Essay Concerning The Evolutionary Future of Humanity: Draft Book Chapter Summaries

The book (name and style TBD) is part science journalism, part new synthesis, part manifesto. Relevant books / authors that you might have read or heard of that are touchstones for this one:

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari

- The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (no one remembers this guy but it’s the closest to my own work)

- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Taleb

- Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene

- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock

- Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, — Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

- The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O Wilson

Academically the book could be said to be the work of an “amateur” (in the Victorian sense) at the cross-roads between evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, political science, psychotherapy, sociology, and digital technology. I’ve worked slowly on these ideas for many years. My bibliographic research to date is 70+ books spanning these disciplines studied over last 10 years, supplemented with 15 years working as a technical practitioner of adjacent domains in consumer digital social media (messaging, dating, social networking, social gaming, social live video streaming) and the applied managerial and organizational sciences.

How will it be marketed? It will be marketed in tandem with a social app / game that I’m building. The game is an applied experimental accompaniment to the book.

Chapter 1: The Tribal Moral Structure of Human Nature

What is our human nature? The human social self is constructed by differentiating Myself, Us, and Them. Humans have only three basic types of social relation: myself (the individual/ego), treating people as family or tribe, or treating them as strangers/others/enemies. This is baked into our evolution as a species, and is proven by many fun social psychology experiments and modern neuroscience’s research into empathy response and role of neurohormones such as oxytocin. How the ‘Other’ is classified turns out to be the biggest unconscious cognitive bias of all about other people. Nothing comes close. It’s also almost immune to reason, as we will see. But what is even less well known is that what we treat AS myself and family can expand. Unlike maybe all other species on the planet, our phenotype is plastic. It goes beyond gene and individual to plasticity at the cultural group level and can become deep enough to emerge as a new unit of natural selection itself (more later). Such is the gene/culture biodiversity of forms of life of humans that it is more correct to think of homo sapiens as embodying a taxonomic class (mammals, fish, reptiles) rather than a species. The self is made up of multiple overlapping of these individual and group identities. There is no single self. Social systems and technologies that limit self-expression of any of the three produce depression and mental illness symptoms.

Chapter 2: The Individual’s Experience of Groups

Contrary to prevalent 20th century reductive intellectual traditions, when a group’s internal processes reach a tipping point of reciprocity, it can emerge as a new type of being and experience itself and operate as a new new individual, a new higher-order level of self, a transcendent order of complexity. The group becomes an individual. And far from an abnegation of self, that experience is both sublime and beatific and expands the degrees of freedom and capability of the whole. Each step is a mini enlightenment producing what Durkheim called “collective effervescence”. It’s what is really meant by expanding consciousness. It is often the very meaning of life to keep overcoming ourselves to accomplishing ever higher orders of social complexity. This is the realm of the sacred, love, art, music, dance, myth, and religion, and also, when it goes wrong, of certain mental illnesses. And the first thing this new individual wants to do is increase its power by forming groups of individuals like itself.

Chapter 3: Unselfish Evolution

This new emergent level of individuation is also a new unit of natural selection, because it meets Darwin’s basic criteria: self propagates through cultural generations with inherited variation (creativity) that confer better or worse propagation within groups and between groups. This chapter will dwell on the huge resistance in the academic establishment to seeing anything other than genes as the unit of selection, but this resistance is illogical and founded on an ideology of individualism that Darwin never shared. The reader will be caught up on many bodies of recent research that debunk the selfish gene as the primary subject of evolution.

Chapter 4: The Evolution of Individuals from Groups

We go deeper and explore endosymbiosis (evolution of new organisms through cooperative integration of lower lifeforms) as a biological and cultural phenomena, and as the expected outcome of non-zero sum game theory. On a cultural level this development from individuals to groups to higher-order individuals is analogous to the process of endosymbiosis in biology (which drives evolution of all lower life forms, such as fungi and bacteria in the lichen, or purple bacteria in the evolution of mitochondria [animal cell batteries], or chloroplasts from cyanobacteria [plant cell batteries]). Endosymbiosis is how we evolved from unicellular to multicellular life. It’s the field of evolutionary biology, altruism, cooperation research, and multi-level group selection in the social and biological sciences. There is huge resistance in the academic establishment at seeing social group formation as a form of endosymbiosis, but this is again a symptom of an unfounded ideology of individualism that pervades the social sciences. It’s helpful to see beyond modern ‘methodological individualism’ by understanding it as a stage of evolution and to see it from both a phylogenic (evolution of species) and ontogenic (development of the organism from conception to adulthood) perspectives.

Lastly, we will use these perspectives to make the jump to seeing corporations as superorganisms taking over the Earth.

Chapter 5: Crossing the Threshold of the Individual as a Response to the Limits of Growth

How do we put down our egos to take up a higher cause? It’s paradoxical. Of particular interest to this book, and the focus of the app/game I am building that is an accompaniment to the book, is the cultural process of higher-order individuation and group formation as a response to the limits of growth, which I (taking after many such as Jospeh Campbell and Jung) identify as embodied by heroism and religious conversion. This is why I have devoted myself for over a decade to trying to figure out how to create technology that promotes self-transformation. As a personal side-note, I tried many times over many years in my 20s to follow traditional intellectual and meditative paths to personal development and none of them really worked for me. I have always been drawn to a more literal path of the hero, and based on what we consume in our culture, I think most people are too. But how do we apply heroism every day, beyond the realm of literature, games, fantasy? How do we reclaim our souls in this secular age?

