Applied Big History Ch 7 Big Lollapalooza

Abstract

Normal evolution would not have allowed this exponential growth
to go on for long. Malthus and Darwin forbade it, but the laws of
physics allowed it. Between the limits of natural selection and the
possibilities of physics was human ingenuity applied with a whole heap of energy and matter. Humans have cheated the logic of evolution, at least for the time being. How did we accomplish this feat and how might we continue to do so?

Full text

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Applied Big History
A Guide for Entrepreneurs, Investors,
and Other Living Things
William Grassie

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© 2018 William Grassie
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1719853071
ISBN-10: 171985307X
Version 1.2
Please send corrections, comments, and feedback to
grassie@metanexus.net
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents!..............................................................................!i!
Foreword by Mitch Julis!...............................................................!iv!
Chapter 1: Thriving in a Complex World!...............................!1!
Outperforming the Market .................................................. 3
Caveat Emptor .................................................................... 5
Applied Big History ............................................................ 8
Wikipedia ......................................................................... 10
Chapter 2: The Great Matrix of Being!..................................!13!
Size ................................................................................... 14
Time ................................................................................. 16
Matter ............................................................................... 18
Energetics ......................................................................... 19
Electromagnetism ............................................................. 23
Sound ............................................................................... 25
Information-Ingenuity ....................................................... 25
Sentience-Consciousness .................................................. 30
Culturally Constructed Hierarchies ................................... 31
Emergent Complexity ....................................................... 32
A Multi-Dimensional Matrix ............................................. 35
Chapter 3: The Economy of a Single Cell!.............................!39!
The Central Bank of Chemistry ......................................... 40
The Currency of Life ........................................................ 44
The Business Models of Life ............................................. 45
The First Agricultural Revolution ..................................... 47
The First Industrial Revolution ......................................... 48
The Whole Economy of Nature ......................................... 51
Chapter 4: Complexity Economics!..........................................!53!
“All Hell Broke Loose” ..................................................... 53
Big Money ........................................................................ 59
Short- and Long-Term Oscillations ................................... 63

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Productivity Growth ......................................................... 67
Scaling Effects .................................................................. 69
Complex Adaptive Systems .............................................. 71
Complicated and Complex Systems .................................. 73
Fluid Dynamics of Markets ............................................... 75
Natural and Economic Selection ....................................... 77
Chapter 5: Death and Taxes!.....................................................!83!
Energy Density Flow ........................................................ 85
Goldilocks Gradients ........................................................ 88
Creative Destruction ......................................................... 89
Energy Regimes................................................................ 90
Instability and Resilience .................................................. 93
Chapter 6: Your Hunter-Gatherer Brain!.............................!95!
A Really Great Ape .......................................................... 96
The Great Cooperators ...................................................... 98
What We Don’t Know .................................................... 100
Survival .......................................................................... 100
Reproduction .................................................................. 104
Sex-Gender Differences .................................................. 110
The Cognitive Revolution ............................................... 113
Stone-Age Brains ............................................................ 116
Divided Self.................................................................... 118
System 1 and System 2 ................................................... 121
Luck of the Genes ........................................................... 125
Our Inner Demons .......................................................... 127
Our Better Angels ........................................................... 128
Natural Values, Natural Morality .................................... 130
Caveats and Cautions ...................................................... 133
Chapter 7: The Big Lollapalooza!..........................................!137!
Welcome to the Anthropocene ........................................ 137
The Secret of Our Success .............................................. 141
Collective Learning ........................................................ 142
Network Effects .............................................................. 144
Imaginary Worlds and Artificial Instincts ....................... 145
Energy Capture ............................................................... 147

