Our Eight Great Contests
Humanity has seen four great eras so far: animal, forager, farmer, and industry. And each era had two key levels of evolutionary competition: individual and group. This makes for eight great contests that have shaped our world.
During the ~500Myr year era of animals, max brains doubled roughly in ~40Myr, which was also roughly the typical cycle period of biodiversity and mass extinctions. Most animals lived in families of ~6, and had two key contests: competition between organisms specified by DNA, and competition between species of organisms, re DNA-specified features of organisms that couldn’t vary easily within species. Turns out, between species competition actually mattered more than within species competition.
~1Myr ago, DNA then evolved humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, which has allowed us to evolve far faster than other animals. Humans then doubled in ~250Kyr, in the context of ~100Kyr ice age cycles. Slowly DNA was tamed to allow most behavior to be controlled by habits we copied from each other. As this wouldn’t worked if we copied at random, we evolved status markers to show who to copy, the first and most important of which was prestige.
Individuals have more cultural than DNA parents, which strengthened group selection of human bands of ~30 individuals. With weapons and language, this let such bands empower talky collectives to limit dominators and enforce norms. This created strong individual prestige contests to gain social intelligence to achieve prestige and favorably influence this collective. Contests between group cultures evolved healthy norms, group markers, and status markers.
When humans became dense enough ~10Kya to no longer need to move often to collect food, they stayed at “farms”, could collect a lot more physical stuff, formed local unequal classes, and were close enough to others to engage in both trade and war with neighbors. Thus arose the new individual market contests to trade well to collect the new status marker of wealth, and the new empire contests between groups to win wars, aided by groups awarding prestige to war heroes.
Farmers doubled in ~1Kyr, and peasant-village-scale farmer groups of ~1000 encouraged stronger conformity and religion. But increasing density and ease of travel, including initially small and rare cities, led to a slowly increasing scale of trade, which led to stronger divisions of labor at larger scales, which cut conformity. So during the farming era morality slowly moved away from strongly-felt enforcement of similar behavior among close kin, to less passionate more abstract rules of fair treatment of non-kin. Trade and war slowly acquired stronger moral salience.
Empires rose and fell with a ~300yr cycle time. War wins allowed larger regions of trade which fed war efforts, often making a virtuous cycle for a time. But such cycles consistently ended in empire falls, apparently often driven by internal decay of key norms and status markers. So it seems that group selection of cultural norms and status markers was often not a healthy evolutionary process within big farmer empires.
A few centuries ago humanity leaned to better manage larger orgs, including networks and hierarchies. This added the org rank prestige to individual competition, and competing orgs enabled dramatic increases in the capacity of both empires and markets. This allowed the “industrial revolution” of the world economy doubling in ~20yr, in the context of ~6yr business cycles. Sci/tech networks aided faster evolution of tech and commerce practices, which big capitalist orgs encouraged and applied. Big civil service orgs supporting empires allowed increased state capacity for war, regulation, and redistribution. Each org has its own internal culture, which decays during that org’s duration, but org cultures improve over time due to competition between orgs.
Bigger higher-capacity states oversaw the merging of peasant cultures into national cultures, of population ~1M, and then increasing world travel, talk, and trade has induced the merging of elite national cultures into a global monoculture. Capitalism-induced increasing wealth, health, and peace has greatly cut group selection pressures on remaining culture(s), and it is much harder for culture to adapt to that new ~20yr doubling time.
Furthermore, ~100yr ago world monoculture switched from trying to preserve culture to “modernist” celebration of cultural activists who change it. Culture then became stronger, suppressing both national and capitalist competition via norms limiting their scopes and increasing skepticism and regulation of them. Culture is plausibly drifting toward decadent laziness/myopia/selfishness, reverting to forager styles, and suffering random walks in other ways.
Thus, as in prior empire falls, the world now seems to have an unhealthy environment for the evolution of cultures as groups, plausibly causing our fertility fall and other maladaptive trends, which will likely lead to our civilization falling, to be replaced by others with quite different norms, values, and status markers, and delaying for several centuries Earth’s rise to become grabby aliens. Even if we achieve AI that can replace humans broadly across jobs, such AI would still likely suffer this key cultural problem.
Yes, I’ve talked about cultural drift many times before. But the above analysis may help us to better frame it. The key problem is that the most powerful evolutionary process yet discovered, capitalism using big orgs of humans, is causing evolutionary progress must faster than simple cultural evolution of norms and status markers can now adapt to this change. And while the usual solution to coupled evolutionary systems of mismatched powers is to let the weak system be driven by the strong, humans now accept a trump status for culture, in thinking that moral systems must always win all overt conflicts with other systems.
One hacked solution is for a big group to adopt a measurable sacred goal that they see as consistent with their morals, which also happens to be inconsistent with civilization collapse, like the date a million people live in space. And then adopt a competent governance system, such as futarchy or for-profit governance, to actually achieve that goal. But if that approach doesn’t work, it seems our descendants won’t get to the stars until they find a way to give far less deference to prior systems for creating and changing morality.
Note that if there is a fifth era with parameters that fit the pattern of the last four eras, it could start anytime in the next century or so, it would double in roughly a month, suffer a cycle with a similar period, and have population sizes of ~1T.