What is the Best Diet for Humans?

People on entirely raw food diets are often undernourished, especially if those diets are also vegan. They are generally thin, but that thinness is not inherently healthy.

Others argue for the health of the paleo diet: a diet free of grains and most carbohydrates, and high in fat. This may well be a healthy diet for some people. But those who come from lineages whose cuisine is rich in carbohydrates—people from the northern Mediterranean, for instance—may not be best served or most healthy on such a diet. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that early humans were eating a diet rich in carbohydrates from starchy underground vegetables—relatives of which include the African wild potato—as much as 170,000 years ago.

They imply that there is a fixed and universal answer to the question of what one should eat. Differences in individual development will render some foods healthy for one person, less so for her neighbor. Demographics such as what sex and age will affect what food is best for you. Cultural differences, which are often based in geography, may well affect your optimal diet. And those cultural differences may have moved into the gene layer, reflecting population-level genetic predispositions to particular foods —as with the lactase persistence of European pastoralists and Saharan Bedouin.

The second misguided assumption that many such diets reveal is that they seem to presume that food is merely for survival. Food is more than nutrients, vitamins, and calories. Humans no longer eat merely to satisfy energetic requirements, any more than we have sex just to make babies.

Real food is that in which the base ingredients are recognizable as coming from a living organism (there are just a few exceptions, like salt).

Fast food tastes good to many people because it successfully games our sense of taste, accessing single notes—fatty, salty, sweet—in a reliable, uniform way that can be triggered anytime you order the same thing at any one of hundreds of identical stores. By contrast, a plate of carne asada, rice, and beans, with freshly made tortillas, pico de gallo, guacamole, and pickled vegetables from a local taco stand or from your own kitchen, will always be more nutritious. If your palate is conditioned for these “real foods” you will most likely find them to be more delicious too.

First, the parts of a given system that we have turned into pills are usually not descriptive of the whole system. Second, there is often emergence in the combination of food in its less processed form, such that our bodies can use food more effectively than it can use pills. This is especially true for those foods that have a long culinary history together—such as the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash traditionally eaten by Mesoamerican peoples. When these foods are eaten together, they constitute a complete protein. Such a long culinary history points to the human discovery, usually unconscious, that just as “smells good” was a good proxy for “good for you” until recently, so too was “tastes good” a good proxy for “good for you.”

In the Andes, quinoa and potatoes were generally on the menu; in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, wheat and olives were among the foods domesticated early; in sub-Saharan Africa, sorghum and guinea yams were significant early agricultural successes. There was meat, sometimes, in short-lived abundance. There was fruit, seasonally, also in abundance. There was alcohol, intermittently, and botanically created stimulants, in some places. In those places, those stimulants were a regular but low-key part of life. Even the ratio of macronutrients is not stable between cultures—Inuit have a high-fat, high-protein diet, with almost no carbohydrates, which is unlike almost any diet that evolved closer to the equator. Given such variation, the idea of a universally best human diet seems patently absurd.

A reductionist, nutrient-centric approach to food fails to allow for celebration, or for grief, both of which are often accomplished through food. It fails to recognize and remember cultural tradition, and to consider flavors that have come together through serendipity and experimentation. Cuisines old and new reflect both their terroir—the land from which they emerged—and their borrowing from other cultures and places.

Humans do not just need protein and potassium and vitamin C. We generally need those things in the food context in which our ancestors ate them. We also need culture and connection. When we sit down to eat a meal together, especially when we are breaking bread that we have ourselves made, we gain far more than calories.

Tools, Fire, and Cooking

After our split from a chimp-like ancestor, over six million years ago, our tool-making abilities began to flourish and diversify. By 3.3 million years ago, our ancestors were using stone tools. Two and a half million years ago, our ancestors were using stone tools to butcher the carcasses of animals they had hunted or scavenged, and to extract marrow from the bones.

Our ancestors may have been controlling fire for more than a million and a half years. Fire provides warmth and light, a warning and protection against dangerous animals, and a beacon to friends. A little later on in our relationship with controlled fire, we began to use it to boil water and make it potable, to eradicate pests, to dry our clothes, to temper metal with which to make tools. With fire we can see one another and our work at night, and we may gather around it, telling stories or making music. There are no known human cultures without fire, although early reports from anthropologists, missionaries, and explorers often made claims to the contrary.

One of the many advantages of cooking is that it makes our food safer by reducing risks from parasites and pathogens. Cooking also detoxifies some plants, making foods available that would otherwise be inedible to us. It reduces spoilage, such that we can store food for longer, and allows us to open and mash otherwise impenetrable foods.

Cooking increases the amount of energy that our bodies can obtain from food. To obtain sufficient calories from a raw food diet like that of our extant wild ape relatives, humans would have to chew for five hours every day. Cooked food is an economical and efficient use of hard-earned food resources, freeing up both time and energy for other things.

Being able to take fire with us also opened up territory that was colder than anything we could have survived without it, allowing for exploration of the entire globe.

Persuading Wild Foods to Team Up with Us

Milk is produced by mammal mothers to feed their young. Fruit is a plant’s way of enticing animals to disperse its seeds—blackberry bushes attract birds and deer and rabbits, and the blackberry bushes achieve their evolutionary goals when those animals feast on berries, wander off, and poop out the seeds, now rich with fertilizer. And nectar is a plant’s way of encouraging pollination—blueberry bushes lure bees of many species with the promise of a sweet reward, and the plant achieves its evolutionary goal of reproducing when a bee carries pollen from one flower to another.

Seeds don’t want to be eaten. Leaves don’t want to be eaten. And certainly, food that requires that we kill entire organisms to eat it—the flesh of animals, be it cow, salmon, or crab—does not want to be eaten. Yet over millennia, we have persuaded many wild foods to team up with us. Those that are persuadable may become susceptible to horticulture, agriculture, animal husbandry. We are, in some cases, coevolving with them.

Our domestication of corn, potatoes, wheat, cattle, pigs, and chickens has increased their populations dramatically. They have a good evolutionary deal, just not an individual one.

Loaves and Fishes

In what is now Jordan, the ancient Natufians were making and eating bread at least four thousand years before they were farming. From wild seeds that were precursors to modern wheat (einkorn), and from the roots of tubers, the Natufians made flour, which they then cooked into flatbreads, perhaps in preparation for travel. Flatbreads have the comparative advantages over raw seeds and tubers of being lightweight, highly nutritious, and transportable, as well as having a long shelf life.

Domestication of farmed species further allows for humans to select for those things that we value, and select against those things that we don’t, such as toxins the plant has put on board to keep organisms from eating it.

In China, pottery existed for ten thousand years before farming. The pottery was almost certainly used for cooking of both hunted and gathered materials. Ceramic crocks were probably used to carry and store water and raw foods. Perhaps they were also used as vessels for fermenting or preserving foods, including the production of alcoholic beverages. Modern humans think of alcohol primarily as a social lubricant, but it is in fact an excellent, calorie-rich way to preserve food that would otherwise spoil. Beer is, in many regards, a liquid loaf of bread.

Agriculture, once it took hold in societies around the world, tended to bring about huge changes in human culture. Just a few of these changes include a shift to permanent settlements and sedentary lifestyles from a more migratory, nomadic existence; greater specialization by individuals, including the rise of full-time craft specialists, which then would have allowed for the elaboration and expansion of trades, arts, and sciences; increases in commerce and other aspects of economy; the formalization of political structures; an increase in wealth disparities between individuals; and changes in gender roles.

Stone tools, fire, and cooking have all been linked to changes in human anatomy and social structure; similarly, the consumption of fish, turtles, and other coastal foods may have been instrumental in the development of our large brains. Coastal and riverine fishing is less dangerous and more accessible to people without sophisticated tools and communal hunting techniques than is the hunting of large terrestrial mammals. Considerable evidence suggests that we migrated along coastlines for well over one hundred thousand years, which is consistent with aquatic fauna having been an important part of our diet.

Those who have at least some relationship with the origin of their food—whether they grow it themselves, pick berries on occasion, or strike up conversations with the growers at their local farmers market—are more likely to value its complexity, the value of terroir, and the constant sharing between culinary traditions.

Harvest Feast

Carrying capacity, the maximum number of individuals that can be supported in a given environment, at a given time, looks stable when you are zoomed out, looking across generations, or eons. Zoom in, though, and the perturbations in carrying capacity can be extreme, a parameter that oscillates wildly the closer you are in space and time. For agriculturalists, this looks like boom years and bust years: For every year that harvests overperform median expectations, there is another year that falls below the median. If birth rate were to track the noisy annual fluctuations in harvest, in half of all years there would not be enough to go around. Such years are naturally ones of conflict and division; long term, this is the death knell for a lineage. The solution involves productively spending excess resource so that it does not get converted into more babies, which will embody an unmeetable demand. Feasts are one such manifestation. By investing in community cohesion, rather than new mouths, a population can avoid the regular and predictable calamity created by the variance in harvests.

The Corrective Lens

• Shop the edges of the supermarket. Better yet, buy your food at a farmers’ market. Nearly everything from the middle of the supermarket has more sugar, more salt, more umami—generally by means that are not vetted, at least not in the long term. Highly refined foods are another example of hyper-novelty, as is plastic, so try to avoid food packaged in plastic, and especially avoid allowing hot plastic to touch your food.
• Avoid GMOs. GMOs are neither inherently dangerous nor inherently safe. They are, however, different from the artificial selection that farmers have been engaging in for thousands of years. When farmers choose plants or animals to breed, promoting some traits and down-regulating others, they are playing within the landscape that selection has already been acting on. In contrast, when scientists insert genes or other genetic material into organisms that have no recent history with those genes, they are creating an entirely new playing field. Sometimes they will be lucky, and the result will be useful and kind to humans. Sometimes they will not be lucky. Chimerical life-forms that have been created by humans using hyper-novel techniques are not inherently safe; anyone telling you otherwise is either mistaken or lying to you.
• Respect your food aversions and cravings, especially after exercise, after illness, or while pregnant (so long as these cravings reflect real food and don’t pose specific risks).
• Expose children to a diverse range of whole foods, especially ones that connect them to your culinary and ethnic background. Eat the same food that you put in front of them, and show obvious enjoyment of it. Keep seasonal produce on your counter, and let the children eat any fruit that they find there, encouraging them to develop their own preferences while they also learn how and when to explore a variety of whole foods.
• Consider your ethnicity and look to its culinary tradition for a guide to diet. If you are Italian, look to Italian cuisine for clues as to how you should eat. If you are Japanese, look to Japanese cuisine. In particular, look to the culinary traditions of home cooking, as the foods represented in restaurants, while often delicious, often represent only a sliver of a culinary tradition’s full panoply of options.
• Do not reduce food to its component parts—such as carbs and fiber, fish oil and folic acid. Instead, think of food as the species from which it came, the cultures that first used it, the myriad ways it is now prepared and eaten across the world.
• Make food less ubiquitous in your own world. For most of history, human societies have tempered against boom and bust with ritual feast and long periods of frugality. But recently, agriculture has led to an increase in the capacity to hold food in reserve, to save for a rainy day—or, more likely, to save for an extended drought, or a harvest failure. While our modern brains want to consume as much as possible, our ancient bodies want to store up for later. When calories were scarce and their availability unpredictable, this metabolic tendency made good sense. When a hunter-gatherer finds honey that he can separate from its bees, he and his friends will likely gorge on it, for there is no knowing when the next burst of sugary goodness will come their way again. But since food resources are no longer scarce, gorging is not an effective strategy. We have to willfully override our evolutionary impulses in order not to suffer the hyper-novelty that the twenty-four-hour grocery store provides. Putting yourself on a schedule, as intermittent fasting recommends, of not eating for regular periods of time seems to be a healthful corrective.
• Do not forget that food is social lubrication for humans. Eating alone in your car after visiting the drive-through is a novel situation, and it’s not helping us connect with our food, our bodies and their needs, or one another.

6. Sleep

During slow-wave sleep, our brains fix memories in place—as do the brains of great apes, including chimpanzees.5 Our brains also prune out old and redundant information during slow-wave sleep and gain mastery over skills that we learn while awake—typing, skiing, calculus. Hence the adage to “sleep on it.”

REM sleep, the newcomer in evolutionary time, provides us our dreams. During REM sleep, we engage in emotional regulation, reflect on what has happened, look forward to what might be possible, and imagine both possible pasts and futures. REM is a creative state; it is sleep’s explorer mode.

Dreams and Hallucinations

As it turns out, a list of symptoms of a person with schizophrenia has a suspicious overlap with a person asleep and dreaming: all of us enter this state every night, even though not everyone reaches out through that state and talks in their sleep. We do not regularly draw this parallel, because our dream state usually comes with paralysis and amnesia. Any confrontations with reality are blissfully hidden from us by the time we get to our morning coffee.

Secondary compound is a loosely defined botanical term for a substance that is not functional within the organism that produces it. Rather, it is intended to interact with pathways in other creatures, often in a hostile way. The irritants in poison ivy are an obvious deterrent to herbivores eating those leaves. Similarly, potatoes and the other nightshades contain endogenous pesticides, a class of compounds known as glycoalkaloids that are highly toxic to humans. In contrast to those pure poisons and irritants, consider these secondary compounds:

• Capsaicin, the molecule that creates the burning sensation when we eat chili peppers, generally dissuades mammals from eating seeds that are intended for birds, which do not have the receptors to sense the “heat.”
• And caffeine, which disincentivizes herbivores from eating caffeinated seeds at high concentrations, may also be a kind of pharmacological social engineering on the part of the plants.
• When bees are given sugar rewards that contain caffeine, their spatial memory improves threefold; the caffeinated nectar of both citrus and coffee flowers may well be priming their pollinators, the bees, to remember them and to come back for more.
• From Psilocybe mushrooms and ergot fungi, to peyote cactus and the botanical brew in ayahuasca, to salvia and Sonoran Desert toads, there are fungi, plants, and animals that have produced secondary compounds that interact with our physiology in ways that mirror dream states. Call them hallucinogens, or psychedelics, or entheogens—their effect on us can be narrative and elucidating.

Novelty and Sleep Disruption

We are ill-equipped to know when the level of light we are being exposed to is outside of normal. While daylight is bright and tends toward the blue end of the visible spectrum, and moonlight and firelight are dim and tend toward the red end of the spectrum, indoor lighting is typically brighter than either moonlight or firelight, and far bluer than, but not as bright as, daylight. This has the potential to interfere with circadian rhythms and hormonal cycles, and therefore to cause sleep disruptions.

Humans have such a long history with fire that our pineal glands are well equipped to encounter red, fire-spectrum light well past sundown, without negative consequences for sleep. Being able to turn on blue, day-spectrum light at any moment, however, is a brand-new phenomenon, one for which we are less well adapted.

Eradicating daylight-spectrum light from the night might have a curative impact on some people who are experiencing debilitating psychological disorders, those who suffer from daytime delusions, paranoia, hallucinations—those who are, it might be said, having their dream state intrude on their waking day.

Many organisms, especially far from the equator, use photoperiod as a clock. It is used to schedule such things as germination and bud formation in plants; and mating season, molting, and embryonic development in animals. And animals as distantly related as crows, eels, and butterflies have difficulty migrating when artificial light is present.