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Information-Ingenuity Capture ........................................ 149
Gene-Culture Coevolution of Collective Brains .............. 152
Chapter 8: Existential Challenges!........................................!155!
Anthropogenic Existential Challenges: ............................ 155
Natural Existential Challenges: ....................................... 155
Peak Humanity ............................................................... 156
Climates Change ............................................................. 159
Useless Arithmetic .......................................................... 162
The Next Leap in Energy-Matter-Ingenuity ..................... 169
Chapter 9: The Bottom Line!..................................................!173!
Creating and Capturing Value ......................................... 174
Parasites or Symbionts .................................................... 175
Species of Specialization................................................. 177
Little Bets, Big Wins....................................................... 178
Picking Winners ............................................................. 179
Diversification ................................................................ 181
The Alphas and the Rest of Us ........................................ 183
Teams Work ................................................................... 185
Inventing the Future ........................................................ 186
Bad Things Happen to Good Investors ............................ 190
Disaster Preparedness ..................................................... 191
Investing in Values ......................................................... 192
Fundamental Values........................................................ 193
Impact Investing ............................................................. 194
Creating a Little Big History ........................................... 195
Our Big Future ................................................................ 196
The Bottom Line ............................................................. 197
Acknowledgments!.......................................................................!199!
About the Author!........................................................................!203!
Bibliography!.................................................................................!205!

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Chapter 7:
The Big Lollapalooza
“Lollapalooza” is a fanciful word of unknown origins dating back to
the 1890s. The term refers to “something or someone extraordinary, an
outstanding example.” Charles Munger uses the term “lollapalooza
effect” to refer to occasions when multiple biases align in the same
direction at the same time for good or for bad. Munger understands the
success of Berkshire Hathaway to be a “confluence of factors in the
same direction.”
198
In the context of Big History, the last hundred years
have been a really big lollapalooza with positive and negative
consequences.
Our task is to grok the transformations of the last century, to gain a
much- needed sense of perspective and proportion in assessing a
current context and future possibilities. We have been through an
extraordinary period of rapid growth in human populations and
consumption patterns. The new developments have been big, multiple,
and remarkable—fossil fuels, electricity, transportation,
communications, construction, agriculture, public health, technology,
education, finance, management, travel, recreation, entertainment, arts,
and culture. Our lives are vastly different than a hundred years ago, let
alone a thousand or ten thousand years ago.
Normal evolution would not have allowed this exponential growth
to go on for long. Malthus and Darwin forbade it, but the laws of
physics allowed it. Between the limits of natural selection and the
possibilities of physics was human ingenuity applied with a whole heap
of energy and matter. Humans have cheated the logic of evolution, at
least for the time being. How did we accomplish this feat and how
might we continue to do so?
Welcome to the Anthropocene
“Anthropocene” is the term used to label the most recent
geological epoch, an era in which human activities begin to
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198
As quoted in Tren Griffin, Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015).

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dramatically impact Earth systems.
199
There is some debate about when
this era began. Some say it began recently, with the creation of
transuranic elements and plastics, both of which will leave traces over
geological time scales. Others say it began with industrialization and
the widespread use of fossil fuels, which will also leave geological
traces in the deep time of our planet. Still others say that the
Anthropocene began with the advent of agriculture or even with the
controlled use of fire, both of which had a dramatic impact on regional
ecosystems.
The exact dating of the Anthropocene is not really the point. The
challenge lies in recognizing the dramatic quantitative and qualitative
changes throughout human history that have transformed this planet.
The human impact becomes particularly steep in the decades after
World War Two, a period that is aptly referred to as “the Great
Acceleration.”
200
Human population growth is one dramatic indicator
of this surge. By 1950, the population of the world was approximately
2.5 billion people. Today, the population is 7.3 billion. In not quite
seven decades, a single lifetime, the population has increased almost
threefold.
This increase in numbers included enormous improvements in
longevity and quality of life. This was mostly accomplished through
clean water, better sanitation, vaccinations, antibiotics, and
refrigeration. We also learned how to produce and distribute more food
for this rapidly expanding population. The possibilities today for travel,
education, healthcare, recreation, entertainment, comfort, food, and
culture far exceed any luxuries that rulers and royalty of the past might
have enjoyed.
Let’s look at some of statistics on the Great Acceleration compiled
in 2014 by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme:
• Real Global GDP, measured in constant 2005 dollars,
increased from US$4.4 trillion dollars in 1945 to US$50.1
trillion in 2010. This is an elevenfold increase.
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199
J. Zalasiewicz and et.al., "Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?," GSA Today 18, no. 2
(2008).
200
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, "Global Change," Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences,
http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html.

