A Theory of Everyone
Can our collective brain grow fast enough to solve the problems of our future?
There’s a burr on the ass of the theory of evolution. How can we explain the dramatic change in human fortunes in the common era? Or in an even longer view, what if anything does evolution have to do with the major milestones in the deep history of our species: language, agriculture, economy, and governance?
Homo sapiens are a young species (200-300 kya) and not particularly genetically diverse (the genetic isopoint estimated between 5-15 kya). These biologically realities stand in contradistinction with the dramatic changes in social complexity, economic growth, and technology. It is quite clear that our nature cannot be wholly responsible for our success. Rather there is something that emerges from our nature, something we can nurture and transmit, that allows us to continuously power the loom of progress: culture. Or more inclusively, our dual inheritance of genes and culture explains our success. Genes and culture co-evolved to thwart threats to our survival and improve our reproductive capacity (selection) over time. And generation after generation, the positive selection on successful cultural technologies (ideas) resulted in cumulative social learning, our collective brain.
At least this is the clever case that whip-smart Michael Muthukrishna, an associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, makes in his recent book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. Such an argument of course provokes another questions. Why isn’t this obvious to everyone?
Drawing on David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College titled “The Is Water,” Muthukrishna argues that the pervasiveness of culture obscures its power. It is the medium of our lives. We live within it just like fish in water. A Theory of Everyone is an exposé on the human medium. Muthukrishna is concerned about the challenges humanity will face over the next century and thinks precise knowledge of cultural evolution will provide solutions. Here’s this case in his own words:
[T]he 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.
Made clear in the quote above, Muthukrishna identifies two components to his cultural evolution solution: “who we are and how we got here” and “where we go next.” Thus, A Theory of Everyone is divided into these two sections. The first section focus closely on “the human animal.” It provides an illustration in broad strokes of “how energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution have shaped all of life and all human activity.” The central case of part one is the intertwined parameters of our nature and nurture under selection pressure have stoked development. Our ancestors through to today have been shaped by two forms of selection, biological and cultural, where the faster cultural selection has driven the lion’s share of progress. This miraculous trajectory from animal to man to collective brain was dependent on the stable transmission of shared knowledge and technologies (culture) - derived from social and asocial learning - generation after generation. Our collective brain has allowed us to increase the efficiency of energy capture and establish stable and effective cooperation (governance) among unrelated people as human populations have grown. Muthukrishna calls this model the cultural brain hypothesis, which is an extension of Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis. However, Muthukrishna warns that this positive trajectory is under serious threat of unraveling.
The second part of A Theory of Everyone explores the various “barriers standing in our [humanity’s] way”: the energy budget, polarization, corruption, diversity, etc. According to Muthukrishna, the most pressing issue threatening human civilization is the decline of the energy return on investment (EROI), which he argues is fundamental to escaping the ever-present Mathulsian trap via economic growth (innovation) and shared prosperity (cooperation). As EROI declines, the shared pie of material resources grows at a slower rate, becoming almost fixed. When the pie is fixed, interactions move from positive-sum to zero-sum. It becomes harder for humans to innovate to solve problems and cooperate with one another to prevent political unrest or violence. The only viable solution, in Muthukrishna's view, is to catalyze cultural evolution to grow the collective brain and leverage our knowledge of the extended evolutionary synthesis (i.e. the evolution of gene and culture) to engineer political solutions.
What are Muthukrishna’s proposed solutions? Generally, Muthukrishna’s proposals concern ways in which incentive and institutional structures can be reformed to promote scalable innovation and cooperation. However, both these forces are double-edged. Innovation causes disruptions. The printing press is often cited as an instigator of religious upheaval in Europe. Many draw similar conclusions about social media and our politics today. Artificial intelligence is next on the horizon, threatening change at an even greater pace. Additionally, Cooperation is as likely to achieve salutary ends as disastrous ones. Plus, cooperation at smaller scales often counters cooperation at larger scales. Counterproductive cooperation, often be labelled corruption, tends to emerge from our natural tendency to favor friends and family. Of course, we care more for our kin than an amorphous and abstract entity like a nation or the global population. Some of this can and will have to be tolerated, but for global problems, like the tightening energy budget, we’ll need solutions to these dynamics. Muthukrishna discusses ways of allaying cooperative threats like inequality through immigration and tax policy, including a land value tax or an estate tax. He also explore more radical policies like start-up cities or programmable politics.
