• For decades, the field of evolutionary biology has been divided by these two constrasting ways of viewing the world. One camp sees life as following a constrained, stable trajectory. Another isn’t so sure, pointing to a perpetually branching tree of life, eternally diverted by chance and chaos. Is the world contingent or convergent? The central question is whether evolution proceeds in predictable ways, regardless of freak events and random fluctuations, or if those contingencies can lead evolution down diverging paths.
• The tapestry of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug one thread, you’ll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every part of the tapestry. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
• If Laplace’s demon could exist, its measurements would need to be flawless. If the creature was off by even one atom, its predictions would, over time, become wildly wrong. We now know that many systems are chaotic - so sensitive to the minutiae of their initial conditions that, even though they follow a clockwork logic, they’re impossible to predict.
• It’s time to adjust our lenses of how we see ourselves within the world. Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact: We control nothing, but influence everything.
• Even the scientific concept of what it means to speak of ‘an individual’ is being revised. Some system biologists, recognising the interconnected, interdependent nature of our existence, have stopped referring to humans as individuals and have started refrring to each person as a holobiont, which includes a core host (in our case, a human) as well as the zoo of organisms living in and around us. We are not just ourselves, but are rather a collection of human cells combined with our associated microorganisms, including fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses.
• Teleological bias is related to a phenomenon called apophenia, the inference of a relationship between two unrelated object, or a mistaken inference of causality. This manifests itself in sorts, with the hot hand fallacy, in which a basketball player making several shots in a row is considered unable to miss even though the player’s past shots have no bearing of future ones.
• These mismatches from broken shortcuts are known as evolutionary traps. They arise when the old ways of survival become incompatible with a newer reality. Unfortunately, as we’ll now see, humans trying to navigate the unimaginable complexity of modern society are now facing an evolutionary trap of our own because our minds didn’t evolve to cope with a hyperconnected world that relentlessly converges toward a knife’s edge, in which one tiny fluke can change everything in an instant. The Shortcut Creature doesn’t do quite well when navigating a new, more complex world.
• That’s the paradox of the swarm. Human society has become simultaneously far more convergent towards an ordered regularity (which makes it appear seductively predictable) and also far more contingent (which makes it fundamentally uncertain and chaotic). Modern humans live in the most ordered society that have ever existed, but our world is also more prone to disarray and disorder than any other social environment in the history of humanity.
• The answer lies with a relatively new realm of knowledge called complexity science and complex-adaptive-systems research. Complexity science has grown out of several distinct fields of inquiry, from physics, mathematics, and chemistry to ecology and economics. It’s concerned with states of the world that are between the two extremes of order and disorder, between pure randomness and stability, between control and anarchy.
• Modern human society clearly is a complex adaptive system, though researchers who explicitly treat it that way unfortunately remain a tiny minority within mainstream economics, political science, sociology and so on.
• Complex systems, such as locust swarms or modern human society, involve diverse, interacting and interconnected parts (or individuals) that adapt to one another. The system, like our world, is in constant flux. If you change one aspect of the system, other parts spontaneously adjust, creating something altogether new.
• The interactions of lots of diverse, interconnected agents or units that constantly adapt to one another can produce a phenomenon known as emergence. Emergence arises when individuals or components organise themselves in a way that produces something different from the sum of their parts, the way that locust swarms have fundamentally different characteristics from solo insects.
• No single locust can direct the swarm. An insect can’t decide to move the swarm east or west because the outcome of any individual movement is unpredictable. The same is true for us. Swarms and sandpiles are useful analogies that help us understand why we’re so often lulled into a false sense of security. We delude ourselves into believing we’re in control, until we are, yet again, thwacked by a devastating crisis, such a financial crash, a disruptive new technology, a terrorist attack or a pandemic. But rather than understanding those inevitable avalanches as the normal functioning of the system, we mistakenly thing of them as ‘shocks’
• That’s why, over time, a softer version of rational choice theory that doesn’t assume such perfect information has become more prominent, called bounded rational choice theory. The bounded part refers to humans not being perfect in our decision-making. We make cognitive mistakes and lack crucian information. Rather than being optimisers, we’re often guided by sacrifice, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, in which we choose not what is optimal but what is good enough. What’s more, modern neuroscience research also makes clear that only a small sliver of our decisions are the product of conscious self-reflection. Much of our decision-making happens on autopilot. Some is even affected not just by the chemicals in our brains, but by the microbes that live within us, which have the power to alter our thinking.
• The Pine Tree Riot, as it came to be known, was an indirect trigger for revolution. The king feared that harsh punishment would spark an uprising, so the mob got off lightly. That slap on the wrist emboldened American’s colonial subjects, who were growing increasingly frustrated with royal rule. Historial view the Pine Tree Riot as a major catalyst for the boston Tea Party, and by extension, the Revolutionary War and American independence. Tall trees were a key, but often forgotten, factor in America’s founding. In the war that soon followed, the new American navy sailed under a flag of arboreal resistance: a single tall pine tree set against a white background.
• Recent research on the fossilised remains of hominisms living in the Rift Valley shows that periods of abrupt climate changes overlap with the expansions of brain size observed in the fossil record. Studies also suggest than humans invented more advanced kinds of tools during three different periods of extreme climatic volatility. These correlations have led some scientist to conclude that our intelligence evolved to cope with these sudden, sharp environmental shifts, as intelligence and the social cooperation it made possible were useful for survival. A chaotic climate in a geological hot spot may be the reason why we’re smart.
• Our interactions with our physical environment are a major catalyst for flukes, upending the neater reality we pretend exist. The idea that geography shapes human history - an our individual lives - isn’t new. Yet, it has fallen out of favour as an explanation of change. This poses a puzzle: if it’s so obvious that we’re shaped by our environment, then why is it so controversial to say so? Why has the physical world largely been deleted from social explanations for change? The answer, like so many, comes from an unfortunate contingent moment of history. In the past, influential thinkers misused geographical explanations for insidious purposes, rendering even somewhat adjacent ideas toxic, which persists to the present day.
• Human history was also diverted by the shape and orientation of the continents - the continental axis theory. Climate, habitat, vegetation, soil and wildlife are mostly dictated by latitude, non longitude. Move south or north, and the climate changes drastically, which means you need different strategies to survive. But if you move east or west, particularly across the vast horizontal stretch of Eurasia, you can travel thousands of miles and still be broadly in the same kind of biome. As a result, people, ideas, trade, technological exchange, and even empires had an easier time spreading east to west rather than north and south - giving advantages on Eurasia that didn’t accrue within Africa.
• Scientists themselves matter - and they matter a lot. Individual researchers can sway which questions science asks, which hypotheses are taken seriously, and who gets funding. This doesn’t mean that scientific truths are subjective, but rather than making science is a human endeavour, which makes it vulnerable to the contingencies and arbitrariness that accompany any actions undertaken by human beings.
• Brian Arthur, an economist who became one of the founding fathers of complex systems theory, demonstrated this effects with technology, coining a new term called increasing returns. In the 1970s battle between video being displayed using VHS or Betamax, it wasn’t clear which technology would win. But once VHS started winning more market share, more people bought VHS players, locking them into the technology for several years later because it would be expensive to switch. Soon, Betamax died out. This arbitrary lock-in effect was largely dependent on timing.