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• World Primary Energy Consumption increased from 90.8
exajoules in 1945 to 533.4 exajoules in 2008. This is 5.8-fold
increase.
• Fertilizer consumption increased from 7.2 million tons in
1945 to 171.5 million tons in 2010. This is a 23.8-fold
increase.
• Water consumption (irrigation, livestock, domestic,
manufacturing, and electricity water withdrawals) increased
from 1.14 thousand km3 in 1945 to 3.87 thousand km3. This
is a 3.4-fold increase.
• Global Paper Production increased from 74.15 million tons in
1960 to 398.77 million tons in 2010. This is a 5.3-fold
increase.
• Motor Vehicles increased from 177 million vehicles in 1966
to 1,281 million vehicles in 2009. This is a 7.2-fold increase.
• The number of Large Dams increased from 5,106 large dams
in 1945 to 31,635 large dams in 2010. This is a 6.2-fold
increase.
• Global tourism increased from 25.3 million arrivals in 1950
to 939.9 million arrivals in 2010. This is a 37-fold increase.
• Telephones increased from 713,000 landlines in 1950 to 6.48
billion mobile and landlines in 2010. This is an increase of
9,056-fold.
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Let’s add to these statistics with some data from the UN Food and
Agricultural Organization:
• Marine Fish Catch increased from 14 million tons in 1950 to
64 million tons in 2010. This is a 4.5-fold increase.

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• Cattle stocks grew from 942 million head in 1961 to 1,453
million head in 2010. This is a modest 50 percent increase.
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• Pig stocks grew from 406 million in 1961 to 974 million in
2010. This is a 2.3-fold increase.
• Chicken stocks grew from 3.9 billion birds in 1961 to 20.1
billion in 2010. This is a 5.1-fold increase.
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All of this activity—human production and consumption—meant
increased human-generated entropy. The energy consumed and
dissipated also drives a manifold increase in pollution and the
degradation of local bioregions.
Soil erosion, for instance, carries away 75 billion tons of topsoil
and degrades 10 million hectares every year.
203
Erosion is caused by
wind, rain, and gravity. Plowed farmland and overgrazed pastures are
especially vulnerable. Erosion results in clogged and polluted
waterways, increased flooding, and ultimately the destruction of
previously arable land.
Erosion is only one aspect of the larger problem of soil
degradation, which occurs also through the depletion of organic
material and essential minerals, the buildup of salt from prolonged
irrigation, and compaction of soil from heavy farm machinery. Soil
erosion and degradation significantly reduce crop yields and, along
with other human pollution, are dramatically increasing nitrogen-fed
eutrophication of rivers, lakes, estuaries, and costal zones around the
world.
204205
Soil is not dirt. It is a living organism, a thin blanket of life on the
surface of land that sustains other plant and animal life. A handful of
soil contains billions of microorganisms feeding off plant and animal
decay, even as they provide nutrients for continued plant growth.
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201
FAOstats , "Live Animals Data Set," Food and Agricultural Organization o f the United Nations,
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QA.
202
Wendy Broadgate et al., "The Great Acceleration Data,"
http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html.
203
David Pimentel and Michael Burgess, "Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production," Agriculture
3, no. 3 (2013).
204
FAO, "Soils Are Endangered, but the Degradation Can Be Rolled Back," Food and Agricultural
Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/357059/icode/.
205
H Eswaran, R. Lal, and P.F. Reich, "Land Degradation: An Overview," USDA Natural
Resources Conservation Service,
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/use/?cid=nrcs142p2_054028.