Corrective Lens

• Wake with the sun. Know the phases of the moon. Navigate sometimes by the light of the full moon. Navigate sometimes as dawn emerges, or as dusk falls, paying attention to the shifting of your senses as light becomes more, or less, available. Spend time outside, letting your body take cues from the light of the sun, rather than from the light switch on your wall or the screen you gaze into.
• Get closer to the equator at some point during your winter. Cross the equator and keep going for ever more light during the dark days in your home hemisphere. Especially if you are susceptible to seasonal depression, you probably live relatively far from the equator, such that winter brings months of darkness in the form of short days and a low sun angle. This advice, of course, comprises a novel opportunity (global travel) that is itself a response to the novelty of living indoors with electric light. 
• Avoid caffeine less than eight hours before bedtime. Children and adolescents are better off with no caffeine at all, because of its strongly sleep-disrupting effects and the nonreversible effects of sleep deprivation on the developing brain. Similarly, avoid pharmaceuticals as sleeping aids—we don’t know everything that they do, and we do know that they are often disruptive to actual sleep.
• Go to sleep early enough that you wake without artificial help—with the sun beginning to come in your windows, for instance, rather than with an alarm that bursts into your consciousness and disrupts your dreams.
• Develop a ritual in advance of sleep. It might be as simple as turning lights down low as bedtime approaches, or more elaborate, but a regular series of behaviors can come to signal to your body that it is soon time to sleep.
• Spend time outside every day—sunlight calibrates your sleep-wake cycle far better than artificial light does.
• Keep your bedroom dark while you sleep. This includes removing, turning off, or covering all blue indicator lights from devices.
• Use a red light, rather than a standard one, if you read before bed.
• Whether you are or are not highly susceptible to circadian disruption from medium-intensity, blue-shifted light in the evenings, there is a good chance that someone in your home is.
• Restrict outdoor blue-spectrum light at the societal level, particularly lights that shine upward and outward at all hours of the night. Nighttime darkness is healthy; twenty-four-hour light is not, and is even implicated in higher rates of disease. Furthermore, humans deserve a night sky, a sky full of possibilities, sometimes of clouds, often the moon, occasionally planets, nearly always stars and the Milky Way in which we live. 

7. Sex and Gender

Some of the population-level differences that have long been attributed to men and women turn out to be mutable—women should not be confined to healing or teaching professions, nor men to ones requiring brute strength or raw ambition. Recognizing these things does not mean, however, that we are the same at the population level. For instance, “Men are taller than women” is a true statement about averages.

An average difference does not imply that all members of population Y (men) are taller than all members of population Z (women). True statements about populations do not manifest in all individuals in those populations; believing otherwise is falling prey to the “fallacy of division” (first described by Aristotle). In populations where the overlap of a trait is significant, it can be difficult to parse population-level patterns from individual experience.

If you, as an individual, do not fit a particular pattern, the discrepancy can feel like evidence that the pattern is false, but that feeling does not make it so.

Female doctors are more likely to go into pediatrics; men are more likely to become surgeons. In retail, men are more likely to sell cars, women are more likely to sell flowers. And while retail jobs in the US were split nearly evenly between men and women in 2019, wholesale jobs skewed strongly male. In tasks that require physical strength, men, on average, are simply stronger. An all-female force engaging in hand-to-hand combat would not beat an all-male one, and it would be beyond foolish to pretend otherwise.

We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril.

Sex: The Deep History

Sexual reproduction has always been a messy, costly operation. You have to find an appropriate mate. You have to convince the mate that you’re a good bet. It may need to be the right time of year—the mating season—or else it’s possible that your gonads have been reabsorbed to save weight and to use those resources for something else (many migratory birds do this). If you do manage to find and convince another individual of the right species and breeding status to mate with you, you may have to tend to the developing egg or fetus. You may have responsibilities that extend for years—decades even—after you have a child that is the result of sexual reproduction.

In terms of genetic fitness, when you reproduce sexually, you are taking a 50 percent hit. If you cloned yourself, you would be 100 percent related to all of your offspring, spreading your genes with perfect accuracy. With sex, only half of your genes are in each of your kids. Asexual reproduction is only a win for you and your offspring if the future looks exactly like the past. So long as conditions stay the same, if life worked out for you, it should work out for your clones.

Our chromosomes start us down a path toward femaleness and maleness. One of the genes on the Y chromosome, for instance, is SRY, which, when initiated, controls the regulation of a whole series of masculinizing actions, including the formation of what will become the testis, in which sperm is made. Hormonal cascades further masculinize a body (with testosterone and other androgens) or feminize it (with estrogens and progesterone). Even when the quantity of gonadal hormones is controlled for, though, sex chromosomes themselves affect such varied differences between males and females as pain perception and response, the anatomy of individual neurons, and the size of various brain regions, including parts of the cerebral cortex and corpus callosum.

In order to reproduce sexually, you need two things: DNA from multiple individuals, and a cell. The machinery of the cell—for example, mitochondria and ribosomes—is big and bulky, at least compared to DNA, but it’s necessary for life. So, if you are going to reproduce sexually, at least one partner has to contribute that cellular machinery, known as the cytoplasm. That cell—which we call the egg—is therefore big (for a cell). Trade-offs being what they are, that big cell is also largely sessile—it doesn’t move.

• The next problem in sexual reproduction is how the gametes will find each other. Since some gametes are sessile, others need to be zippy, which is facilitated by being stripped of most of the cellular machinery that would be required to make a zygote. Those gametes are called sperm in animals, pollen in plants. They move around their environment, “looking for” eggs.
• Intermediate gametes—ones with some cytoplasm and some ability to move—would be worse at both things: they would have insufficient cytoplasm to create a zygote on their own (and upon meeting a gamete that also had cytoplasm, there would be disagreement about whose to use to make a whole new life), and they would be slow to find other gametes to hook up with.
• Anisogamy, the evolution of two different (aniso) gamete sizes (gamy), therefore occurs because of the poor performance of intermediate gametes.

Humans are sexually dimorphic across many domains, extending far beyond reproduction. Men and women have different disease risks, etiology, and progression, for conditions from Alzheimer’s to migraine, from drug addiction to Parkinson’s disease. Our brains are structured differently. We tend to have different personality traits by sex, and they are mediated by our environment: personality differences are greater in countries that have abundant food and a low prevalence of pathogens. In general, women are more altruistic, trusting, and compliant as well as more prone to depression than men. Men are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, women are more likely to have anxiety disorders. Finally, on average, men prefer working with things, and women prefer working with people.

Sex Changes and Sex Roles

Sometimes, conditions are so dire that normally sexually reproducing individuals become asexual in order to reproduce.

Similarly, sometimes conditions are such that it is evolutionarily appropriate to change sex. In a few species of plants, many species of insects, and several clades of reef fish, sequential hermaphroditism is common, in which an individual begins as one sex and switches to the other at some point in their life.

Among sequential hermaphrodites like flame wrasses, after a female changes into a male, he has changed not only his sex—which gamete he produces, once eggs, now sperm—but also his “sex role,” which is the behavioral expression of his (new) sex. In humans, we call this gender, or sometimes, gender expression.

The usual rules of sex roles, then, are ones of male display and female choosiness. This stems from that long-ago difference in investment between the sexes—the large resource-rich egg and the small streamlined sperm. Furthermore, in those species in which parental care is necessary for the offspring to survive—which means all of mammals and birds, and a good proportion of reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects as well—males tend to put more effort into what happens before sex, and females put more effort into what happens afterward.

In the vast majority of species, females are the limiting sex. Because females invest more in offspring— from eggs being larger than sperm through parental care typically falling to females more than males—males must compete for access to females, and females get to choose among their suitors. Males thus tend to be larger or more aggressive; or gaudier, louder, or more melodious than the females of the species.

Sex-role reversed species have also flipped which sex invests the most when; in these cases, the male is the limiting sex. Several polyandrous waterbirds do this, including Northern jacanas. Among them, we find dominant females defending large territories, inside of which a female’s many male mates build nests, incubate eggs, and tend to the young.

Sex-role reversal—what we might call gender switching in humans—is not the same as changing sex. In mammals and birds, with our genetic sex determination, there is no sex change possible. Behavior, though—call it sex role, call it gender—that is highly labile (open to change). We humans are the most labile, behaviorally, of all the animals. So, it shouldn’t surprise us too much that many of us are abandoning some old gender norms—behaviors that have, in the past, been tightly coupled with our sex—and configuring new ones.

What it would be foolish to do—and what many WEIRD people in the 21st century are doing—is to pretend that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary. Remember the Omega principle, which tells us that adaptive elements of our software (e.g., gender) are no more independent of our hardware (e.g., sex) than the diameter of a circle is independent of that circle’s circumference. Gender is more fluid than sex, and has many more manifestations, but “acting feminine” (gender) is not the same as “being female” (sex).

Women are, on average, more likely to nest and nurture, and men are more likely, on average, to defend and explore. Observing this does not mean that men don’t nurture, or that women don’t explore, but these population-level differences have evolved because of the underlying differences between the sexes. Pretending otherwise puts us all at risk—ask people to believe things that are patently untrue and they will be ever less likely to form a coherent worldview, one based in observation and reality, rather than fantasy. Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that is different.

Sexual Selection in Humans

Human girls develop breasts at puberty, and they persist throughout the woman’s life. Breasts are, of course, functional as mammary glands with which to feed babies. In no other species of primate do breasts persist when there are no babies around to benefit. Human breasts are sexually selected, and they are doing more than feeding babies. They are also advertisements to men.

The concealment of ovulation in humans is also sexually selected. While nearly all mammals advertise fertility by physiological means, humans do not—or at least, we do so far less than other species. We have also become sexually receptive throughout the year, rather than just seasonally. Concealment of ovulation serves some reproductive ends, but it also encourages something that humans do a lot of: we engage in nonreproductive sex—sex for pleasure, sex for bonding.

The physical ornamentation of women—including not just makeup and heels and jewelry, but also breasts that stay enlarged throughout our reproductive cycles—is an indicator of partial sex-role reversal in humans. What does that mean? Whereas most animal species exhibit male-male competition and female choice of mates, a species with partial sex-role reversal, such as we have, will also show competition between females and male choice of mates. This can manifest as anything from women advertising to attract the attention of men to outright brawls between women. Men, not coincidentally, will also be more likely to be in a position to choose their partners.

Division of Labor

The division of labor can and has created rigid roles, however, many of which are outdated in the 21st century. It is useful to understand some of where those roles came from in order to determine which ones are unlikely to change, and which ones might.

• Among hunter-gatherers, men have been far more likely to be hunters of large game, women more likely to be gatherers of plant foods and smaller animals. Hunter-gatherer women likely spent most of their adult, premenopausal lives pregnant or breastfeeding infants and toddlers. When breast milk is all or most of a child’s diet, the mother is effectively on birth control, as she experiences physiologically induced amenorrhea—she cannot get pregnant when breastfeeding at frequent intervals. This keeps birth intervals relatively long, and the birth rate fairly low.
• Jump forward to the human transformation of landscapes with agriculture, and gender roles became even more constrained. Being tied to a particular piece of land, we were now more sedentary and had ample grain stores with which to supplement our and our children’s diets at any time. Agriculturalist women thus experienced a decrease in the birth interval—babies came at a faster rate—and so the birth rate climbed. This increase in fertility tied women to hearth and home, and we saw a concomitant decrease in women’s roles in economic, religious, and other culturally important realms.
• Some of the average differences between the sexes include that men have more “investigative” interests, while women have more “artistic” and “social” interests. Men are also, on average, more interested in math, science, and engineering. On tests, girls score higher in literacy, while boys score higher in math. And although average intelligence is the same between boys and girls, the variability in intelligence is not: there are more boy geniuses, and more boy complete dullards, than there are girls in either category.
• Across several domains—including both emotional memory and spatial ability—women are better at details; men are better at “gist.” This finding manifests in the average man’s superior ability to remember a route, and the average woman’s superior ability to remember the location of the keys, the cup of coffee, the document in need of being signed.
• Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.
• In an analysis of 185 cultures, in every culture studied, some tasks are always gendered in the same direction: iron smelting, the hunting of large marine mammals, metalworking—all of these are done by men only (in those cultures that do these things at all). More interesting is the tasks that are highly gendered across cultures, but for which some cultures curtail female involvement, while other cultures curtail male involvement. These include weaving, the preparation of skins, and the gathering of fuel, among others. This suggests that there is a value in the division of labor, even when neither sex is inherently better at the task.

Historically, women and men have had division of labor, both in family units and in societies, but other than those tasks mandated by anatomy and physiology (gestation, lactation), there is little in the modern world that some women might not choose to do. Similarly, men are ever more welcome in traditionally female fields such as nursing and teaching, although we shouldn’t expect parity there either. Different preferences lead to different choices. Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool’s game.

Sexual Strategies

While most readers of this book are likely living in a culture that assumes monogamy and biparental care, absent those constraints, men don’t contribute much to the production of babies. It is also true that baby production does not end at birth, as once a baby has been successfully gestated for nine months, mother’s milk may nourish that baby for six months, two years, or more, depending on cultural norms. Maternal investment in offspring is mandated, and high; paternal investment can be high as well, of course, but is negotiable. There are many humans alive now, and throughout history, who never met their fathers.

In every culture studied, women were more interested in mates with high earning potential than were men. Furthermore, men were more interested in potential mates who are young, and physically attractive, than were women.

Women who might get pregnant will have an easier time if that child has a father who contributes to the well-being of his child and mate. So, women will be selected to prefer men with the capacity to earn. Because female fertility peaks early, and falls off far more steeply than male fertility does, men who might father children are more likely to be interested in youth and beauty in their mates—both of which can be understood to be proxies for fertility.

Because fathers have never had certainty of paternity until recent technological advances have made it possible, the evolution of jealousy and mate guarding is far more prevalent in men than in women. Across cultures, men have tried to control the reproductive activities of women in such a way that they could increase their own certainty of paternity. Among the most patently divisive and destructive are menstrual huts that isolate women during menses (and so allow men to know when in their cycle women are) and female genital mutilation (which reduces or eradicates the possibility of sexual pleasure).

Among the Nayar of southwest India, wives and husbands do not live together, they share little beyond sexual activity, and women may have multiple husbands. With such uncertainty of paternity, fathers do no paternal care, but the mothers’ brothers have both rights and responsibilities toward their nieces and nephews that are, to our WEIRD eyes, quite paternal. In general, though, a man who is tricked into raising someone else’s children is ridiculed.

Broadly speaking, there are three possible reproductive strategies:

1. Partner up and invest long term, reproductively, socially, and emotionally.
2. Force reproduction on an unwilling partner.
3. Force nobody, but also invest little beyond short-term sexual activity.

Until very recently women preferred long-term partners to one-night stands, and they were far more likely than men to be sexually reticent. Women have thus tended to engage in a long game, looking for a man with whom to partner, to co-parent, and to grow old together. Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal. Given that women are forced by nature to invest in their children, they have a better chance of successfully parenting if they have a partner who is invested as well.

All three of these strategies are open to men, but the first one is the male strategy that is best for society, best for children, best for women, and best for all but a handful of men.

Rape has allowed men to successfully reproduce, especially in times of war. Nobody will defend rape as honorable or desirable for individuals, or for society. Rape is reproductive strategy two.

