behave like adults. — or more likely, a different community emerges that simply ignores and bypasses them. We are on the edge of a cascading Mass Extinction Event after all. This is not a time for throwing tomatoes at the intellectual gods of one’s opposing intellectual camp.

It is with observations like these that I believe this proposal will never see the light of day. Yet I write it in earnest now because it is a gift seed that has grown within me throughout my life. It must be born for me to continue living — just as a woman’s body must push a baby through the final expulsion to ensure survival for mother and child. As painful as it is for me to write out my life’s vision as a failed proposal, here it is in all its messiness just the same.

My intention in writing this essay is to show how powerful and useful an evidence-based approach can be for guiding social change in its many forms. While I have become convinced that there will not be a planetary mobilization effort — for the reasons listed here and others that I may share in future essays — I still believe this perspective to be of potential value for everyone who is working to increase health and resilience in their communities regardless of what happens at the planetary scale.

You may find insights that help you improve your local food system, make modest progress with local schools, envision new programs at your local university, and so forth. None of these things require a billion dollars to achieve. The proposal presented here is for a grand vision that is unlikely to materialize. Perhaps what is best to do in spite of this is to enact a million humble visions without coordination and sophisticated scientific knowledge (where institutional capacities for such things are lacking).

How will you become a practitioner of applied cultural evolution? What kinds of culture design laboratories will you build? Are you ready to do this work in a time of planetary crisis regardless of what is no longer possible? I leave this proposal in your capable hands.

Onward, fellow humans.

Joe Brewer is co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth. If you would like to get involved in this work, consider becoming a member. Also, you can support me on Patreon if you feel inspired to do so.