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Everywhere we look on earth, we encounter microbiomes that are the
foundational scaffolding for all plant and animal life.
You will recall that it is possible to use DNA to encode binary
information and that a kilogram of DNA could store all of the digital
information in the world.
206
Think of a kilogram of living topsoil as
something approaching that same complexity. Soil contains staggering
quantities of living, organized information.
It takes a long-time to build up topsoil. The last ice age stripped
the topsoil down to the bedrock for much of the Northern Hemisphere,
so most of the topsoil in these previously glaciated regions has
accumulated over the last 20,000 years. Throughout the history of
agriculture, soil erosion and degradation far exceeded the rate of
replenishment. Humanity may soon find itself bereft of suitable
agricultural land, even as we struggle to grow enough to feed the
expanding population.
The Big Lollapalooza, the Anthropocene, the Great
Acceleration—however we demarcate this period in recent history—is
noteworthy also as a period of remarkable economic growth. Between
1950 and today, it would have been hard not to make money on long-
term investments during a period in which economies around the world
rapidly expanded. Investors, of course, want to know if they can expect
continued economic growth and in what sectors, entities, and regions.
In order to anticipate future scenarios, we need to better
understand how we got to this moment in the cultural evolution of our
species and the natural history of our planet. How can we explain our
species’ rapid rise? How did we cheat the logic of Malthus and Darwin
by growing exponentially in numbers and consumption?
The Secret of Our Success
In!the!last!chapter!we!already!explored!some!of!the!factors!in!
human!evolution!that!propelled!us!to!the!heights!of!complexity!
through!the!mastery!of!dense!and!intense!flows!of!energy,!matter,!
and!ingenuity.!Big!Historians!would!agree!that!the!foundation!of!
our!success!story!is!our!unique!capacity!to!create!and!use!symbolic!
language.!Language!enabled!the!possibility!of!speaking!about!and!
coordinating!actions!around!the!objective!world—plants,!animals,!
skills,!relationships,!threats,!and!opportunities—and!describing!
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historical!and!future!outcomes.!This!was!an!evolutionary!
advantage.!That!being!said,!language!also!gave!rise!to!complex!
social!relations.!Humans!are!great!cooperators,!even!as!we!
compete!with!each!other.!A!deeper!look!at!several!different,!though!
complementary,!interpretations!of!the!secret!to!our!recent!success!
helps!to!better!understand!how!we!came!to!our!current!
circumstances.!This!brief!overview!tracks!and!combines!the!
analyses!of!several!different!Big!Historians!under!the!following!
headings:!
• Collective Learning
• Network Effects
• Imaginary Worlds and Artificial Instincts
• Energy-Matter Capture
• Information-Ingenuity Capture
• Gene-Culture Coevolution of Collective Brains
Collective Learning
No other species excels in the use of symbolic languages, through
which we are able to communicate and accumulate knowledge and
skills from one generation to the next. We are the beneficiaries of long
lineages of discoveries, inventions, and skills acquired and passed
down by our ancestors over tens of thousands of years. We build upon
the achievements of our contemporaries and previous generations.
The real story of evolution is as much about cooperation as it is
about competition.
207
Humans are the most amazing cooperators, and
collective learning is the prime example thereof. Because of collective
learning, cultural evolution is a win-win over the long arc of human
history, even though economic markets, ethnic conflicts, class struggle,
and political disputes frequently involve win-lose tradeoffs.
208
Learning
is how we survive, thrive, and, ultimately, reproduce our genes and our
cultures.
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207
Lynn Margulis, "Symbiogenesis and Symbioticism," in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary
Innovation, ed. Lynn Margulis and R. Fester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Symbiotic
Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic, 1998); Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel,
Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution
(Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2009).
208
Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage, 2001).

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Collective learning is why “all hell breaks loose” during the Great
Acceleration of the past century.
209
Collective learning is one of the
main engines of economic growth.
210
You and I didn’t invent
agriculture, metallurgy, or arithmetic. We didn’t invent the wheel or the
automobile, the light bulb or the phonograph, the smartphone or the
GPS satellites. The list goes on and on. But here it all is, our amazing
portfolio of knowledge and know-how that grows with compounded
interest. Every culture, every domesticated plant and animal, every
work of literature and art, every technology, every artifact, every
language, including these words, is the common inheritance of
humanity. In economic terms, collective learning is a positive
externality—the more people who use the resource, the more value it
generates.
In his book Maps of Time, David Christian points to collective
learning as the key to the rapid rise of our species. Collective learning
begins with language and accelerates with the rise of agriculture and
ever-larger permanent settlements. Christian shows how collective
learning became a positive feedback loop in human cultural evolution.
He writes:
First, with the appearance of cities and states, human societies
became more diverse than ever before. And diversity itself was a
powerful motor of collective learning, for it increased the
ecological, technological, and organizational possibilities
available to different communities, as well as the potential
synergies of combining these technologies in new ways. But states
also increased the scale of human interactions. Because they were
so much larger than all earlier human communities, their powerful
gravitational fields sucked in resources, people, and ideas from
great distances. By doing so, agrarian civilizations created vast
new networks of exchange. These count as the era’s second main
structural feature. Networks of exchange that were more
extensive, more varied, and more dynamic than those of any
earlier era increased both the scale and variety and the potential
synergies of collective learning.
211
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Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of We alth: Evolutio n, Complexity , and the Radical Remaking of
Economics (Cambridge Harvard Business Press, 2006).
210
David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (New
York: Norton, 2006).
211
Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 284.