The final alternative male strategy, however, is also not honorable or desirable for society, and yet has been encouraged for women by “sex-positive” activists as a sign of freedom and escape from puritanism. This third reproductive strategy is that of one-night stands. Of sex with strangers and without commitment or expectation. This strategy does not involve force—many women will often willingly sleep with a guy they just met. Such sexual liaisons do tend to come with some deceit, though, often by both parties. If women adopting some of the worst traits of men is our evidence of equality and freedom, we need to reinvestigate our values. This is reproductive strategy three: sex with neither force nor investment, the short game.

Contra the messaging of sex-positive feminists, engaging in this short game diminishes the sexual power of women. When people of both sexes are routinely seeking frivolous, no-emotional-connection sex, they are creating conditions in which everyone is behaving like men at their (second) worst. It’s not as bad as rape, obviously. But it’s not as good as strategy one, either. Society sliding toward this third reproductive strategy for both men and women is a variation on the Sucker’s Folly—the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit (sexual pleasure) not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.

Women often don’t intuit that there are two distinct male strategies (aside from rape), and so are often advertising toward men engaged in strategy three, the one that looks for one-night stands, while actually angling for men interested in strategy one. Hotness is a manifestation of sexual strategy three gaining primacy. Beauty, by comparison, is a manifestation of the first sexual strategy, the one that’s in it for the long term. Hotness fades fast with reproductive potential. Beauty fades far more slowly.

Failures of Reductionism, Redux: Pornography

There is no such thing as “having sex.” It’s not like “watching Netflix,” or “playing the guitar.” Sex is interactional and emergent, such that “having sex” with person A is not the same as “having sex” with person B. This is, once again, the mistake of reductionism, imagining that a proxy for a thing is the (whole) thing.

Of course, people are fascinated by human sexuality. There is information, in watching others, about hazards and opportunities, both evolutionary and personal. Doing so triggers that third sexual strategy, though, the one that wants to get to the act of sex right away, the one in which it doesn’t matter who it is that one is having sex with.

Men are more likely to be jealous of physical infidelity, women are more likely to be jealous of emotional infidelity. In general, women prefer erotica, which brings with it a backstory, as it were. Porn, targeting that third sexual strategy, reduces human bodies to our constituent parts, and puts a premium on extreme sexual acts as a result of economic competition for attention. Among populations that have come of age on a steady diet of porn, women are far more likely to report being asked to engage in anal sex, strangling, and other violent “games” that are represented on-screen, even though few real women want these things in life.

Porn, we posit, produces what we will call sexual autism. Here, we take the diagnostic criteria for autism and suggest that porn produces, in its adherents, something similar with regard to sexuality: incoming sensory data are of primary importance, and emotional and social communication is backgrounded, if considered at all.

Those who learn sexual behavior via porn tend to display repetitive behavior, and atypical sensitivity to sensory inputs. Sexual communication is difficult for them—probably because communication is a two-way street, and the other person cannot be fully predicted in advance, or controlled. People who have learned about sex through porn have difficulty developing, maintaining, and understanding sexual relationships; insist on inflexible adherence to routine; and show intense fixation on narrow interests. It is, in short, difficult for them to contend with novelty and surprise, with discovery, and with emergence.

If the most complete human sexuality is, as we argue, an emergent property between whole individuals—bodies and brains, hearts and psyches—porn reduces sex to commodity, to acts, to mere bodies. Selecting from a narrow menu of options, sex learned from porn will be repetitive and inflexible, with a narrow focus on orgasm. Those who learn about sex from porn are likely to be insensitive to feedback from anything but their own body. Communication and feedback will not be priorities, nor perhaps understood as values at all. Relationships will be difficult to form, harder still to understand. This is safer, in a way—while you risk not discovering the true highs of human relationship and connection, you are also protected from some of the true lows. What of the world of emotional, deeply human discoveries that are possible with a richly connected sexuality? 

The Corrective Lens

• Avoid sex without commitment. Cheapening sex by seeking it everywhere and at all times renders it more difficult to form a stable bond with one individual, which is the best predictor of a relationship of equals, in which neither partner feels chronically subservient or undervalued. Instead, seek ecstasy and passion, which are more consistently discovered with someone whom you know well, and who knows you well.
• For straight women: Do not succumb to social pressure to embrace easy sex. If you aren’t interested in sleeping with a guy within hours or days of meeting him, and he passes you by for someone who is—what have you lost? You have lost access to a guy dedicated to strategy three. You are better off looking for a good guy who is capable of, and interested in, refusing to act on his basest impulses.
• Keep children far away from pornography. Try to keep yourself away from it as well. The market should not be allowed to intrude on several things, including but not limited to love and sex, music, and humor.
• Do not interfere with children’s development by trying to block, pause, or radically alter their development. Gender is the behavioral expression of sex, and so is both a product of evolution and more fluid than is sex.
• Childhood is a time of identity exploration and formation. Children’s claims to be the sex that they are not should therefore not be indulged as anything beyond normal play and searching for boundaries. While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern “gender ideology” is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.
• Keep contaminants away from fetuses and children. In several species of frogs, there is an established relationship between exposure to common environmental contaminants, like atrazine (an herbicide), and an increase in hermaphroditic individuals. While sex determination in frogs is different than in humans, we will not be surprised if it turns out that some of the modern confusion around sex and gender ends up attributable to widespread endocrine disrupters in our environment.
• Recognize that our differences contribute to our collective strength. If we more highly valued work that women are more likely to be drawn to (e.g., teaching, social work, nursing), perhaps we could stop demanding equal representation of men and women in fields that women are simply not as likely to be interested in. Recognizing that we are, on average, different is the critical first step to building a society in which all opportunities are truly open to everyone.
• Equal opportunity is an honorable goal in step with reality, whereas aiming for equal outcome—in which every occupation, from day-care workers to garbage collectors, has equal representation between the sexes—will disappoint everyone involved.

8. Parenthood and Relationship

Love is a state of the emotional mind that causes one to prioritize someone or something external as an extension of self. Love, the genuine article, is a matter of intimate inclusion. When it is real, there are few forces more powerful.

Love evolved first between mother and child, but then expanded its scope. Soon enough, adults reliably experienced love between partners, and then other forms of love began to blossom—between fathers and children, grandparents and grandchildren, among siblings. Love then found a place between friends and between soldiers, between those who shared intense experiences, good or bad.

Eventually, love evolves to include abstractions—love of country and love of God, love of honor and service, truth and justice.

Love as we experience it first evolved nearly two hundred million years ago, when mammals diverged from reptiles. As with the evolution of sex, the egg is foundational to our understanding of the evolution of love.

The first mammals were egg layers, and eggs do not require love, although in many species they benefit from parental vigilance. But the five extant species of egg-laying mammals—four species of echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus—are substantively different from all other egg-laying species. Mammals, even the ones that lay eggs, make milk. Early on, it was a crude operation: modified sweat glands secreted nutritious fluid that was lapped up off the surface of the mother’s skin. Later, a more elegant solution for delivery evolved: the nipple. In all mammals, nippled or not, milk solves a problem.

A mammal mother can leave her babies in a safe place while she forages, freeing her from having to provide all their food in advance or having to shuttle morsels back to her burrow. Milk also allows the baby’s food to be chemically and nutritionally adjusted in various ways that facilitate development.

Parental Care: Moms, Dads, and Other

Helplessness of hatchlings and newborns—altriciality—is not itself an asset, but this helplessness opens the door to extraordinary things. Major programming of the brain can take place through cultural transmission when offspring are in close contact with their parents. This is far faster than genetic change, and allows not only for rapid behavioral evolution, but also for tailoring of behavioral patterns to the local environment—physical, chemical, biological, and social.

In birds and mammals, altriciality is the downside of behavioral flexibility, which is an asset. Behavioral flexibility, plasticity, emerges in organisms that are not fully programmed by the genome.

In part, cooperative breeding, which is on full display in many human societies, is most likely to evolve when rates of promiscuity are low and resources are distributed across the landscape such that any given individual cannot monopolize them. The monopolization of resources opens the door to the monopolization of mates—indeed, the distribution of resources in space and time has far-reaching effects on mating systems.

Mating Systems

Sexual size dimorphism is a strong predictor of polygyny across vertebrate species. Men are, on average, about 15 percent larger than females, and significantly stronger. This tells us that our ancestors were at least somewhat polygynous or promiscuous.

And while the majority of human cultures have been polygynous at some point in time, the majority of people alive today belong to cultures in which monogamy is the norm. Monogamy is fragile, and easily and often breaks down into polygyny in mammals. Despite this, monogamy is the superior system.

Types of Mating Systems:

• Monogamy: individuals of both sexes have just one partner at a time
• Polygamy: individuals of one sex have just one reproductive partner, but individuals of the other sex have multiple partners. Subtypes include:
  • Polygyny: (poly—many, gyn—female): One male and multiple females
  • Polyandry: (poly—many, andr—male): One female and multiple males.
• Promiscuity: members of both sexes have multiple partners (in humans this is sometimes called polyamory)

Monogamy is the mating system with the greatest potential for cooperation and fairness, beginning with child-rearing. In primates, monogamy is also correlated with the largest relative brain size. Across the biota, females are the limiting sex, which allows them to be choosy about their partners. In a polygynous system, sexual partners abound for females, but they are in short supply for males and—absent an intent to invest beyond the act of sex—males tend to have incredibly low standards for sex partners. If a female does not show obvious signs of a communicable disease, a male is likely to accept just about any willing female. Absent monogamy, this is what sexuality reduces to: females burdened with the entire chore of reproduction, and undiscerning males always on the make.

Because monogamous males select a female and forgo sexual opportunities with others, they have as much reason as females to be choosy about sexual partners. Males being choosy in this way reduces their tendency toward violence. They may yet fight over access to the best females, but no longer need aspire to the acquisition and defense of “harems,” which are closely associated with aggression and physical weaponry like antlers and piercing teeth.

Monogamy also creates a system in which nearly everyone has a mate, as sex ratios tend to be one-to-one within populations, regardless of mating system. This prevents the accumulation of sexually frustrated males for whom violence may be the only path to reproduction, either through the overthrow of harem owners—as in lions and elephant seals—or through rape—as in ducks and dolphins.

Males without “certainty of paternity” are unlikely to stick around to pair-bond with a female and help raise the kids. Male birds tend to have high certainty of paternity (not long between fertilization, egg laying, and hatching), but male mammals are rarely certain at all.

Once pair-bonded, a male is faced with a choice. He can merely guard his chosen female against rivals, or he can contribute in some way to the provisioning and care of their offspring. Paternal care is not universal in monogamous species, but it is common. Paternal care increases the chances that offspring will live to be reproductively viable, and also increases the number of viable offspring that can be produced—both of which contribute to the fitness of male and female alike.

In humans, there seems to have been a positive feedback loop: as babies got more and more helpless, with longer and longer childhoods, the bond between co-parents got tighter and tighter. Love is a manifestation of the tightness of that bond.

Given that monogamy is the route to having full siblings, monogamy thus enhances cooperation between offspring and reduces the tendency of intra-brood conflict.

Illnesses faced by mothers during pregnancy are often the result of a conflict of interest between mother and fetus—an often gentle but real tug-of-war for resources. A mother has a strong interest in dividing resources between her various offspring over her entire reproductive life span, whereas a developing fetus—which has hormonal access to its mother’s bloodstream and is only 50 percent related to its mother—has an interest in taking more than its share, so long as its take doesn’t put its mother’s life at risk. That conflict of interest is mitigated in monogamous populations, in which the fetus has double the interest in the survival of future full siblings compared to populations in which future siblings will be sired by different fathers. From the perspective of a father in a non-monogamous species, another way to put this is that males take advantage of the maternal behavior of females, and their genes continue this parasitism through pregnancy.

Implications of Monogamy in Humans

Sex, gender, relationship, and mating systems: four topics intimately intertwined and shot through with complexity and significance. 

When resources are in surplus, monogamy is likely favored. It provides a clear advantage at the lineage/population level by bringing all able adults into child-rearing, allowing the population to capture resources at the fastest rate. When a population reaches carrying capacity, though, and zero-sum dynamics are once again in play, the incentives of high-ranking men tend to shift in the direction of polygyny. Male-male competition becomes a driving force, as men with wealth and power seek to dominate the reproductive output of multiple women.

When polygyny is on the rise in a society, we see an increase in sexually frustrated young men who are willing to take big risks for the possibility of gaining a mate. The lineages of the relatively few powerful males who benefit from polygyny also benefit by arming frustrated young men and sending them abroad with dreams of coming back with a bride or as a marriageable war hero.

• The possibility of gaining territory and treasure through military adventurism has clear evolutionary implications—it expands the resources available to the conquering population and thereby increases its size. Such military adventurism is also a “transfer of resource” frontier, which is a form of theft.

All else being equal, people in monogamous cultures experience lower birth rates, and higher socioeconomic status, than those in polygynous ones. Furthermore, the age difference between spouses is smaller. In part, this likely reflects a move away from viewing women and girls as commodities, which strongly polygynous cultures often do.

Polygyny is often conflated with a fantasy of promiscuity in which there is an increase in sexual and reproductive freedom without negative consequence. The sexual revolution would seem to bear this out, but it is an illusion for two reasons.

• First, absent birth control, promiscuity is good for men, who procreate almost without cost, and dangerous to women, to whom the entire burden of child-rearing gets shifted.
• Second, promiscuity tends to break down into polygyny as powerful men discover that they are in a position to demand exclusivity from multiple reproductive partners, either in sequence or in tandem.

Prior to birth control, women (and their close kin) guarded their reproductive capacity. Because human babies are so hard to raise, a woman who could insist on help from a man would be foolish to forgo it. In such a world, men had great incentive to impress women to whom they would commit. Our modern arrangement gives women a lot more freedom to enjoy sex without the risk of becoming single parents, but it also radically undercuts their bargaining position with respect to long-term commitment—especially if they engage in reproductive strategy three, the short game.

Men may physically feel as though they have been judged sexually worthy by large numbers of women, but subconsciously they know that the bar for such acceptance has been lowered so far as to be meaningless. Yes, it is sex, but it is junk sex, formulaic and without depth.

Women may consciously want to enjoy sex without commitment, but they are wired to fall in love with the men they bed because sex, babies, and commitment are evolutionarily inextricably linked for women. Sex and orgasm trigger the release of oxytocin in females, which promotes bonding. The situation is similar for males, except that it is not oxytocin but vasopressin that does the job.

The pair-bond-facilitating vasopressin, they argue, will be most present in men when they have sex with women they have known for a longer time. If true, what this would mean for women is that sleeping with a guy you’re really into on the first or second date will actually decrease the likelihood that he will fall in love with you.

Two categories of men benefit from type 3: the wealthy and powerful who are in a position to have multiple partners, and those who delight in pretending to be interested in commitment in order to bed women in whom they then invest nothing. Some men in both of those categories also propose sexual quid pro quo with women trying to advance their careers, a position that women can find impossible to recover from without damage. Somehow, we have replaced a deeply flawed system of mating and dating with one perfectly positioned to transfer all the spoils to kings and cads.

Committed relationships are a good thing, so valuable to the rearing of healthy children. Yet if women in the modern mating and dating scene don’t accept casual sex as normal, they’re often ignored. If they do embrace casual sex, they often unwittingly trigger fear of commitment. Men could be seen as profiting at the expense of women in this situation, which is partly true, but their windfall is mostly an illusion. Yes, men are built to find commitment-less sex rewarding, but they are also built to value loving partnerships. 