Fortunately, we can look to our recent history for solutions to constraints on scaling cooperation. In fact, large swaths of humanity have navigated the "blood is thicker than water" dynamic to scale civilization quite successfully. According to Joseph Henrich, one of Muthukrishna’s mentors and academic collaborators, the Catholic Church's "Marriage and Family Program" (MFP) disrupted kinship network across Europe throughout the medieval period, contributing significantly to the social norms and economic development observed in the West.1
In addition to policy proposals, Muthukrishna also offers readers some other useful strategies for innovation. He presents a COMPASS acronym, comprising a series of strategies that individuals or corporations can use to find novel solutions. COMPASS in many ways is an operationalization of Mertonian norms (communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism) with some more specific insight on how actual innovation occurs (recombination and intellectual arbitrage).
COMPASS: Seven Secrets of Innovation
Collective brain thinking (C)
Off the beaten path (O)
Magpie strategy – steal like a magpie with a prepared mind and intellectual arbitrage (M)
Paradox of diversity (P)
Adjacent possibilities (A)
Social beats smart (S)
Sharing is critical (S)
Friendly Criticism of the Theory
Although I admire Muthukrishna’s capacious generalized knowledge and clever ideas, I think this theory of everyone is still a work-in-progress. I worry that our knowledge is not yet at a point where we can reliable and effectively intervene on human arrangements. And this is because of the organic evolutionary path by which slouched toward today’s success. Yes, Muthukrishna is right that there are some heuristics like COMPASS that can catalyze some progress, but this seems like tinkering at the edges rather than a bonafide path to grand solutions. I also welcome greater political experimentation. How much I resonate with Muthukrishna’s specific proposals here varies, but I do think we should dare to be more experimental because stagnation is a serious threat to our continued success.
I also think Muthukrishna’s perspective on the human animal is somewhat overly optimistic. He dismisses both Rousseau’s and Hobbes’ view of human nature, asserting a multitudinous natures influenced by context and incentives. I think this perspective, though right in some ways, isn’t entirely reconciled with our biology and the universal defaults of primate social groups. I favor Hobbes’ view. Competition over scarcity (material and immaterial) and dominance-based hierarchy are not eradicable yet will always instigate upheavals without containment. Of course, Muthukrishna probably understands this better than me, meaning in some ways A Theory of Everything aims to be more dewy-eyed than cold-eyed for pragmatic reasons.
And finally, I would have appreciated a more detailed exploration of dual inheritance theory. This is an unfair request and essentially outside the scope of the book as it veers into a technical space. I personally agree with Muthukrishna and his fellow cultural evolutionaists that civilizational advancements depends on the preservation and accumulation of knowledge and technologies across generational time. I also agree that sometimes things that look like innate capabilities (human intelligence) can have latent elements of cultural loading. These are straightforward, uncontroversial conclusions in my view. I would just have reveled in an accessible tour of the mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission on this cultural component and any known interaction with genetic changes in humans. There are of course great examples of how human cultural practices can shape genetic selection (e.g. animal husbandry and lactase persistence), and many of these cases have been described in other books and are certainly available in the scientific literature. I look forward to exploring these thanks to this book increasing my interest.
In A Theory of Everyone, Muthkrishna tours an awe-inspiringly expansive landscape of ideas. He expertly maps each landmark he finds along the way back into a framework of cultural evolution, his theory of everyone. Although I would like to dig into the formal theories and data to figure out just how much explanatory power this theory has, I think any intellectually curious person would benefit from reading this book. It is hard to imagine that biologically informed studies of cultural evolution won’t be critical to maintaining and expanding human development. Hopefully, our collective future is bright.
This thesis is elucidated in detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World. I strongly recommend it.
I ama fan of cultural evolution as an explanatory tool. I wrote a post summarizing a bit on how cultural evolution works (this uses mostly Boyd and Richerson's formalism).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works
I used this sort of thing to model American economic culture (proxied by inequality) here:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
I got introduced to this topic via Peter Turchin's cliodynamics which forms the framework around which I build my ideas on what is going on in American society.
My own view is we should use some of the policy tools of the past to restore capitalism to what it was originally created for, and then use it to solve big problems like dealing with greenhouse warming.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-going-to-green-energy-can-lead
Thanks for taking the time to write a review, Stetson. If you haven't read Joe Henrich's earlier book, The Secret of Our Success, it has more focus on the details on cultural evolutionary psychology. The textbooks in this space could do with an update. Paul Smaldino has a new text "Modeling Social Behavior" that looks like it covers a lot of this ground.