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The vast majority of the knowledge and know-how that runs our
twenty-first-century global economy has been passed on by previous
generations, added to, accumulated, and distributed laterally across
geographies.
212
And as the transfer of information got cheaper, first
with the printing press and later with the internet, collective learning
became practically free for the taking. The problem is that there is so
damn much of it. Technical proficiencies often require decades of
specialized training to master.
Network Effects
In their book The Human Web, historian William McNeill and his
son J. R. McNeill, also a historian, take a systems approach to
explaining the rapid rise of our species. Webs are sets of connections
linking people together. These connections take many forms: kinship,
friendship, cooperation, rivalry, enmity, and chance encounters. They
involve common worship, economic exchange, ecological exchange,
political cooperation, and military competition. These networks always
involve the communication and use of information, and with it the
transfer of useful technologies, crops, goods, ideas, and diseases. The
authors’ systems approach to world history allows them to make a
number of important observations about large patterns in cultural
evolution:
(1) All webs involve cooperation and competition, both of which
are sustained by communication. This can be seen already in hunter-
gatherer societies, where small bands of humans transmitted local
knowledge about edible plants and ecologies, organized cooperative
hunting of large game, and developed exogamous marriages with
neighboring tribes, as well as cooperative aggression and defense
against competing groups of humans.
(2) Those groups that achieve more efficient communication and
cooperation improve their competitive advantages and survival
prospects. Cooperating groups tend to grow and in so doing also begin
to lose internal cohesion, often leading to collapse and succession. For
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Science is a quintessential e xample of collective learning, because it is so obviously cumulative
and international. As the Pakistani Nobel Physics Laureate Abdus Salam said, "Scientific thought
and its creation is the common and shared heritage of mankind."

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instance, larger and larger metropolitan webs grew over the past 6,000
years because urban cultures had (a) economic advantages via
specialization of labor and exchange, (b) military advantages via larger,
well-equipped warriors with better technology, and (c) epidemiological
advantages via frequent exposure to a wider array of diseases that built
up their immunities over many generations.
(3) Metropolitan webs tended to expand and grow in scale because
of improved communication and transportation technologies. This can
be seen today in the development of modern communication, air travel,
and global capitalism. The worldwide cosmopolitan web has left no
part of the world untouched.
(4) Human communication, cooperation, and competition also
shape the Earth’s history, not just human history, beginning with the
deliberate use of fire, coordinated hunting of large animals, and the
domestication of plants and animals. This process of changing the
ecologies of the world has accelerated dramatically in the past centuries
through the harnessing of more and more of the earth’s energy and
material flows for our human purposes, leading to a vast expansion of
the human population and a great remaking of the geology and the
biosphere.
The McNeills conclude by calling for another widening of the
human web, uniting humans more intimately and less destructively
with nature and other cultures.
213
Imaginary Worlds and Artificial Instincts
Yuval Harari, like others, sees language as the key to our
becoming world- dominating super-cooperators. The miracle of human
language, however, is not just about accumulating knowledge and
know-how. Language also enabled the possibility of speaking about
fictional worlds. Ancient cave paintings and petroglyphs from around
the world suggest that by 40,000 years ago, we were not only budding
artists, but also storytellers. Storytelling is how we scaled up our
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213
J. Robert McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World
History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