Committed relationships are a good thing, valuable to the rearing of healthy children. Yet if women in the modern mating and dating scene don’t accept casual sex as normal, they’re often ignored. If they do embrace casual sex, they often unwittingly trigger fear of commitment. Men could be seen as profiting at the expense of women in this situation, which is partly true, but their windfall is mostly an illusion. Yes, men are built to find commitment-less sex rewarding, but they are also built to value loving partnerships. Casual sex is disrupting that.

Elders and Senescence

Brain and mind are not synonyms—the mind is a product of the brain. Brain is hardware; mind is software. A perfectly functional piece of hardware is of little value if the software and the files are seriously corrupted. If we fixed the brain without somehow retooling the mind—even if every physical pathology of the brain could be banished—most of the centuries of extra life would be wasted in a nightmare scenario of senile minds hobbling youthful bodies.

We spend decades acquiring skills and knowledge about how to function effectively in the world, but this hard-won programming is trapped within bodies that soon succumb to the hostile forces of nature. Were we neurologically hardwired by our genomes, we would be born knowing how to be adults, and we could get there directly. Even among organisms that do have parental care, there is often considerable preprogramming.

Elders pass on the durable knowledge and wisdom by this second mode of inheritance—culture. Because this second mode is cognitive rather than genetic, and culture changes faster than genes, the niches we exploit can change at a staggering rate. This plasticity allows bands of humans to function as coherent bodies, with tasks divided as if into separate organs.

In central Portugal, menopause, which is nearly unique to humans, is not the end of vitality for women. It is the end of direct reproduction, but the ability to provide wisdom and care to the young—to children and to grandchildren—after the risk of continuing to produce new babies is past, can be considered a great gift.

The wisdom of elders is ancient and necessary in human history, and there is deep value in being skeptical of the wisdom of elders, when that wisdom is out of place, or of the wrong time. Parents have an overriding interest in their offspring being highly effective in whatever environment they will inhabit. If the mind’s software needs updating and the young are in a position to accomplish it, it is in everybody’s interest that the antiquated paradigm be replaced. This explains why, for healthy parents, seeing oneself in one’s children is some mixture of rewarding and jarring, but seeing them thrive is a thrill and a relief.

Many believe that as individuals we are entitled to more, that we personally must be preserved, but this desire is in error. Such preservation would interrupt the primary mechanism by which humans innovate and keep pace with change.

Love across Species

Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion. Perhaps you could argue, then, that humans are also partially a canine construct.

Love develops for every evolutionary pairing that requires devotion. We love our pets, and our pets love us. Dogs, in particular, are love generators who hang out with you and help you know that you’re not alone. Dog is love, unmoored.

We need to be careful in how we attribute emotion and intention to other animals—as we should within our own species as well—but there can be no doubt that many other species plan and grieve, love and reflect.

Grief

The only way to avoid grief is to live a life without love. Grief has evolved multiple times across species, always in highly social organisms with parental care.

Modern approaches to loss and to grief tend to overemphasize metrics and logistics and spend too little on meaning and narrative (What did he bring to us? How are we better for him having lived?). We often don’t want to see the body, or sit with it at all. Death is at a remove, and this particular hyper-novel situation, in which it is our choice to not confront the corpse of a loved one, can render us more confused in the aftermath of death.

Grief is us recalibrating our brains for a world without one of its central pieces. We must reformulate our understanding, as we are no longer able to go to that person (or animal) for words of wisdom or comfort, but we are still able to think back, to learn from, and to take comfort in the relationship that can no longer grow, but can still be remembered. We don’t want to believe in their permanent absence, and so our brains create fictions, ghosts: Was that him turning the corner at the café we used to frequent? Surely that was her—I know her hair, her jacket—getting on the train. Grief is the downside of high-bandwidth interdependence. Grief is the downside of love.

The Corrective Lens

• Take time to grieve in a way that feels right to you. In the middle of deepest, earliest grief, sometimes you will be joyous, and sometimes you will not be thinking about the one whom you have lost. It ebbs and flows, loses some of its power over time, but never disappears entirely. No matter what, honor your memories and your inclinations.
• Spend time with the body of your loved one after they die. Those who have lost loved ones to situations from which their bodies could not be recovered often suffer from prolonged periods of grief. When we view our dead, sit with them, and talk with them, we set a foundation upon which our grief, our neural recalibration, can be moored.
• Turn the sound down on your conversations, and watch the actions. Act like an animal behaviorist, especially when interpreting interactions between you and your romantic partner. Much can be learned about the actual emotions in play when you stop listening to words and start watching behavior.
• Be an animal behaviorist on your own emotional state as well. And recognize that if you have contempt or disgust or persistent anger for someone with whom you are in a relationship, these feelings are incompatible with love.
• Avoid dating apps, if you can. The risks are many, including that seeing so many possible partners may make you less interested in going deep with any individual. In such a sea of opportunity, it is also possible to become a perfectionist—to get the sense that the “perfect one” must be out there, if you just keep swiping long enough. Best to have real-life interactions early and often in any relationship that you think might be worth developing.
• Encourage alloparenting of your children—by grandparents, older siblings, friends. If you have only adult women, or only adult men, in your household, an alloparent of the opposite sex stands to be particularly beneficial for your children.
• Breastfeed your infants, if you can. Adults who were breastfed have better formed palates and better-aligned teeth compared to those who were bottle-fed; and breast milk has in it all manner of nutrients and information that we do not understand. It may, for instance, contain cues with which the infant entrains his sleep-wake cycle. Thus, if you do breastfeed, and also pump milk to feed the baby at other times, feeding your baby milk that was pumped at the same time of day as it currently is could be helpful in getting your baby to sleep when you want him to. Put another way: beware Chesterton’s breast milk.

9. Childhood

It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. During childhood, we learn how to be. We also learn who we are, and we dream about who we might become.

We have the longest childhoods on Earth, and we arrive in the world with more plasticity than any other species—meaning that we are the least set-in stone. Software, which is the interplay of experience and knowledge with capacity, is more important in humans than in any other species.

Our ability to learn language is part of our hardware. Nearly all human babies have this competence latent in them. Which language a baby will speak, however, is entirely context dependent. Furthermore, we quickly lose some of our ability to hear and construct the phonemes and tones of languages that are not in our environment, regardless of our particular ethnicity or lineage. Just as we are born with more neuronal potential than we use, we are also born with more linguistic potential than we use, and some of it is lost during childhood. We are born with broad potential, and that potential narrows over time.

We are born to explore the world around us, discover its secrets, and structure our minds accordingly. Once this job is done, we shed our surplus capacity, lest it become a metabolic liability, all cost and no reward.

All species that are social, are long-lived, and have generational overlap also tend to have long childhoods. These other species’ childhoods come with tantrums and play, emotional depth and cognitive capacity, just like ours. The adults that develop from those children of other species have social complexity that is recognizable to us humans as well.

Stealing childhood from the young—by organizing and scheduling their play for them, by keeping them from risk and exploration, by controlling and sedating them with screens and algorithms and legal drugs—practically guarantees that they will arrive at the age of adulthood without being capable of actually being adults. All of these actions—almost always well intentioned—prevent the human software from refining our crude and rudimentary hardware.

Childhood facilitates the passing on of cultural information, and culture can evolve faster than genes. Childhood gives us flexibility in a changing world.

Learning to Navigate Backflips and Traffic

Children learn through observation and experience. While various cultures, including WEIRD ones, focus increasingly on direct instruction (which becomes formalized as school), cultures from the Navajo to the Inuit avoid teaching when at all possible.

Children learn from their parents, from their siblings, from their extended family and friend groups. Siblings have historically been particularly corrective forces, as they tend to be brutally honest when their brother or sister does something poorly, or has an error in judgment. The ways that children enforce their own views of appropriate behavior on other children may look mean to adults, but when children are actually allowed to roam freely, in groups, and engage in long periods of unstructured play, the bullies and jerks are more likely to lose power than gain it, and everyone learns how to both create and follow rules that work. Across cultures in which play has been observed, even very young children who are allowed to engage in open-ended play in potentially dangerous areas with no adult supervision tend to resolve disputes quickly among themselves, and rarely have accidents.

Our societal pendulum has swung too far to one side—to protecting children against all risk and harm—such that many who come of age under this paradigm feel that everything is a threat, that they need safe spaces, that words are violence. By comparison, children with exposure to diverse experiences—physical, psychological, and intellectual—learn what is possible, and become more expansive. It is imperative that children experience discomfort in each of these realms: physical, psychological, and intellectual. Absent that, they end up full-grown but confused about what harm actually is. They end up children in the bodies of adults.

Plasticity

Childhood—and by extension parenting—is an interplay of love and release, of holding someone close while also giving them freedom to explore, even perhaps to leave.

Phenotypic plasticity allows individuals to respond in real time to changing environments, to avoid being canalized into set patterns and lifeways by their genes.

• Human children who chew soft, processed foods have smaller faces as adults than those who grow up chewing hard, tough food.
• Even our critically important aortic arch, the first arterial branch off the heart that takes oxygenated blood to the body, has several common anatomies within human populations, which can develop from highly similar genetic starting gates.

WEIRD parents are not just focused on our children, we are focused on the metrics that are easily recorded and conveyed to others: the when of our child’s first smile, word, or step. Once we have such metrics in hand, we are easily confused into imagining that the when is a critical measure not just of health, but of future capacity. Once again, the easily measured thing—the calorie, the size, the date—becomes an inaccurate stand-in for a larger analysis of the health of the system. By believing in the false notion that when a benchmark is met is the salient measure of health and progress, we play into our modern fear of risk. It is risky for my child to miss a benchmark. It is risky for me not to force my child to meet arbitrary deadlines. Such parental focus can instill fear in our children, which they carry forward as an aversion to risk.

Fragility and Antifragility

Humans are antifragile: We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries. As we grow into adults, exposure to discomfort and uncertainty—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is necessary if we are to become our best selves.

“Expose children to risk and challenge” is therefore a rule, like so many rules in complex systems, that is context dependent. So, while exposing your child to ever greater risk as they grow up is integral to their becoming antifragile, you cannot do so by simply throwing them in the deep end. First, you must make sure that your child knows, at the deepest level, that they are loved, that you have their back, and that no matter what, if they are in trouble, you will do everything possible to come in and get them.

Bond tightly with your children early on. We are fans of attachment parenting: carrying your child as you move through the world, so that they see what you see, and are in literal contact with you; and co-sleeping with your baby (which, contrary to some reports, makes having an infant easier on parents, not harder). When your baby cries, go to him, assure him that he is not alone. A child thus treated is likely to have the confidence, pretty early, to go out adventuring, because they know that someone—their parents—have their back, no matter what.

• So, when some parents try to make their babies resilient by putting them alone in dark rooms and expecting them to learn to comfort themselves, those parents are not understanding what sort of being they have on their hands. There is nothing in our millions of years of evolutionary history that should lead an infant to feel secure alone in a room.
• The younger the child, the more secure and safe she needs to know that she is, which creates the inner strength and resilience to go out and explore sooner, and with greater skill and courage. Just because a parent knows that he adores his child, and would let harm come to himself in order to protect her, does not mean that this is known by the child.

Of course, children will quickly learn to test the system, and to try to game their parents. Parents and children are together for the long haul, and children are selected to figure out parental moves, and to attempt to manipulate them. Indeed, manipulation begins before birth. A fetus is selected to extract resources from its mother, even as the mother is selected to provide for her child, while also keeping some in reserve, both for her own health and for that of future children.

Static rules don’t work with children. Rules have to be nimble, able to change as the child matures, and responsive to both the needs and the tactics of the child. That being said, as early as possible talk to your children as if they are mature and responsible beings. Hold them responsible for their actions, and for ever more of their needs as they grow up. Give them real work to do, not busywork. Do not make false threats (“If you keep doing that, I’ll turn this car around!”). Always make sure that they know they are loved.

Play and Tinkering and Sport

Play, it has been proposed, serves to enable mammalian children to develop kinematic and emotional flexibility for use in unexpected, and uncontrollable, situations.

Broadly speaking, play can explore the physical world, the social one, or some combination of the two. There is terrific value in tinkering, in taking physical objects and moving them through their paces, in taking them apart and seeing if they go back together again.

Many girls are more likely to want to explore explicitly social space—staging tea parties, in which they act out the words and intentions of their guests, which may be dolls and stuffed animals, in advance of having real guests with whom they can interact—and that, too, is exploratory.

Team sports can bring the physical and social together in a fun and creative way, and are a valuable platform for exploration. They are not for everyone, but sports are one way to ensure physical skill, and physical skill facilitates mental clarity and strength. That said, team sports are not a complete replacement for either unstructured play or physical engagement with the world that most would call “work.” Work must be done, and children are well served by doing some of it.

Formal sport is valuable, and physical work is, too, but deeper yet is simple play, with no top-down enforcement of rules. When children make up the rules as they go, or modifying rules for established games for whatever court and gear they have at hand, they are learning deep truths from play.

Older children in mixed-age groups gain practice in nurturing, leading, and mentorship, and often get inspiration for creative activities.

On the Dangers of Apparently Animate Objects That Can’t Respond

Why is there an uptick in diagnoses on the autism spectrum now? We posit that it is, in part, related to the number of children who were raised staring into screens animated with creatures that seemed to be alive but weren’t. Those seemingly alive creatures, which cannot and therefore will not respond to a child’s looks or gestures or questions, send the message to the developing brain that the world is not an emotionally responsive place.

• How is a child to develop a nuanced theory of mind—the ability to attribute mental states to others, and to understand that others can and do have desires and opinions that are different from one’s own?

Humans engage in theory of mind more often and more deeply than any other species. We interact with inanimate and animate objects differently, and learn not to ascribe intent to those that do not react. Letting inanimate objects babysit your young child risks sending the child the message that others in the world are neither responsive to nor deserving of respect and fairness.

Legal Drugs and Children

The considerable rise in mood-altering and behavior-modifying pharmaceuticals being given to children in the last several decades is, we posit, in part a response to children resisting school culture. Boys are more likely to get diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed speed, which “allows” them to focus, and increases the chances that they will tolerate sitting still, facing forward, in neat rows. Because rough-and-tumble play no longer suits our delicate sensibilities as a culture, we prefer to drug our children into submission.

Girls, on the other hand, with less proclivity toward “acting out” and greater proclivity toward being agreeable and anxious, are more likely to get prescribed antianxiety meds and antidepressants. Most school seems better suited to girl ways of being and learning than to boy ways of being and learning, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for girls, either.

Except for rare, extreme examples, many people who exhibit “neurodiversity” benefit from trade-offs that allow them enhanced insight or skills in other areas. There is also value simply in being the “rare phenotype,” in looking at the world differently from how the majority sees it. This logic applies not just to people who have autism spectrum disorder, especially if they are high functioning, but also to people who have ADHD or are dyslexic, dysgraphic, color-blind, left-handed, or more. Given a choice, you might not choose any of these traits for yourself or your children, but that preference may say more about our inability to understand trade-offs—especially cryptic intellectual trade-offs—than it does about what is actually beneficial for individuals, and for society.

While learning differences aren’t inherently good or bad, they can serve to break bad educational relationships. A good teacher-student relationship is liberating, but a bad one can be devastating, and this is made more likely by the quantification of teaching that can turn teachers into seal trainers rather than holistic educators. Once education has become highly canalized—directing people unswervingly into banal and generic choices—the canals themselves become toxic. Having a learning disability can free a person from even being able to play in the toxic canals, which can force such young people to forge their own educational path. This provides a view not only into the current metric-heavy system—one that too often fails to reveal wisdom or capacity—but also into a better, alternative future, one in which there are multiple routes to becoming successful, productive, and antifragile.