Chapter 6: Group Conversion and The Futility of Reasoning Beyond Morality

Despite the large amount of speech devoted to changing the minds of people who differ among themselves on moral, religious, political, tribal grounds, there is very little evidence that it does anything to change anyone’s minds; in fact, encouraging does the opposite. Reasoning didn’t evolve for the purpose converting one group to another, but for amplifying the executive functioning and reinforcing solidarity within a group. This chapter will show how it is possible for people to use reasoning to solve difficult problems in one domain of life, and yet seem to not even notice the gaping holes in their beliefs by the same principles in other areas of their life. We’re immune to reasoning across moral boundaries. Reasoning is usually deployed after the fact of some moral revolution to show how all the differences we thought were important are meaningless. This is the origin of our ability to make excuses, which is a truer origin for the type reasoning we’re talking about here than, say, tool building. History books tend to reverse the order and attribute the social to change to some philosophy, but as far as what reasons are chosen it’s usually any port in a storm.

There are only two ways to change a righteous mind from a position of moral certainty: at the group level by getting it to see that it’s really hurting Us, usually by shaming the group to its elders, parents, children or social groups that occupy that role (it can even be a country, e.g. China’s feelings about itself in the 18th century after its practices of female foot binding were decried in the court of international press and opinion that it wanted to be respected by; or at the individual level by come at it as an outsider in it’s hour of need and provide aid.

Chapter 7: The Evolutionary Directive of Heroism

In this controversial chapter, I show how heroism is an expression of the oldest and most universal ethical principle in human culture: the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I go on to show how the Golden Rule goes beyond a moral principle to an evolutionary directive that produces ingroup-outgroup synthesis that knits social groups together in a web of mutual aid. (Christianity’s own propagation has depended on saving people who are outgroups in their own society — the poor, sinners; or outgroups of Christian society — missionary work. The mafia and cults work the same way.) Heroism produces social conversion to new group memberships. Social group identity, expansion of boundaries between Myself, Us, and Them, and the idea of Enlightenment, and evolutionary propagation of the self are deeply linked concepts and phenomena.

Chapter 8: The Thermodynamic Origins of Evolution

The self’s measure of Propagation (propagation is a better term than ‘survival’ when we’re talking about the changing unit of natural selection — for we beg the question of ‘who’ is surviving) is metabolic, it is thermodynamic and it’s why nature always evolves the biggest animals and largest ecosystems that the environment supports. A human on a bicycle uses up 100W of energy per day or about 2,500 calories. A blue whale 15kW. A human living well in NYC, 25kW. Thermodynamics drives evolution. We are “dissipative structures“ in the language of chemistry, driven by geothermal and solar and chemical energy. The periodic table is a table of creation through thermodynamic dissipation; each element is the nuclear waste product of the previous element. Our solar system is the by-product of the formation of a third-generation sun. Life is a scaling function for negative entropy, negentropy. Metabolic waste is regenerative. Over the time scale of the Earth, life is the evolutionary response to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. We introduce the Metabolic Theory of Ecology. Many of our sustainability problems as species are because our technologies are wildly inefficient and our waste is unregenerative and our biologically limited sense of self leads us to an imbalance of propagation and consumption of physical individuals over scaling individuals to groups and beyond. The will to power, our ambition, cannot be stifled nor need it be to reach a planetary ecological maxima. This is a radically different paradigm to traditional thinking of the problem in terms of limits of growth, which again and rather ironically has its roots in a pervasive, counter-productive ‘methodological individualism’. When Nature hits a limit of growth of the individual, it scales the individual to the group level, exhibiting the universal the three-quarters power law fractal scaling of metabolic rates discovered by physicists recently. Virtual reality will turn out to be a key scaling technology.

Chapter 9: Scaling Humans to a Planetary Self as Solution to Limits Of Individual Growth

In which we introduce Finite Time Singularities, Malthus, and Innovation. The singularity of that evolutionary process (asymptote of the macro growth curve) is ever larger human group units, that include real as well as virtual cities, moving towards a Gaian human race operating as an integrated network in a planetary biosphere. This process may take hundreds or thousands of years and expand off planet. But there is no greater limit to ourselves than our own deaths. The process of evolving from ourselves to our groups to new self that transcends our own deaths is spiritual quest of every human lifetime.

Chapter 10: The Future is Humanist

Is this transhumanist? No. Transhumanism is associated with extremist technologists such as Ray Kurtweil and his discredited Singularity University, which he co-founded with Google (since withdrawn funding due to scandal). The idea of Singularity goes at least as far back as the Christian mystic/anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin 100 years ago, which he called the Omega Point, which couldn’t be more different than the “Man as prosthetic God” (Freud) vision of most transhumanists. The book with debunk the cult of crypto-fascist individualism represented by most tech futurists and return technology to the realm of membranes doing work towards a global organism formed out of human individuals reaching their full evolutionary potential. In the language of evolutionary biology, humanity becomes a conglomeration of planetary endosymbionts, entrained in the dance of creation. It’s a version ultimately no different from what the Jesuit priest, Christian mystic, and anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin said “ Mankind, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of individuals and peoples, the paradoxical conciliation of the element with the whole, and of unity with multitude — all these are called Utopian, and yet they are biologically necessary.” As a personal note to the reader, the author considers himself continuing Teilhard de Chardin’s work.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S.Eliot, 1955