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cooperative behavior. The key to our success is as much collective
fiction making as it is collective learning.
Small groups of intimate humans can cooperate without
hierarchies, but beyond this low threshold, cooperation requires a group
fiction to maintain social order and cohesion. Here, language makes
possible the rapid rise of our species. For Harari, it is precisely our
ability to create social fictions and imaginary worlds that allowed us to
scale cooperation from tens to thousands, to millions, and to now
billions of people in our global civilization:
Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a
medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in
common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. .
. . [N]one of these things exists outside the stories that people
invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no
nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice
outside the common imagination of human beings.
214
Harari calls these “networks of artificial instincts.”
215
Outside of
bacteria, we are the only species that can “flexibly cooperate” in large
numbers because we can create imagined realities and shared taken-for-
granted rules. Religion, human rights, ethnicities, nations, and even
languages are all fictional. Money is perhaps the most universal and
important fiction of all. In the twenty-first-century, in the wake of the
scientific revolution and the Great Acceleration of the past century,
human fictional realities are now changing the objective realities of
entire ecosystems and our own future evolution.
“[T]he way people cooperate [and compete] can be altered by
changing the myths,” writes Harari. “Under the right circumstances
myths can change rapidly.”
216
How might the new narrative of Big
History alter our many competing myths in order to promote a
healthier, safer, and more compassionate world? What are the right
circumstances for rapid change? How might these be strategically
advanced? These are some of the big questions that led me to the
philosophical and social scientific study of religion. We still have a
long way to go in our exploration of the new narrative of Big History
before we can productively begin to answer those questions.
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214
Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 464-71.
215
Ibid., Kindle 2515.
216
Ibid., Kindle 551.

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Energy Capture
In his book Big History and the Future of Humanity,
anthropologist Fred Spier frames the rapid rise of our species as a case
of energy capture. The rise of agriculture, for instance, is
“concentrating useful bio-solar collectors (plants) and bio-energy
converters (animals) within certain areas to improve the conversion of
solar energy into forms of bio-energy that were helpful for maintaining
or improving human complexity.”
217
As we have already discussed, the flow of energy is essential for
maintaining and growing pockets of complexity that run uphill in a
universe that is otherwise always running downhill (entropy). Life
probably began, and certainly took hold, at alkaline thermal vents in the
primordial oceans by harnessing chemical and heat energy from the
Earth’s core.
218
Life grew exponentially, but was initially limited by
this energy source. By figuring out how to tickle a photon from the sun
and turn it into food energy, life could continue to grow and become
more complex. Without photosynthesis, life would have stalled,
plateaued, and possibly died out long ago. Photosynthesis is the most
important innovation in the history of the planet. Everything that
follows is parasitic on the energy economy of photosynthesis, including
our brains and collective learning. All our dreams and desires, our
thinking and doing, are directly or indirectly powered by plants.
Photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into
carbohydrates (food energy) and oxygen. Thus, photosynthesis
progressively removed methane and carbon dioxide from the
primordial planet and increased concentrations of oxygen in the
atmosphere and oceans. Initially, this had cataclysmic results—it led to
the greatest pollution and extinction crisis in natural history. First, with
the decline in greenhouse gases, the earth cooled and the oceans froze
into a “snowball Earth.” Second, because oxygen is chemically
reactive, it oxidized the membranes of the anaerobic bacteria that
populated the early Earth.
Life eventually adapted to these new conditions by creating
membranes that could resist oxygen and, later, harness the chemical
power of oxygen through respiration, thus greatly increasing the
efficiency of the biochemical-energy cycle inside the cell.
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217
Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity.
218
Lane, The V ital Qu estion: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life.

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In his book Energy: The Engine of Evolution, Frank Niele
analyzes the thermodynamics of life from early prokaryotes to our
global civilization. Life depends on three “energy regimes,” which
appear sequentially—the Thermal Regime, the Phototropic Regime,
and the Aerobic Regime.
219
These all appeared first at the scale of
single-celled organisms, prior to the evolution of complex multicellular
organisms. The energy economies of evolution were all directly or
indirectly dependent on these processes, until humans came along.
It began with the controlled use of fire. Fire mastery improved
human diets, as cooking expanded the number of foods that could be
hunted, gathered, eaten, and digested. Fire also protected our ancestors
from predators and expanded the range of ecosystems in which humans
could flourish. Finally, fire mastery let loose a series of coevolutionary
developments, as the hearth provided a new context for social bonding,
tool making, planning, symbolic language, and other cognitive
enhancements. No other species has learned to control fire. Niele calls
this the Pyrocultural Regime.
The domestication of plants and animals, beginning only 10,000
years ago, was another leap in the capture of energy-matter. The
evolution of agriculture led to larger, sedentary communities with
surpluses that could support specialized classes of laborers, including
ruling elites, standing armies, and priestly castes, which extracted the
surplus production through conquest and tribute-taking. Specialization,
competition, cooperation, and trade led to numerous technological
developments, including the harnessing of the kinetic energy of wind
and water that also contributed to our increased energy consumption.
This is the Agrocultural Regime.
About 200 years ago, the burning of fossil fuels during
industrialization marked the next energy revolution. Note that coal, oil,
and gas are products of photosynthesis that have been accumulated,
concentrated, and transformed over geological time scales. It is fair to
say that pretty much everything we touch, eat, wear, use, and do in the
modern world is directly or indirectly touched by fossil fuels. Niele
calls this the Carbocultural Regime. He goes on to explore the necessity
and possibilities of an evolving Heliocultural Regime.
The logic of harvesting more solar energy to grow human
complexity is compelling from the perspective of Big History—but, of
course, that transition will require huge investments and further
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Niele, Energy: Engine of Evolution.