Does a Butterfly Remember How to Be a Caterpillar?

As humans, we continue to transform throughout our lives, but the most intense period of transformation is childhood, just as identity is being formed. The fact of transformation can make it challenging to reconcile who you were in early childhood with who you are in late childhood. More challenging yet is reconciling who you were in late childhood, when perhaps you thought yourself already an adult, with who you are as a young adult. This is made even more difficult with a permanent record of those earlier phases always around to remind you (social media).

Combine calls to “be your authentic self” with a Western cultural norm of always being right, and early social media posts are destined to confuse and thwart children as they should be metamorphosing into their adult forms.

If you are on social media in middle school, your identity is bound to be confused and confusing. If your parents were posting images of who you were at seven, and you have those to compare to as well, it’s harder still. Yes, we deserve to have photographs of our children at all stages of development. In general, those photos should not be on display for everyone to see, unless they clearly represent a particular moment in time that is not meant to be universal.

Adult humans remembering precisely how they thought about the world when they were younger is not, in general, necessary to living a good life—especially if those thoughts and images are doctored, not reflective of what was actually true. Being constantly reminded of what we looked like, how we acted, what thoughts we decided to post on social media when we were younger and different is actively getting in the way of the ability to grow up. This applies to adults as well as children.

The Corrective Lens

• Do not expect your children to keep up with the Joneses. Some developmental “delays” are indeed delays, and indicative of physical or neurological problems. But development is wildly plastic, and doesn’t always happen in the order you expect it to, or at predetermined moments. Don’t panic if your kid isn’t reading in the second grade. The chances he’s going to grow up illiterate are slim to none. Earlier is not necessarily better. Early walkers, talkers, or readers do not inherently become more adept, smarter, or more productive adults.
• Encourage active engagement with the physical world. Do this mostly by modeling it, but also by making opportunities and, to some extent, toys that make it easy and fun, available. Allow mistakes. Expect accidents, falls, minor injuries. Be prepared for the possibility of larger injuries. Remember that people do not learn exclusively from being told what others have learned—especially physical truths. They have to have the close calls themselves.
• Do not let inanimate objects babysit your children, especially if those objects are masquerading as animate ones.
• Do let children play without adult supervision as early and often as possible. This includes in game and sport situations where there are established rules.
• Consistently follow through on your promises, both positive and negative. Do not make a threat and then not follow through. Better not to make such threats in the first place, but if you do make them make sure that you deliver.
• Expect that static rules will get gamed. Becoming an adult is, in part, about learning what the system is, where its weaknesses are, and how to take advantage of those weaknesses. Children learn this in the system that their natal home provides. Make honorable systems, listen to children when they have grievances, take them seriously from an early age, but do not pretend to them or yourself or anyone else that yours is a friendship rather than a parent-child relationship. Stop manipulation every time that it starts.
• Do not helicopter or snowplow your children. Let them make their own mistakes. At the same time, make clear rules. One they we set was: “You are allowed to break an arm, a leg, a wrist, an ankle. But you may not break your skull or your back, or impair your senses.” This allowed their children a sense of what kinds of risks were acceptable to take, and also what kind of plans B, C, D, and so on they needed to have in order to protect their brains and central nervous systems above all else.
• Do not spoil your children; instead, give them responsibilities early on. A child who is catered to constantly comes to expect it, and is destined to be both dissatisfied with the world beyond his natal home and unwilling and likely unable to do much for himself.
• Let your children in on (almost) every conversation. Reward your children’s inquisitiveness with conversation, and do not dumb ideas down for them. Obviously, there are some things that are inappropriate at various developmental stages and ages, and what you personally decide is appropriate and when will vary by person, but in general, assume that your child is smart and can handle the content of an adult conversation. Don’t try to make them interested, just have it, demonstrate through your actions that this is what is valuable, and they will come to value it too (just like with food). Similarly, involve them in tasks that are actually useful, and engage them in those tasks in a way that enhances their understanding of the world.
• Let siblings (and friends) teach each other, and do not intervene whenever they have a disagreement or altercation. If they ramp up their arguments so that you have to get involved, do not reward such behavior. They should be resolving their own disputes as early as possible.
• Let your children sleep. Sleep plays a crucial role in brain development, and when synapses—the connections between neurons—are being generated at a very high rate, sleep expands in scope as well.
• Do not succumb to dominant parenting expectations. Most of them are silly—at best unnecessary, at worst actually harmful. Listen to your own self, and don’t let parental peer pressure get you doing things that you take issue with, or that feel wrong for your children. 
• Do not make a habit of displaying your children on social media.
• Provide ample free time for your children and, if possible, allow them to explore unwatched during that time.
• Be the kind of person you want them to become. 

10. School

The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives. John Taylor Gatto, in A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

Keep your wits about you. Believe that you can rather than that you cannot. Build deep community and, having built it, trust that it will be there for you.

In light of the relative rarity of teaching both in other species and among other human cultures, we should be asking ourselves: What do we need to learn in order to become our best selves? And of those things that we do need to learn, which of them need to be taught, and which can we learn in other ways—through direct experience, or through observation and practice, for instance? Put another way: What do we need school for?

You do need school to learn to read and write. Reading and writing are so new that we need an educational supplement in order to learn it. School is also useful to learn cell biology, written history, and all but the most basic math. Literacy, like math and thinking from first principles, is like an adaptive foothill, though, and once you’re literate (or numerate, or adept with logic), you can teach yourself many things without requiring further school.

We can also use school to discuss texts with real people, to gain exposure to ways of thinking about and representing the world about which we were previously ignorant, and to gain experience in proposing and running scientific experiments. School is not necessary to engage in any of those pursuits, but it can be useful.

In school we also might learn what it sounds like when irreconcilable positions meet one another. This allows an insightful person to go on to do the same thing within themselves: hold two irreconcilable positions in their head at once. The value in this is immeasurable; it allows a person to learn argument by arguing with themselves, which facilitates their ability to both uncover and recognize truth. Humans are perhaps unique in the degree to which our theory of mind—the ability to understand that other living beings have points of view, and that those perspectives might be different from our own—enables us to explore contradiction and paradox.

• While the West has tended to avoid paradoxes and to find them troublesome, Eastern traditions are more likely to have embraced inconsistency. We argue that Buddhism being littered with contradictions is adaptive, serving exactly the educational purpose we are advocating for. Similarly, classrooms ought to be littered with paradoxes, left in various states of interpretation, for children and older students to discover and poke at and understand.

Because memory and recall are easy to assess and measure, they can easily become the metric that is being chased, by students and teachers and schools alike. Far harder to teach and to quantify—and at least as valuable, if not more so—are critical thinking, logic, and creativity. Memory exercises tend to drill down on detail, on facts that are unchanged by context. Trade-offs being ubiquitous, a focus on memorized details, then, will likely come at the expense of a focus on the big picture.

While people don’t intuit the formalization of the scientific method, children are inclined to observe pattern, to postulate reasons for the pattern, and to try to figure out if they’re right. All people are inclined to be verificationists, to look for verifying evidence of their own correctness, rather than to look for falsifying evidence that, if it doesn’t show up, makes their precious idea look more and more likely.

What Is School?

School is based on an economic efficiency, while being unimaginative about what could be accomplished. The economics—not to mention the perverse incentives behind compulsory schooling—of school tend to fill children’s heads with knowledge, without showing them a path to wisdom.

Perhaps school should serve the purpose of helping young people grapple with the question: Who am I, and what am I going to do about it? Another way of phrasing this might be: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Or: How do I find my consciousness, my truest self? Done well, then, school can provide a great platform for formalizing and delivering rites of passage. Rather than focusing on any version of these questions, though, modern schooling, especially the compulsory sort widespread across the WEIRD world, is more apt to teach quiescence and conformity.

Or perhaps school should reveal to children that fringe positions should be explored and considered, not thrown out immediately on the basis that they are unpopular. Betting against the fringe is an easy and safe bet and when done in a tone of paternalistic indulgence, say, or authoritarian disdain, it usually shuts down dissent. While most fringe ideas are in fact wrong, it is exactly from the fringe that progress is made. This is where the paradigm shifts happen. This is where innovation and creativity occur, and yes, most of it is wrong or useless, but the most important ideas on which we now base our understanding of the world and our society came from the fringe.

School should be fun, but it should not be gameable. A child shouldn’t be able to “win” at school (although many do, and many more lose at it). Social rules are learned at school, but at its base, school should be about discovering truth, both universal and local. School is, for better and for worse, a stand-in for parents, for kin group, for those with whom the child has shared fate.

School should not, therefore, teach through fear. Risk and challenge help children learn. As with parenting, this requires early tight bonding, during which a secure base is established, which provides children the confidence to go out adventuring fairly early, because they know that someone has their back, no matter what. School that operates by fear will teach the opposite lesson.

• Fear is an easy mechanism of control, and so it should not be surprising that teachers use fear to control students of all ages. As corporal punishment in the classroom fell out of favor in many (but not all) places, psychological and emotional control replaced it. 
• Children are threatened with poor grades, poor test scores, and having their parents informed that they have behaved badly. The rise of metrics within a system—which are often overly simple, wrongheaded, and only pseudo-quantitative—tends to accompany a decay in social trust.

One approach, which will be more effective with older children and young adults, is for teachers to explicitly hand away their own authority by telling students not to trust them just because they are the figure in the front of the room. When a teacher then does earn the respect and the trust of her students, such that she becomes a legitimate authority figure, one with authority that was earned rather than assumed, her authority will better serve both the students and their education.

• Using fear to keep children seated in neat and tidy rows, to keep their eyes forward and their mouths closed, to keep them from moving their bodies at all but for a few scheduled moments in each day—this will help create adults who are unable to regulate their own bodies and senses, unable to trust in their own ability to make decisions, and likely to demand similarly controlled environments in their adult lives—trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the like.

For young schoolchildren, one solution would be having a garden at school, and spending time in it in all sorts of weather. Frequent field trips to natural areas, and spending time actually outside rather than in the climate-controlled protection of the “nature center,” help, too. Will it always be comfortable? No. Will some children be ill prepared for rain or wind or sun? Yes. Will they learn from small, early mistakes to start taking responsibility for their own bodies and fates and so get better at navigating the world? Yes. Yes, they will.

Preparing students to understand risk encourages them to expand their worldviews, and embrace experiences that lead to maturity. This does, however, come at a cost: understanding risk cannot completely protect individuals from danger.

Modern school tends to protect against individual tragedies, while facilitating the larger, societal ones. Arrange all the little boys and girls neatly in rows, assign them seats, and tell them never to speak unless they are called on first, because that will make it easier to keep track of them. At the same time, at home, teach the little boys and girls that they are each the center of the entire universe, and that they may and in fact should interrupt adults at any moment, for any reason. Teach the children that temper tantrums are acceptable by caving to them whenever they erupt, and also tell the children that they are the most precious and infallible beings in existence, and as such, any criticism is a crime against their core selves.

We should not be surprised when children raised this way can make no sense of the confused and confusing messages coming at them from home and from school. Nor should it surprise us when they gravitate to the systems that are most gameable.

Congratulations, society, you have successfully produced self-satisfied whiners who are accustomed to getting what they want, who are good at school but not at thinking, and who are, in fact, neither smart nor wise.

The World Is Not About You

The rise of pharmaceuticals being prescribed to children, helicopter and snowplow parenting, and the near ubiquity of screens have all made school an even more difficult place than it once was. In the United States, add to these the economic and political forces that have reduced school funding while increasing testing, thus cutting the creativity and freedom of teachers off at the knees.

Risk and potential go hand in hand. We need to let children, including college students, risk getting hurt. Protection from pain guarantees weakness, fragility, and greater suffering in the future. The discomfort may be physical, emotional, or intellectual—My ankle! My feelings! My worldview! —and all need to be experienced to learn and grow.

By inculcating in children the sense that order is always better than chaos, and that being easily counted and prioritizing doing things that are easily counted is the honorable way to go through school (and therefore life, many would extrapolate), society creates adults who bristle at the unexpected and the new.

Higher Ed

Science and art, in particular, often mistakenly described as at opposite ends of some imagined spectrum in the pursuit of truth and meaning, do not make their primary impact in the world through careful, thoughtful assessment and critique of what has come before. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and yes, the history of ideas and of creations that came before us is integral to what we know and think and do, but that does not mean that it ought to be our primary focus, or that it is our mission.

Tools Are More Valuable Than Facts

Explicitly tell students—and make sure that it is true—that they are not in competition with one another. Our students actually learned more when they collaborated with one another. There was never a “curve” looming that guaranteed that some would fail. Another piece of the puzzle is to break the “this is the time of day that we are educated” paradigm, by leaving the classroom and spending more time together. When students and faculty do this, and break bread together day after day for several days or weeks or even months, it becomes clear that, actually, good questions show up at all hours of the day, all days of the week, and if you are traveling with an intellectual tool kit that you have cultivated through logic, creativity, and practice, you can engage such questions whenever and wherever they arise, not just in the classroom when the authority with the appropriate degree is standing in front of you, paid to answer your questions.

Intellectual Self-Reliance

When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education. Teller, in “Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic”

The brick-in-the-wall model creates minds that are all alike, minds that are ever less capable of generating or considering strange new ideas, minds that are outraged by confusion, and by uncertainty. Nearly every student whom they taught was, in the end, game to be challenged, actually challenged—told when they were wrong, told the teachers when they were wrong, and told that they needed to learn to pose real questions and then sit in the not-knowing for long enough to figure out how one might figure it out.

What harm can come from looking up answers to straightforward questions? The harm is that it trains us all to be less self-reliant, less able to make connections in our own brains, and less willing to search for relevant things that we do know, and then try to apply those things to systems we know less about. If answering “how” questions quickly, with a few keystrokes, impedes the development of self-reliance, what of the desire to pursue “why” questions this way? It is even more likely to kill logical and creative thought. Why do birds migrate? Why are there more species closer to the equator? Why does the landscape look this way? Before you look it up— think on it. Walk on it. Sleep on it. Talk about it. Share your ideas with your friends, and when they disagree, engage the disagreement.

Calm Down, Level Up

In the past, it was difficult to find yourself in a habitat without having an intimate understanding of it. Either you had received wisdom about it from your elders, or you had come to understand it by entering it from the edge, gradually immersing yourself in it. We moderns, though, live in such a rapidly and unpredictably changing habitat that none of us can claim to be fully native in it. We also have a problem of abrupt boundaries that our ancestors did not, a strangely clear line demarcating safety from not: the swimming pool; the garbage disposal; the curb.

Fear, anger, and hyperbole sell products, attract an audience, and are a useful tool of control. They are not, however, representative of the best that we can do as humans. Terror-inducing stories may be a hack to prompt appropriate behavior in modernity. It is a failure of education to scare people into acceptable behavior. If the ultimate goal of education is to produce capable, curious, compassionate adults, helping students stay calm and capable of reason, rather than in a constant state of alarm, is a far better route to that end.

Observation and Nature

One set of goals for higher ed ought to be to teach students how to hone their intuitions, become experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations.