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innovations in the decades to come. Over 7 billion humans now
consume in aggregate 18 trillion watts of energy in a variety of forms—
fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas); hydropower; nuclear power; renewables
(solar, wind, biomass, biofuels, and geothermal); and, of course, the
food we eat. Without this energy constantly running through our global
civilization’s arteries, the world would collapse. Our cities, industries,
transportation, agriculture—indeed, every aspect of our contemporary
lives—depend on this tremendous flow of energy.
Those reading this book are likely energy rich, relative to others
throughout human history and in our contemporary world. You have
effortless access to electricity and the internet. You have potable water
pumped into your home and your waste safely disposed. You have an
enormous quantity and variety of food at your disposal, cultivated,
processed, and shipped from distant places to your local grocery store.
You likely have access to travel great distances by bike, car, bus, train,
ship, and airplane. Remove one of these from your life and you would
starkly come to understand true “luxury” by its absence.
Information-Ingenuity Capture
As discussed, the quantity of information-ingenuity on our planet
has been growing by leaps and bounds. This is true of life’s rising
complexity and the recent rising complexity of human culture.
Moreover, the Earth-bound growth of information-ingenuity manifests
aspects of exponentiality, as we saw in the chapter on the Great Matrix.
Like other big historians, Cesar Hidalgo understands the rise of
symbolic language and collective learning among humans as the
threshold resulting in an accelerating adventure of discovery and
invention. “Humans,” writes Cesar Hidalgo, “are special animals when
it comes to information, because unlike other species, we have
developed an enormous ability to encode large volumes of information
outside our bodies.”
220
Human artifacts, not just the written word, can
be thought of as a form of embodied information—manufactured
physical orders serving some human function. The story of human
artifacts begins with wood-stone tools and cave paintings and now
extends to global positioning satellites and megacities. Look around.
Most of the objects in your immediate environment, including these
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Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, Kindle
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words, are what Hidalgo calls “crystalized imagination.” Earlier we
explored the exponential nature of energy density flow in evolution and
culture. We examined the Great Acceleration of the last century and the
manifold growth in human population and consumption patterns
leading to the Anthropocene. Now we need to grok similar jumps in
order of magnitude of information-ingenuity through the course of
human history. “People,” writes Hidalgo, “are the ultimate incarnation
of the computational capacities of matter.”
221
Cultural evolution has limitations and constraints that make the
growth of knowledge and know-how uneven in human history and the
contemporary world. Learning occurs in social and cultural networks.
Learning occurs over a prolonged period of childhood dependency.
Much of it happens by absorption. Children naturally learn their mother
tongue and acquire cultural norms. We evolved to learn best from
people who are similar to us. Learning requires trust. Individuals with
social prestige within the group are seen to be trustworthy sources of
relevant knowledge. Trust is a big issue in social psychology and the
scaling of human cooperation.
Today, learning often includes decades of formal training in order
to gain technical mastery of a specific domain. Hidalgo introduces the
term “personbyte” to indicate the theoretical maximum amount of
knowledge that any single person can acquire. An individual can only
acquire so much in a lifetime. It is in the nature of collective learning
that knowledge and know-how are trapped in social networks. And
social networks are difficult to copy.
Hidalgo runs the Observatory of Economic Complexity at MIT.
Among their many projects are the graphic visualization of imports and
exports between countries—for instance, Chile and South Korea, or
Brazil and China. Hidalgo introduces the notion of a net balance of
embodied imagination (manufactured products) in international trade.
Some countries are net importers of “crystallized imagination.” Other
countries are net exporters. “The more prosperous countries,” write
Hidalgo, “are those that are better at making information grow.”
222
More precisely, it is the growth of ingenuity, not merely the
growth of information as code, that matters in evolution and
economics. In computer programming, for instance, ingenuity can be
maximized through clever algorithms, and perhaps also less code, less
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221
Ibid., Kindle 2488.
222
Ibid., Kindle 1864.

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memory, and less processing. Evolutionary, technological, and
economic elegance is captured in my aphorism "minimize entropy,
maximize creativity.”
Hidalgo also introduces the term “firmbyte” as a theoretical limit
on how much knowledge and know-how any single company can
command. This limit is why networks of firms are needed to
manufacture complex goods and to provide complex services. The
firmbyte limit scales more than the personbyte limit, because firms vary
dramatically in size and complexity. As networks grow within and
between companies, so do the transaction costs. The scaling adds
friction and inefficiencies to production and exchange, but also the
possibilities of creating more complex products and services with more
“crystallized imagination.”
Cheaper links favor larger networks and the concentration of
knowledge and know-how. Larger networks of people and companies
are able to embody more knowledge and know-how, but transaction
costs may also scale, putting a drag on productivity. “Certain societies
can save substantially on transaction costs,” writes Francis Fukuyama,
“because economic agents trust one another in their interactions and
therefore can be more efficient than low trust societies, which require
detailed contracts and enforcement mechanisms.”
223
Trust is an
essential ingredient in lubricating and scaling complex economic
manufacturing.
Recall Eric Beinhocker’s understanding of the importance of both
physical and social technologies in economic growth. Hidalgo reminds
us that physical technologies are themselves products of social learning
and that it is the accumulation of knowledge and know-how that drives
evolution and economics. He writes:
So it is the accumulation of information and of our ability to
process information that defines the arrow of growth
encompassing the physical, the biological, the social, and the
economic, and which extends from the origin of the universe to
our modern economy. It is the growth of information that unifies
the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the
emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth.
224
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223
Francis Fu kuyama, Tru st: Human Nature and the Creation of Prosperity (Boston: Free Press,
2008), 352.
224
Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, Kindle
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Gene-Culture Coevolution of Collective Brains
In his book The Secret of Our Success, anthropologist Joseph
Henrich reminds us that genes and culture coevolve. We are a self-
domesticated species. Like our domesticated animals, humans today are
different from our wild forebears long ago. Human cultures are a form
of decentralized eugenics—controlled breeding—and have for
millennia been selecting for prosocial attributes. Henrich writes:
Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the
short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change),
institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with
psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and
preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these
culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the
primary driver of human genetic evolution.
225
Somewhere along the way, Henrich argues, early humans crossed
the Rubicon into “superorganism” status, whereby survival and
reproduction became entirely dependent on the cultural transmission of
knowledge. From there, a positive feedback loop took hold, as group
competition selected for societies with better cooperators. The
coevolution of genes and culture resulted in something unique in
evolution. Humans are the first species to develop “collective brains.”
All human societies, whether they live as hunter-gatherers or not,
are entirely dependent on culture . . . humans are at the beginning
of a major biological transition, the formation of a new kind of
animal. In our species, the extent and sophistication of our
technical repertoire—and of our ecological dominance—depends
on the size and interconnectedness of our collective brains. In
turn, our collective brains depend heavily on the packages of
social norms and institutions that weave together our
communities, create interdependence, foster solidarity, and
subdivide our cultural information and labor. These social norms,
which were gradually selected by intergroup competition over
eons, have domesticated us to be better rule followers, as well as
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Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Huma n Evolution,
Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2015), 314-15.

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more attentive parents, loyal mates, good friends (reciprocators),
and upstanding community members. Like the cells in our bodies,
all human societies possess a division of labor and information,
with different subgroups specializing in different tasks and
cultural knowledge.
226
The secret of our species’ dramatic rise is all of these factors—
symbolic language, collective learning, network effects, social fictions,
energy- and ingenuity-capture, gene-culture coevolution, collective
brains, and more. There is little disagreement on the basics among Big
Historians, but the different emphases mentioned above help us to
better understand how our species cheated the evolutionary logic of
Malthus and Darwin by growing exponentially in the last century. Past
performance, however, is no guarantee of future success.
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226
Ibid., 318.