It takes being willing to fix your own errors. Modeling for students the actual process by which ideas emerge, and are refined and tested, then rejected or accepted, allows them to move away from the linear models of knowledge acquisition that most of their schooling, and nearly every textbook, have inculcated in them.

If education is, in part, preparation for an unpredictable and shifting world, teaching courage and curiosity ought to be a priority.

By creating opportunity to go into nature—regardless of what your discipline is, and what you are trying to teach—you allow students to begin trusting themselves, rather than taking other people’s words for what is true.

Students may think that they want to be seduced, led astray by false praise, as it feels good in the moment. Most whom we met, though, wanted to be educated, led forth from narrow, faith-based belief into intellectual self-sufficiency, where they could assess the world and the claims in it from first principles, with respect and compassion for all.

The Corrective Lens

School and, parents should teach children:

• Respect, not fear.
• To honor good rules and question bad ones. All people run into bad rules—whether in the legal system, at home, at school, or elsewhere. If you’re a parent, strive to show your children that you are 100% on their team—no matter the trouble they’ve bumped up against. Children should be free to ask why the parents’ rules are what they are, but also know that it is counterproductive to break the rules simply for the sake of breaking them.
• To get out of their comfort zone and explore new ideas. You will likely learn the least in exactly the areas where you are most certain of what you already know, whether or not what you (think you) know is actually accurate.
• The value of knowing something real about the physical world. When you have a sense of physical reality, you are less likely to be gameable by the social sphere. Never accept conclusions on the basis of authority; if you find that what you are being taught does not match your experience of the world, do not acquiesce. Pursue the inconsistencies.
• What complex systems actually look like, even if the messiness of those systems is beyond the scope of the lesson. Nature is an example of such a system. Nature provides, among other things, a corrective to the ideas that emotional pain is equivalent to physical pain, and that life is or can be made perfectly safe. Exposure to complexity is key.

Higher education, in particular, should recognize that:

• Civilization needs citizens capable of openness and inquiry; these should therefore be the hallmarks of higher education. The need for nimble thinking, creativity in both the posing of questions and the search for their solutions, an ability to return to first principles rather than rely on mnemonics and received wisdom—these are ever more important as we move forward in the 21st century.
• A misunderstanding of how work will look in the future is driving people to specialize earlier and more narrowly. Higher ed is the natural place to counteract that trend and push toward greater breadth, nuance, and integration. Students of traditional college age today cannot accurately predict what their career will look like by the time they are seventy, fifty, or even thirty. College is where breadth should be inculcated.
• A university cannot simultaneously maximize the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of social justice, as Jonathan Haidt has famously noted. This is a basic trade-off, and unavoidable. It becomes important, then, to ask what the purpose of a university is. Is it necessary that we focus on the pursuit of truth? Yes, in fact it is.
• Social risks—intellectual, psychological, emotional—must be taken, but doing so in front of strangers is particularly difficult. Both small class sizes and extended time together building community are correctives to anonymity.
• Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas. Bob Trivers, evolutionary biologist, once advised them to seek positions in which they taught undergraduates. His reasoning was this: Undergrads do not yet know the field, and so are likely to ask questions that you aren’t expecting, “dumb” questions, or ones imagined to already be settled. When the educator is confronted with such questions, one of three things is likely to be true:

1. Sometimes the field is right, and the answer is simple. Full stop.
2. Sometimes the field is right, but the answer is complex, nuanced, or subtle. Figuring out, or remembering, how to explain that complexity or subtlety is worth the time of any thinker who deserves the title.
3. Sometimes the field is wrong, and the answer is not understood, but it takes a naive view of the matter to ask the question.

• Classrooms are effectively sterile boxes removed from the world. It is difficult to learn in such a situation, because you won’t run into the things that you need to learn but that cannot be taught—things like how to survive tree falls, boat accidents, and earthquakes.

11. Becoming Adults

Rites of passage are useful as markers of transition. But they are rather uncommon among WEIRD people, less ritualistic, and this has contributed to our losing track of the characteristics of adulthood. Historically, adults were those who knew how to feed and shelter themselves, how to be constructive and productive members of a group, how to think critically. This knowledge does not magically accrue with age, though. It must be earned.

Across cultures, rites of passage therefore provide clear signals to you, the individual, about how far along you are and what society can expect from you. Without these markers, we are more likely to end up with widespread confusion—thirty-year-olds who are effectively children, unfamiliar with responsibility, and eight-year-olds who are granted adultlike status with regard to their ability to determine, for instance, what sex they truly are. Rites of passage thus coordinate society with respect to what is expected of individuals at various stages of development, and they exist in two forms: temporal (age) and, loosely, merit (earned).

Age is a rough guide to what a person should be able to do, and merit is a specific guide for what an individual is capable of or, in the case of marriage, signing up for. These have been abandoned or corrupted across WEIRD culture. Temporal rites are loosely and inconsistently applied, and merit rites are largely gameable.

People who are deserving of being called “adult” can observe themselves carefully and skeptically, and regularly ask themselves questions like these: Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being closed-minded? Am I entrenched in a worldview, and if so, why? Am I coming to conclusions independently, or have I accepted an ideology that I allow to do my thinking for me? Do I avoid collaboration that would be valuable, if it would also be challenging? Am I letting emotions make decisions for me, especially hot, intense emotions? Am I ceding my adult responsibilities, and do I make excuses when I do?

• These questions all ask, in different ways: Am I doing as well as I should or could be doing? Answers will often be easier to find through one of the two categories of rites of passage. Age rites tell people what to expect of others and allow society to hold individuals accountable when they don’t rise to the occasion. This teaches us to ask: Am I doing my job? Because others will be expecting that we are.
• Merit rites teach us to think for ourselves and, when accomplished, view ourselves as people of knowledge and skill. They also convey this to society. This raises the bar of what is expected and what it means to “do your job.” The interplay of expectation and accountability would naturally result in more self-examination to ensure you are living up to what is expected.

One of those adult responsibilities is to not spend money on every latest thing. Selling delayed gratification is rarely a successful business strategy, so it is hard to find in the marketplace. Instead, junk everything is available—junk food, entertainment, sex, news. The aggregate of the market is therefore selling infantile values, which make you a desirable consumer but a poor adult.

Absent the hyper-novelty and unconstrained market forces of 21st century WEIRD societies, childhood is when you take in information from your ancestors, and discover the world that you inhabit, both physically and cognitively. Adulthood, then, is the phase in which you operationalize what you have learned, and become productive.

Our narratives are also no longer shared at the societal level. The tremendous choice that we have in picking and choosing narratives means that when we partner with people, we generally share a language but not the baseline set of beliefs or values that we would have in an ancestral environment. Historically, shared narratives, or at least the cross-pollination of narratives, kept manipulation in check. Now those systems are breaking down. In the past, those creating and those consuming the narratives—be it religion or myth, news or gossip—had shared fate, and they knew it. Now we live in such a fractured society that most of us have little sense of our shared fate—that we all live, for instance, on a single planet on which we depend.

School, which should be helping young people learn how to be successful adults, is mostly rudderless at best, and actively harmful to development too much of the time. Products and algorithms coming at children will do them harm, their motivational structures will be hacked, their peers will lead them astray. They will not be unscathed. How, then, to become functional adults?

Laboratory of the Self

The problem for humans who are trying to figure out how to live in the world is that we are each our own unique, complex system. There are some universals, to be sure—toxins and advertising and sedentary lifestyles are risky for all of us. Consider, though, that our internal wiring is so distinct from that of the next person, that for many topics, the advice that works for person A may well fall flat for person B.

Humans are capable of inhabiting every human niche that has ever been exploited: we are hyper-plastic. Combine that with a modern environment that is ultra-noisy, and we all face an independent landscape of dysfunction.

Roughly speaking, such would-be self-help gurus fall into four categories: the con artists, the confused, the correct but of finite applicability, and the universally useful. We posit, and we hope by now you agree, that many evolutionary truths are universally useful.

• Effective con artists are hard to see in advance, but it’s up to all of us to learn to do so.
• In the second category are those who are confused, spouting “wisdom” because it attracts people and money, not recognizing that such wisdom may have no relationship to truth or value. Both con artists and the confused are generally playing an entirely social game. Many of the confused, and the con artists, appear to have dispensed with core beliefs altogether, navigating in an entirely social mode with no reference to external reality. Rather than having generated ideas based on their fit with reality, they have generated them based on how they are received by their audience. Sometimes there will be “tells” in how they present material. However, you figure out who they are, do not seek such people for advice.
• In the third category are people who are correct in claiming that they have discovered something that has worked for them, but (and they may not be aware of this) what works for them may not work for you. Their wisdom has limited applicability.
• Finally, the fourth category includes those rare people who have advice that is universally applicable.

The trick, then, is in figuring out how to:

• Dispense with the con artists and the confused.
• Learn how to distinguish, within the third category, between those with advice that works for them but is inapplicable for you; and those who know something that, if you can figure out how to apply it, would improve your life almost instantly. Do this by engaging in a kind of scientific Buddhism. Banish noise, notice small potential patterns, and test hypotheses within yourself for what works.
• Adopt the good advice of those in the fourth category, those few who actually have universally applicable advice.

Complexity and noise are the enemies of signal. The solution involves controlling your experiments as much as is possible given the constraints of the environment. Change only one thing at a time. Do it fully and completely (if you cheat, you’ve learned nothing, but you may be fooled into thinking that you now have information). And give it time to work.

Types of Reality

Many modern people seem to imagine that by changing people’s opinions or perspectives, you change underlying reality. In short, they believe that reality itself is a social construct.

How do you avoid becoming someone who assesses the world based on social responses rather than based on analysis, one of those people who are easily fooled by con artists and the confused? Two good strategies are to regularly engage with the physical world and to understand the value of close calls. The sad truth is that the more “educated” you are today, the harder this is to do. Our current higher education system is steeped in a philosophy that doubts our ability to even perceive the physical world. That philosophy is called postmodernism.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed. Postmodernism, and its ideological child, post-structuralism, were once contained in a small corner of the academy. These ideologies do contain kernels of truth. They teach us that our sensory apparatus biases us, and that we are mostly unaware of those biases. They reveal that schools, factories, and prisons are similar in their use of power to control populations (as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his metaphorical extension of Bentham’s Panopticon). And Critical Race Theory has at its foundation the real observation that the American legal system has had a particularly difficult time emerging from its racist past, and that full recovery from that past is not yet on the horizon. These are a few real and valuable contributions that such ideologies have contributed to the world. But most modern instantiations of postmodernism have jumped the shark.

• Postmodernism and its adherents have infiltrated systems far beyond higher ed and are doing considerable harm. One of the most astounding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.
• If you have little or no experience with the effects of your actions in the physical world, and therefore have not had occasion to see the reactions they produce, then you will be more prone to believing in a wholly subjective universe, in which every opinion is equally valid.
• Every opinion is not equally valid, and some outcomes don’t change just because you want them to. Social outcomes may change if you argue or throw a fit. Physical outcomes will not.

Our eyes are tools of our brains, taking note of the world. We are fully embodied—our bodies are not afterthoughts to our brains, or unnecessary to their interpretation of the world. Perception is an action. The more you move, therefore, within whatever your particular limits are, the more integrated, whole, and accurate your perception of the world is likely to be. Movement increases wisdom. So, too, does exposure to diverse views, experiences, and places. We need both freedom of expression, and freedom to explore, because both speak to the value of environments in which outcomes are uncertain.

Pursue feedback from the vast universe that exists beyond other human beings. Watch your reactions when the feedback comes in. The more time you spend pitting your intellect against realities that cannot be coerced with manipulation or sweet talk, the less likely you are to blame others for your own errors.

On the Benefit of Close Calls

The fact that we tend to believe in bad luck, but not in good luck, makes it more difficult to learn from our mistakes.

Trying to explain away the past, rather than learning from it and moving on, is a poor use of time and intellectual resources.

Having close calls is part of the set of experiences that are necessary in order to grow up. If your child has been made totally safe, living a life with no risk, then you have done a terrible job of parenting. That child has no ability to extrapolate from the universe. If you, as an adult, are totally safe, you are probably not reaching your potential.

On Fairness and Theory of Mind

Being an adult, in part, means not abdicating responsibility, especially when others are depending on you. Being an adult also means engaging in cooperation on a number of levels. We may engage in kin selection, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity.

When your group is threatened, you rally, and the bonds within the group grow stronger. In good times, however, when things are easy, group stability tends to fray, first around the edges, and ultimately at the core. Again, economic markets prey on this tendency, destabilizing our sense of self and community, causing us to look elsewhere for the missing ingredient that will, finally, make us happy, productive, and secure.

One thing that theory of mind provides potential access to is a sense of fairness. The concept of what’s “fair” didn’t originate with philosophers. It didn’t emerge with city-states, or with agriculture. It wasn’t new to hunter-gatherers, either, or to our first bipedal ancestors. Monkeys keep track of what’s fair, and what’s not, and they have decided opinions about unfair practices in their social realm.

Markets prey on our sense of fairness. They fool us into thinking that everyone else is getting grapes, while we are stuck with cucumber. If other people already have those better things, why don’t we? Our sense of fairness is thus kept off balance, always threatened by the invisible other consumers who already have the next big thing, and thus must be doing better than we are. We are still trying to keep up with the Joneses, but the Joneses are no longer our neighbors. They are now a tiny fraction of the world’s elite piped into our screens, and photoshopped to boot.

As humans, one of the ways that we test the moral waters and assess the mood of a group and its boundaries is through humor. It helps mitigate questions of fairness. Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can’t be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problems lurking just beneath the surface. Furthermore, attempts to induce laughter inorganically—as with laugh track—is the market once again trying to intrude on honorable human tendencies to bond over shared experience and understanding. Laugh track ultimately renders us more humorless, and less capable of connecting with actual human beings.

On Addiction

Many things have a pathological version. Pathology is not the same as “downside”—senescence is a downside of early adaptive traits, but it is not pathological. In contrast, arrogance is pathological confidence.

Positive obsession has many words in English: passion, focus, drive. The primary manifestation of negative obsession, of pathological obsession, is addiction.

Our software is built to maximize our fitness, even if our conscious minds have other priorities. But our software has an increasingly difficult time telling signal from noise, because our map of what enhances fitness in the ancestral world does not prepare us well for the modern world.

Our intuitive sense of the fitness value of behaviors is thus often wrong in modernity. Our intuition had a greater chance of leading us to the right choice before the Industrial Revolution, before hyper-novelty was ubiquitous. Many of us are now effectively able to pull levers, like rats with access to amphetamine, and get a concentrated burst of euphoria that doesn’t just obscure the risk of that euphoria, but makes it ever less likely that we can turn away from it in the future. It’s another instantiation of the Sucker’s Folly: the reward obscures the cost.

“Reward” is not binary—it is not simply a positive or a negative. The valence and size of the reward depend, in part, on what the other possibilities are—the opportunity cost. The cost-benefit analysis is incomplete until you compare it to what else you could be spending the time on.

Boredom is effectively synonymous with the “opportunity cost” having gone to zero: if you believe there is nothing else enriching that you could spend your time on, then the calculation of whether or not to engage with a particular substance or action is skewed, particularly if that substance or action results in a feeling of enrichment, even a false one.

• It is, of course, too simple to say that boredom causes addiction. There are many factors at play: the limiting nature of ancestral environments did not require self-regulation for most substances or behaviors; both trauma and psychological disorders disrupt decision-making processes; emotions are hijacked by addictive substances and behaviors that create a false incentive structure; and social pressures often drive calculations toward consumption.

The Corrective Lens: How to Give Yourself a Raise

• Explicitly aim to be an adult. Do this, in part, by regularly asking yourself the questions that we posed at the beginning of the chapter (Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being closed-minded? . . .), and by minimizing the effects of economic markets on your daily life.
• Become aware of the constant flow of information telling you what to think, how to feel, how to act. Do not let it into your mind. Do not let it steer you. Your internal reward structure needs to be independent and un-gameable. That independence, in turn, should allow you to collaborate well with others who are similarly independent. Be wary of those who may well be nice, but who are captured.
• Always be learning. Look for collaborators. Play at competition, and be prepared to stop playing if things get real. Be skeptical, if not suspicious, of any novel prescription for which the rationale is unstated or thin on reflection.
• Revive, or create, rites of passage in your life. Celebrate not just the passage of time, but also developmental transitions. Honor graduations and marriages, births and deaths, but also career and job changes and promotions, the completion of important analytical or creative tasks, and the ends of eras, when they are recognizable as they end.
• Seek out physical reality, not just social experience. Pursue feedback from the physical universe, not just from subjective social sources. Move your body.
• Gain experience with model systems that tell you how things actually work.
• Get over your bigotry. Variation is our strength. Not just sex and race and sexual orientation, but class, neurodiversity, characteristics of personality—all of this adds to what we can accomplish on Earth.
• Place equality where it belongs. Equality should be focused on the equal valuation of our differences. It should not be a bludgeon for uniformity.
• Smile at people—the people with whom you live, the person behind the counter, the stranger on the street.
• Be grateful.
• Laugh daily, with other people.
• Put your phone down. 
• Define your fights for whom and what you love, rather than against whom and what you hate. If a mob ever comes for people you know, people whom you consider friends, stand up and say, “No, you’re wrong.” Be honorable and courageous when bullies move in. Speak up for what you know to be true, even if it makes you a social pariah.
• Learn how to give useful critique without backing the other person into a corner. With our children, when they fall off a unicycle or don’t do well on a math test, we tell them it’s “not your best work.” It’s true; it doesn’t pretend that every action is worthy of a gold star; and it demonstrates that we know that they can do better work, and that this wasn’t it.
• Count fewer things about your life (calories, steps, minutes), and do more.
• Develop a theory of close calls. When a close call occurs, have a plan for how you will leverage it to gain a better understanding of yourself and the world.
• Calm down, and level up.
• Learn to jump curves. Diminishing returns are a factor for every complex phenomenon, so learn to jump curves (put another way: consider learning a new thing rather than being a perfectionist and trying to get ever better at whatever you are already really, really good at).

12. Culture and Consciousness

The Age of Information brings the promise of a collective (metaphorical) campfire, a decentralized thing where people who have never met in real life can be warmed by the presence of other minds, sharing ideas and reflections.

But the online world does not have the structures that made discussion around the hearth so valuable. An ancestral campfire places everyone’s reputation—earned over a lifetime—front and center. Around an ancestral campfire, each person would have some basis for elevating or discounting claims and proposals based on the individual’s known strengths and deficits, and taking the history of the discussion into account. The virtual campfire is, by contrast, a free-for-all. We don’t really know one another, our visible history is often misleading, many users are anonymous, and some participants have a hidden dog in the fight. 

Campfires both metaphorical and literal are a convergence point for culture and consciousness, where people come together in good faith to learn the old wisdom and to challenge it.

Culture we define as beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of a population. These beliefs are often literally false, metaphorically true, implying that they result in increased fitness if one acts as if they are true despite the fact that they are either inaccurate or unfalsifiable. Culture is a special mode of transmission because it can be passed horizontally, rendering cultural evolution immensely faster and more nimble than genetic evolution. This also renders culture noisy in the short term, before new ideas have endured the test of time. Long-standing features of culture, by contrast, constitute an efficient packaging of proven patterns. Culture can spread horizontally, but its consequential parts are ultimately passed vertically, from generation to generation. Culture is received wisdom, generally handed to you by ancestors, and efficiently transmitted.

Consciousness we define as that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange, meaning that conscious thoughts are ones that could be delivered if someone asked what you were thinking about. It is emergent cognition, where innovation and rapid refinement occur. Conscious thoughts may never be conveyed, but they can be, and the most important ones are, as consciousness is most fundamentally a collective process in which many individuals pool insights and skills to discover what was previously not understood. The products of consciousness are, if they prove useful, ultimately packaged into (highly transmissible) culture.

As mentioned earlier the human niche is niche switching. They argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.

Through parallel processing of multiple human minds, our consciousness can become collective, and we can solve problems that neither we could solve as individuals nor our ancestors could have even imagined.

• In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns.
• But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.

That said, novel levels of novelty, such as we are experiencing now, are a special danger. This means that what’s needed today—and urgently—is a call to consciousness on a scale that we have not seen before.

Consciousness in Other Animals

Sociality involves recognition of individuals, the tracking of social fate, and iterated interactions that are, at least plausibly, continuing into the future.

Aggregation of animals like tree frogs and salmon are not conscious as they are not sociable in that way. Congregations of baboons in the other hand have very conscious culture.

Innovation at the Margins of the Ancestors’ Wisdom

As a people move across space, it is relatively easy to notice as the ancestors’ wisdom becomes less applicable. As a people move through time, however, as we all do, elders may not recognize their wisdom becoming out of date. The young see it. It is no accident that those who are coming of age in times of change and push boundaries, and that language and norms change somewhat with each generation. Throughout history, the ancestors’ wisdom has generally remained relevant long enough for new generations to get their footing, to know what needs to be pushed against. As a people move through time that is changing extremely rapidly, however, as our world is now, it is more difficult to know what to do with the increasing irrelevancy of the ancestors’ wisdom, and with what to replace it. The margins of the ancestors’ wisdom are rarely hard and fast. At those margins, wherever they are, it is time to niche switch.

Consider three broad contexts in which humans have learned and innovated in times past.

• The first is the utterly new idea: the idea that springs to mind often unbidden and without explanation. This was the territory that the first Mayan, Mesopotamian, and Chinese people were in when they innovated farming. Similarly, the innovation of the wheel, metallurgy, and pottery. Before those things existed, nobody knew they were possible.
• The second context in which innovation occurs is when you know that something is possible, on the basis that it’s been done before, but you have no idea how to make it happen. The Wright brothers saw flight in other organisms, and felt confident that it could be accomplished by machine.
• Third and finally, you might have instruction: you know what you’re shooting for, and have someone or some set of rules or instructions telling you how. Between school and YouTube, we often conflate this third kind of learning for the only kind of learning that is possible. The third type of learning is the most cultural; it is the learning of received wisdom. In contrast, humans are at our most conscious, and therefore our most innovative, in the first two contexts.

Conformity

Conformity has a time and a place—like most traits, it is not simply worse (or better) than not conforming.

There is a tension between conforming and disagreeing in the face of apparent inconsistency. This tension is a hidden strength of humans—the push and pull between wisdom and innovation, between culture and consciousness.

Historically, we have combined forces in social groups, such that in a single group, many people with distinct skills created an emergent whole, one in which generalist capabilities emerged even if all members of the group were specialists. Now, though, it is time to innovate, because change is accelerating, and the received cultural wisdom isn’t sufficient. Individuals themselves becoming more generalist—through learning skills across domains, for instance, rather than diving deep into only one—will help us in this endeavor.

It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative (in regards to Asch’s psychology experiment where people would change their answer to the length of a line based on the answers of their peers).

Literally False, Metaphorically True

It is easy to dismiss many myths and beliefs, precisely because they are literally false. Indeed, doing so is almost a sport among some hardheaded people. Take astrology. It is clearly beyond reason to imagine that the stars that we see, many of which are thousands of light-years away, are having a direct impact on human behavior. Similarly, it is beyond reason to believe that a passel of angry gods is the reason for tsunamis, yet among the Moken, those who believe in those gods survive at higher rates than those who don’t. And it is surely beyond reason to believe that a full moon is protective of crop health, yet among Guatemalan farmers, precisely that belief results in more productive farming.

This is how religion and other belief structures spread. Even if such things are not literally true, acting as if they are benefits people; sometimes it even benefits the biodiversity and sustainability of the land on which they live.

Distortions that help you survive and thrive are adaptive. Myths and taboos often make little sense to outsiders, and some of them are surely misguided, even counterproductive for those who honor them. Some surprisingly precise taboos are likely overgeneralizations from an actual event.

Beware Chesterton’s fadys—the old ideas may have hidden truths, and those truths may be difficult to recover once they have been dismissed.

Religion and Ritual

All cultures have ritual. Some rituals are rites of passage to celebrate new babies, coming of age, marriage. There are rituals—traditions, perhaps, given their reliably repeating nature—to celebrate the first planting of the year, and the harvest, and astronomical events like the solstices and the equinoxes. As we have come to live in larger and larger groups, surrounded by ever more anonymity in our daily life, regular holidays, with their attendant shared cultural norms, help to keep us in sync, to act as though we are in fact part of something larger than ourselves. Rituals, which are not inherently religious but have a strong tendency to be so, often include food, music, and dance.

Not only do most cultures spend a substantial fraction of their resources and time on structures and ceremonies intended to impress a cold and indifferent universe, but religions expend a great deal of social capital telling believers what they are not allowed to do. If anything dwarfs the cost of religion, it is the opportunity cost of religion. Were it true that religion was maladaptive, these huge costs would constitute a major vulnerability for faithful populations.

Atheists who behave just like these believers, except for the fact of skipping religiosity and reinvesting the massive dividend, should displace them as a regular feature of history. If religiosity had no adaptive benefit, great leaders in every population’s history would have said, “All you must do is work hard and ignore their mumbo jumbo and their lands will be yours.” But that’s not what we find. Instead, we find great leaders saying things about God and his quirks, his preferences and his plan for us.

Religiosity is adaptive, and moralizing gods, while not being a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, seem to help sustain multiethnic empires once they have become established. As moderns, we are often eager to throw off the spiritual and religious chains of the past, but beware Chesterton’s gods. Religion is an efficient encapsulation of past wisdom, wrapped in an intuitive, instructive, and difficult to escape package.

Sex Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: On the Sacred versus the Shamanistic

Culture is in tension with consciousness, much as the sacred is in tension with the shamanistic. The sacred is to culture as the shamanistic is to consciousness.

The sacred is the reification of received religious wisdom, the sine qua non of a particular religious tradition, that which has stood the test of time and proved valuable enough to the ancestors to be passed on as holy. That which is sacred has a low mutation rate—it changes infrequently—and is highly resistant to change; it is built for a static world. The sacred is protected from corruption (or at least, it’s supposed to be), and is often insulated from the corrupting influences of secular power, wealth, and reproduction. The orthodoxy of the sacred exists in persistent tension with the heterodoxy of the shamanistic.

The shamanistic is high risk, high creativity. It has a high mutation rate, and therefore a high error rate. It explores a huge number of new ideas, most of which are poor. It challenges orthodoxy—that which is sacred. The shamanistic is practically mandated to explore and play with cultural norms. It does this in a variety of ways, such as through altered states of consciousness, which include dreams, trances, and use of hallucinogens.

In nearly every known culture there is use of something, be it strictly hallucinogenic or not, that breaks a person out of the normal, everyday experience and allows for a different perspective to emerge. This is consciousness revolutionizing culture.

When the ancestral wisdom runs out, humans pool their dissimilar experiences and expertise to discover how to bootstrap some new way of being. Identifying when the ancestral wisdom has run out in a particular domain is tough, and there will always be tension between those who want to stay the course and those who are looking to break with tradition and try a new way. Functional systems need those advocating for both—for culture and for consciousness, for orthodoxy and heterodoxy, for the sacred and the shamanistic.

The Corrective Lens

• Sit around more campfires.
• Honor or create rituals that recur—annually, seasonally, weekly, or even daily. They might be ancient and religious in origin (e.g., honoring the Sabbath or Lent—a time for both selective privation and community), astronomical (e.g., recognizing and celebrating the solstices and equinoxes), or entirely new.
• Be Asch-Negative. Don’t conform to social pressure when it goes against your better judgement. 
• Teach children how to bootstrap their own program, so that they can be individually conscious. The tension that we have described between culture and consciousness has an analog during development. Trying to teach children precisely how to be adults, by inculcating them solely with the cultural rules that have come before, will fail. In a world of hyper-novelty, many aspects of culture are ever less relevant, and consciousness is imperative.
• Consider engaging with psychedelics, carefully, if there is anything in you that is curious. They are now legal in some places. But consider engaging them as the powerful cognitive tools that they are, not as a form of recreation. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.

13. The Fourth Frontier

Our outsized brains are prone to confusion and miswiring. Our children are born helpless, and they remain dependent on us for an uncommonly long time. Our great linguistic diversity severely limits to whom we can talk. Even our bipedal gait, so important in allowing us to move and carry things on the ground, comes with risk to mother and baby in childbirth, and reliably causes back pain. We’re gossipy, sentimental, and superstitious. We build extravagant monuments to fictional gods. We are arrogant and confused, often mistaking the unlikely for the inevitable, even as we downplay massive and obvious hazards. In everything, trade-offs.

“Times of plenty” is economic growth. When the usual order is restored as births and deaths are once again balanced, we hit equilibrium, and life becomes harder again. Growth feels good, and it is not surprising that we are obsessed with it. It was adaptive to be obsessed with it. 

Our obsession with growth creates two problems. The first is that we have convinced ourselves that growth is the normal state and that it is reasonable to expect it to go on and on. That patently ridiculous idea— exactly as hopeful and deluded as the search for a perpetual motion machine—causes us to stop searching for other possibilities. While this expectation greatly reduces the chances that we will miss out on growth, it also prevents us from recognizing and pursuing more sustainable options. Second, because we regard growth as normal rather than exceptional, we behave destructively to feed our addiction.

• Sometimes we violate our stated values by inventing justifications to steal from a population that has resources but not the means to defend them. Other times we degrade the world, and inflict decline—the opposite of growth—on our descendants in order to fuel current expansion. The former scenario accounts for many of the greatest atrocities in history. The latter explains the modern experience of watching the goodness of our planet liquidated before our eyes.

Geographic frontiers are what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked: the vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources. All of the New World—North and South America, the Caribbean, and every island near the coasts—was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians.

• Geographic frontiers represent the discovery of resources heretofore unknown to humans. Geographic frontiers are inherently zero-sum: there is a finite amount of space on this planet of ours, and we will reach the end of it.

Technological frontiers are moments when innovation allows a human population to make more, or do more, or grow more, than they did before the innovation occurred. Every human culture that has terraced hillsides, decreasing runoff and increasing crop production, was confronting technological frontiers.

• Technological frontiers are the creation of resource through human ingenuity. Technological frontiers are temporarily non-zero-sum—specifically, positive-sum—and this can appear to be a permanent state. But there are physical limits: a single electron is the theoretical minimum needed to flip from one state to another in a transistor, for instance.

Finally, there are transfer of resource frontiers. Unlike geographic and technological frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers is inherently a form of theft.

• In modern times, transfer of resource frontiers is everywhere: oil drilling, fracking, and logging in ancestral lands; predatory lending, as with subprime mortgages and much student debt; the Holocaust. One symptom of transfer of resource frontiers is tyranny.
• Like all frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers is ultimately zero-sum. Theft has its limits; even thieves must obey physical laws.

We have run out of geographic frontiers, or nearly so. Technological frontiers come with risks (beware Chesterton’s fence!), and are ultimately constrained by available resources. Transfer of resource frontiers are immoral and destabilizing. What, then, are we to do? Where to turn to find salvation? In simple terms, consciousness. Consciousness can point the way to a fourth frontier.

An artisan who takes pride in the quality and durability of their work is enacting some portion of a fourth frontier mentality, one in which the life span of a product is as important as its function. A table or sideboard made by a local craftsperson is not beloved merely because it is more beautiful than what can be assembled from a box bought at Ikea, but also because the person in possession of a lovely and functional piece has a chance of handing it down to their children, or other kin, or friends. So, too, would we like to be able to deliver unto the next generations a lovely and functional world.

The fourth frontier is the idea that we can engineer an indefinite steady state that will feel to people like they live in a period of perpetual growth, but will abide by the laws of physics and game theory that govern our universe. Think of it like the climate control that allows the inside of your house to hover at a pleasant spring temperature as the world outside moves between unpleasant extremes. Engineering an indefinite steady state for humanity will not be easy, but it is imperative.

Senescence of Civilization

In organisms, we know what causes senescence. It is antagonistic pleiotropy, the propensity of selection to favor heritable traits that provide early life benefits even when they carry inevitable late life costs. This willingness to accept harm in old age occurs because selection sees the early life benefits much more clearly, as individuals will often reproduce and die before the harms have time to fully manifest.

Our economic and political system, in combination with our desire for growth in the moment, inflicts policies and behaviors that don’t seem crazy at first, not at all, and yet they too often turn out to be not only bad for us and the planet, but also irreversible, by the time we realize what we have wrought. We are living the unfortunate reality of the Sucker’s Folly—again, the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit to not only obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.

What we “want,” and what the market is glad to hand us, is short-term gratification that rarely accounts for what is best for us long term. A market that is unregulated will tend to embody the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken idea that “what is” in nature is “what ought” to be. When we let such unregulated markets lead, we are fed directly into the naturalistic fallacy. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

Compounding the issue of unregulated markets is the reality that humans are perfectly adapted to manipulate one another, and that such adaptations have been moved into the hyper-novel territory of widespread anonymity. Historically, manipulation was kept in check by living in small groups of interdependent people. Shared fate was the rule that kept us in line. Putting one over on a person whose fate is intimately linked to your own is generally a poor idea, and those who do quickly get a reputation for doing so. We no longer live in small, interdependent communities. Many of the most critical systems we rely on are global, and the participants are nearly always anonymous. Malicious market forces are largely an expression of manipulation made possible by such anonymity, and by a lost sense of shared fate.

The key to building a system that is resistant to senescence is to:

• Not optimize for a single value. Mathematically speaking, if you try to optimize for any single value, no matter how honorable—be it liberty or justice, decreasing homelessness or improving educational opportunities—all other values, every single other parameter, will collapse. Maximize justice, and people will starve. Everyone may starve equally, but that’s small recompense.
• Create a prototype for your system. After that, continue to build prototypes. Do not imagine that you know from the beginning what the final system will look like.
• Recognize that the fourth frontier is inherently a steady state, whose characteristics are ours to define. We ought to strive to create a system that:
  • Liberates (that is, that frees people to do rewarding, interesting, awesome stuff),
  • Is antifragile,
  • Is resistant to capture, and
  • Is incapable of evolving into something that betrays its own core values. In the technical language of evolution, we need a system that is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, a strategy incapable of invasion by competitors.

The Maya

We are not served by ignoring what we are—brutal apes. We are also not served by pretending that brutal apes are the only thing that we are. We are also generous, cooperative beings full of love. We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage, and a fair bit of intellectual confusion. Let us understand the baggage, in order to reduce the confusion, and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.

Like the Maya, we moderns need to find ways to flatten the boom-bust cycle that has plagued all populations across time. They hypothesize that the Maya did this by creating a mechanism for not turning excess resources into more people, or ephemeral things; instead, they invested in giant public works projects. Many of these public works projects are visible today as temples, as pyramids. They grew them like onions, building more layers in times of abundance. In years of plenty, they posit, when excess food could easily have been turned into more people, which would have expanded the population, making hunger and conflict inevitable in lean years, the Maya instead turned the extra food into pyramids, or into bigger pyramids. They created glorious and useful public spaces, enjoyable by all, and when agricultural boom years inevitably ceded to bust years, the temples required no nourishment, and the population could withstand the leaner times.

Western civilization has been dominant for nearly as long as the Maya were. Their culture unraveled, accelerated at the end by a hostile enemy from across an ocean. Our culture is unraveling as well. We need a new steady state, an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. We need to find the fourth frontier.

Obstacles to the Fourth Frontier

TRADE-OFFS IN SOCIETY

Freedom and justice exist in trade-off relationship with each other. We ought not try to push either of these two sliders all the way to one end. It is of course true that many societies are both less free and less just than they might be. For a majority of situations, we are not yet up against the limit of what is possible (what economists call the efficient frontier), and could potentially increase both freedom and justice until that limit is reached. Coming to grips with the fact that freedom and justice cannot both be maximized is a critical step in the conversation. Imagining a world that is totally free and just is to imagine utopia, a static perfection, a world in which trade-offs have been banished. Utopia is an impossibility, and its persistence as a fantasy is a profound hazard.

In order for us to have a conversation about humanity’s future effectively, people of every political persuasion need to understand diminishing returns, unintended consequences, negative externalities, and the finite nature of resources. Liberals are particularly prone to underestimating diminishing returns and unintended consequences. Conservatives are particularly prone to underestimating negative externalities and the finite nature of resources.

According to the economic law of diminishing returns, as you increase your input to a given variable, while holding everything else constant, the increases in your yield will virtually grind to a halt. Diminishing returns occur in every complex adaptive system. Understanding this encourages us to create nimble, evolving strategies, rather than cumbersome, static ones. A utopian vision, one that seeks to maximize any single parameter, falls prey to diminishing returns. Because we are constantly reaching for a static goal—which requires greater and greater investment to achieve, with ever smaller gains—we greatly limit what else could be accomplished. The opportunity cost of not jumping to the next diminishing returns curve is spectacular.

Unintended consequences are a variant of Chesterton’s fence: messing with an ancient system that you do not fully understand may create problems that you do not foresee. Liberals are prone to making regulations that upset functional systems. For instance, linking education funding to test scores led to the unintended consequence of creating a feedback loop in which poor scores reduce funding, which then further decreases scores. That said, conservatives are prone to easing regulations to facilitate the creation of new products—which themselves may upset functional systems.

• Deregulating waste management to reduce operating costs has created pollution, which is effectively externalizing the costs of waste management. This has destabilized uncountable natural systems that humans historically depended on: fish and shellfish that are too toxic to eat, rivers that can’t sustain fish populations, air quality that leads to asthma and developmental delays. In short, both liberal solution making and conservative desire for market innovation are the source of unintended consequences.

Negative externalities occur when individuals making decisions—or products—do not have to bear the full cost of those decisions. Allowing the harm from what is created to be disassociated from its value.

• From the burning of coal for energy, in which the air pollution is shared by all but the profits by few, to the playing of loud music late at night to the enduring irritation of your neighbors, negative externalities are rampant in our world.

The finite nature of resources should be obvious. While there are some resources that are effectively infinite—oxygen and sunlight being at the top of that list—the vast majority of Earth’s resources are finite. From rubber to wood to oil, from copper to lithium to sapphires, all are limited.

The partisan nature of Western democracy can make us feel as though we could never align behind a set of shared values, but realizing that we have a lot in common is the only way to achieve collective consciousness. We have but one planet. And yet we continue to behave as though the world in which we live is a cornucopia of infinite wealth. The Sucker’s Folly blinds us, our nature seeks growth, and our culture, lagging behind the times, is wired for a world in which we no longer live. While the Omega principle reveals that our culture is not arbitrary, it does not guarantee that our culture is up to snuff when it comes to hyper-novelty. This is the domain of consciousness.

OBSESSION WITH GROWTH

The evolutionary creature in all of us needs to feel growth. Growth is what winning feels like, in evolutionary terms. Every single one of us, every lineage that has existed on Earth, has been through an oscillating cycle of growth, of filling up a niche, and of running into the end of the resource—of moving from a non-zero to a zero-sum world. Coming up short against that limit feels terrible, whereas abundance allows humans to flourish.

• Chasing growth as if it is always there to be caught is a fool’s errand. Sometimes the opportunity exists, and sometimes it doesn’t. The expectation of perpetual growth is in many ways similar to the pursuit of perpetual happiness—it is the route to a host of miseries.

Our obsession with growth and the economic mindset it has created has given rise to a throughput society: one in which civilization’s health is evaluated based on the production of goods and services, where more consumption is presumed to be better. This framework is so deeply embedded in our minds that it seems almost logical, until one considers the implications.

• If the durability of goods was increased and needed less frequent replacement, we’d face a massive economic contraction. Jobs would be lost, incomes would drop, taxes revenue would decline. In short, it would destroy the ability of our system to function.
• Similar absurdities emerge anywhere that something positive interrupts demand. Would it be good if people invested more time and effort with their romantic partners instead of paying for porn? Would it be good if people were more satisfied with what they had and less susceptible to sales pitches? Would it be good if people were more easily sated and less prone to overeat? Would it be good if people spent more time producing art, music, and insight and less time coveting, purchasing, and flaunting trendy goods? Of course. All of these things would be major upgrades to our way of life. But our growth-obsessed economic mindset would report exactly the opposite. Our throughput society depends on insecurity, gluttony, and planned obsolescence. It’s how we keep the lights on.

If we are to persist, sustainability must displace growth as the indicator of success.

The “world ending” doesn’t typically mean the destruction of the planet. Rather, it means something like “our world”—in effect, our ability to persist into the future. When it is framed that way, some individuals who have predicted the end of their world will certainly have been right. Many populations have, after all, faced threats to their survival, and many of those failed to rise to the challenge. It is our belief, therefore, that sensitivity to existential threats is a long-standing adaptive trait, and that the size of the present human population, our degree of interconnection, and the technology we now possess all create a threat to our species analogous to threats faced by ancestral populations.

ON REGULATION

Simple, static laws will either be wrong from the beginning or have a short shelf life. Having a short shelf life is fine, to the extent that the system can upgrade. As Thomas Jefferson observed, even democracies need rebellion with some regularity. To the degree that a system is set in stone, it will be both gameable and gamed.

Evolved systems that have persisted over time are generally complex and functional, and we should employ the Precautionary principle when tinkering with them. Removing functional organs because we can’t tell what they’re for is not wise. It’s tempting therefore to laugh at those doctors who once proposed to take out people’s healthy large intestines, but what similar mistakes are we making now? Given the hyper-novelty of our era, it would be the height of arrogance to imagine that we are not currently doing things that will be understood to be laughable, even deranged, in the future.

Society is obsessed with short-term safety because short-term harm is easy to detect and comparatively simple to regulate. Long-term harms are a different story, being more difficult to detect, and even harder to prove. What are the long-term effects of screen time or educational testing, aspartame or neonicotinoid insecticides? We do not know. But because no one wants to live in a world where safety testing keeps every innovation off the market for decades, we have become reckless. We foolishly presume long-term harms are absent until they can no longer be ignored, and are then shocked that our expectations of safety were wrong.

A good regulatory scheme is efficient and light-handed—all but invisible. While inherently constraining, its net effect should be liberating, allowing access to the benefits of innovation without having to obsess about hidden consequences.

Good regulation is a key ingredient in any functional complex system. Our bodies, for instance, are tightly regulated across many domains, including temperature. To keep us within optimal range, myriad systems constantly adjust the balance between heat generated and lost, shunting blood into and away from our extremities and capillary beds. Our temperature is nothing if not well regulated, but these processes are so effective that they are barely detectable to us, freeing us to do anything from swimming in a cool river to playing soccer in the sun, all while rarely giving a thought to the risk of hypothermia or heatstroke.

Large systems outside the scope of possible containment by individuals need to be regulated. We cannot address nuclear safety or oil extraction or habitat loss without large-scale regulation.

Leveling Up

We need as many people as possible to get on board with this discussion, to mature into adults, and to discard their utopianism. We need people to welcome the idea that some set of values has to be broadly embraced and pursued, and to recognize that we’re not going to arrive at a decent future by describing it precisely in advance. We’re going to reach it by agreeing on the characteristics that such a desirable and plausible world must have, and then we must prototype, evaluate the results, and prototype again.

We are in the throes of a sustainability crisis. One thing or another will take us out. It might be climate change, or a Carrington Event, or a nuclear exchange set in motion by wealth inequality, a refugee crisis, or revolution, to name just a few of the awfully real possibilities. We are hurtling toward destruction. We must, therefore, with full consciousness, embark on something dangerous. We must seek the next frontier: the event horizon, beyond which we cannot see, from which we cannot return, but through which may be our salvation.

The Corrective Lens

• Learn to hack and kludge your own mental architecture for a better life. Keep markets as far from your motivational structure as you can—don’t let someone else’s profit motive determine what you desire or do.
• Keep commerce away from children, for as long as possible. Children raised to put high value on the transactional nature of being become dedicated consumers. Consumers are less observant, meditative, and deeply thoughtful than people who value creating, discovering, healing, producing, experiencing, communicating.
• Individuals need to calm down, and level up. Rely less on metrics, more on experience, hypothesis, and deriving truth and meaning from first principles.
• Rely less on static rules, and seek an understanding of the context in which those rules are appropriate.
• Dispense with anything predicated on a utopian vision that focuses on a single value.
  • As soon as someone reveals that they are trying to maximize a single value (e.g., freedom or justice), you know they are not an adult.
  • Liberty is emergent—therefore not a single value. It is an emergent consequence of having fixed the other problems (e.g., justice, security, innovation, stability, community/camaraderie).

Society-wide, we should:

• Like the Maya, invest our surplus in public works, which make us antifragile.
• Prototype, prototype, prototype.
• Move to a precautionary mindset, such that we can learn to regulate our industries effectively, minimizing any negative externalities that they create.
• Consider Chesterton’s fence in all of its guises—from health care to cuisine, from play to religion.

From the moment when our ancestors achieved ecological dominance, competition between populations has been our dominant selective force. Millions of years of evolution have refined our circuitry for such competition, and it has become the default at the human software level. Now, though, three things conspire to make the inclinations that brought us to this moment an existential threat to our future: the scale of the human population; the unprecedented power of tools at our disposal; and the interconnectedness of the systems on which we depend (global economy, ecology, and reach of technology). The importance of understanding human software is urgent. The problem we face is the product of evolutionary dynamics. All plausible solutions involve awareness of those dynamics. The problem is evolutionary. So is the solution.

Epilogue

The author’s family’s new Hanukkah rules:

• Day 1: All human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
• Day 2: The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• Day 3: Only support systems that tend to enrich people who have contributed positively to the world.
• Day 4: Don’t game honorable systems.
• Day 5: One should have a healthy skepticism of ancient wisdom, and engage novel problems consciously, explicitly, and with robust reasoning.
• Day 6: Opportunity must not be allowed to concentrate within lineages.
• Day 7: Precautionary principle: When the costs of an action are unknown, proceed with caution before making change.
• Day 8: Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.