Review of Michael Muthukrisha's new book A Theory of Everyone

A Theory of Everyone deals with the same area of inquiry as I do in this Substack, except my focus is limited to the U.S, while Theory is global. The first half of the book contains a nice summary of how cultural evolution works. Muthukrishna takes a different tack to the subject, proposing four “Laws of Life”: Energy, Innovation, Cooperation, and Evolution that form the basis for the development of all life on Earth. Energy is needed simply to remain alive, and more is needed for growth and reproduction. Innovation, the development of abilities to exploit new energy sources or make better use of existing sources, results in an increase in the total amount and variety of life. Cooperation allows for the specialization of life functions making new sources of energy availability and increasing the efficiency of energy use. Finally, evolution is the mechanism through which innovation and the ability to cooperate in larger groups happen.

The law of energy is simple to understand. Life processes require energy, energy to grow (DNA replication and protein synthesis are energy-intensive) and simply to remain living (life requires the maintenance of an environment inside the cell different from outside, which requires energy). Innovation permits the exploitation of new sources of energy, such as photosynthesis and respiration.  Photosynthesis enabled solar-powered life and added oxygen to the atmospheric as a side product.  Respiration enabled the combustion of photosynthetically generated biomass (fuel) using atmospheric oxygen to produce an enormous increase the yield of energy. For example, yeast can either convert sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide anaerobically to generate one unit of energy or burn it with oxygen to form CO₂ and water plus nine units of energy.

Cooperation allows for compartmentalization, the segregation of life processes from each other so they do not interfere with each other, allowing them to work in parallel under more optimal conditions. For example, bacteria are basically bags of enzymes, nucleic acids, and metabolites surrounded by a membrane. The concentration of metabolites will be uniform throughout. In contrast, a eucaryote cell contains organelles which had once been bacteria-like organisms before they became part of a eucaryote. These organelles can maintain different environments optimized for different functions. So a plant cell will have chloroplasts that specialize in photosynthesis from which sugar diffuses out into the cytoplasm where it is converted into the building blocks for the cell, converting NAD into NADH molecules in the process. NADH diffuse into the mitochondria and reacts with oxygen to regenerate NAD and produce energy in the form of ATP molecules, which diffuse into the cytoplasm. ATP is then used to power protein manufacture in the ribosomes and DNA replication in the nucleus.

In multicellular organisms the role of organelles in the cell are performed by organs containing large numbers of cells working together cooperatively to carry out a variety of large-scale (relative to a single cell) functions. The organs themselves also work in a cooperative fashion to operate an animal or plant. And when we come to humans and other social animals, we see cooperation among individuals to operate communities that can last beyond the lifespans of the individual members. Beekeepers manage hives that last many lifetimes of the individual bees within them. The same is true of human societies. Finally, the mechanism through which all these things are achieved is evolution, which involves variation and natural selection.

Muthukrishna describes the operation of his laws of life with examples other than the ones I used. He follows with a discussion of the human animal in which he introduces the concept of cultural evolution. He covers the same terrain as I do here, taking a novel approach that ties cultural evolution into his laws of life which is well worth reading. He follows with a discussion of human intelligence, that covers similar territory to my take here. He also characterizes IQ as having genetic and cultural components that are affected by gene-culture co-evolution. His take is more conversational and not as explicit as mine, where I proposed a toy model that conceived intelligence as the product of genetic and cultural modules, the latter of which is mostly responsible for group differences in average IQ. A key feature of his discussion is his emphasis on education as a means to increase intelligence. I employed economic development (proxied by GDP per capita) as an explanation for why population-average IQ is different between groups and why it increases over time. Educational gains accompany economic development, and so Muthukrishna’s evidence of education’s impact on IQ provides an explicit mechanism for the process I merely alluded to. I found this chapter valuable.

He follows the intelligence discussion with one discussing strategies for innovation, with no specific relation to cultural evolution. Chapter 5 talks about how we are cultural beings, that what makes us human is our mastery of culture. Chapter 6 discusses the evolution of cooperation. It tells a similar story to other accounts of this phenomenon such as Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety, Boyd and Richerson’s Not by Genes Alone and Joeseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, emphasizing some different aspects of the process and making it a good adjunct to these. With these two chapters, Muthukrishna completes his presentation of how humans came to be what we are today in the context of the laws of life.

The second part of the book talks about the future, the problems and opportunities we face, and the insight to be gained from the “theory of everyone” (his term for cultural evolution as manifested through the Laws of Life) that can structure an approach to a positive future. He starts out with the possibility of things going badly for humanity going forward. This is a similar theme to what I discuss here, except my focus is just on the US, while his is global. He discusses ways humanity could unite to solve our common problems, describing a variety of immigrant assimilation models in use and proposing what he calls the umbrella model which involves preferentially allowing immigration of the most productive people into advanced countries, presumably to beef up the ability to innovate a solution to the problems humanity faces.

He next talks about how governance could be changed to enable the evolution of better systems through the creation of start-up cities, polities independently evolving different approaches to problems of cooperation. He follows this with a discussion of how to deal with economic inequality, which bars from participation many who might otherwise contribute to solutions to humanity’s problems. He proposes a version of Henry George’s land tax as a potential way to address this. The final chapters are concerned with how to encourage the innovation needed to solve the world’s problems by promoting the exchange of ideas through free speech, internet connectivity, and rewarding ability; improving the functioning of the internet; and becoming brighter through educational reform. These have been proposed by others who were not employing cultural evolution in their thinking. They are ideas worth considering, but not really illustrations of the theory of everyone.

I have noted what I call a “supply-side” bias throughout the work. Many of the developments and problems discussed in the book see their cause as one of inputs, rather than the operation of cultural evolution. For example, the development of agriculture is seen as the driver for increasing social complexity by making a larger population possible which can then evolve greater complexity. For a long time, archaeologists believed that what prevented humans from developing the large-scale complex societies often referred to as civilization was food production (energy). Until agriculture supplied the necessary energy input, the organization needed for large-scale societal projects was not possible. We now know from discoveries of Gobekli tepe and other pre-pottery Neolithic sites in Turkey and the Levant that permanent settlements and monumental architecture preceded agriculture, suggesting that development of agriculture as a supplemental source of calories was in response to a demand for this by a pre-existing organized community, that had been created by evolution of cultural “scaleup technologies” permitting larger community size without internecine conflict.

Similarly, Muthukrishna sees access to fossil fuels (coal) as a new energy source as key to the industrial revolution and creation of the modern world. That is, the availability of coal made the industrial revolution possible. China had used coal from ancient times and during the 11^th century used large amounts (ca. 140,000 tons) of coal to make iron, yet never industrialized, despite having the necessary inputs for doing so. The reason is that like the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution was not an input-driven phenomenon, but rather, a demand-driven one. The development of capitalism through cultural evolution was another cultural scale-up technology like those responsible for pre-agricultural megalith construction, or the post-agricultural scale-up techs of the state and the great religions. Just as these organizational technologies demanded ever-more productive agricultural technologies to fuel their growth and development, so did capitalism require new sources of energy to continue its growth and development. Again, access to a new energy source did not drive the cultural evolution of higher forms of organization, but rather the cultural evolution of a higher form of organization (capitalism) created a demand for a new energy source, which was then filled by capitalist entrepreneurs. China did not industrialize because it did not develop capitalism.

Surveying the EROEI, energy return on energy investment, for various sources (see Figure 1 in my previous article) Muthukrishna notes that only fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydroelectric power reach an economically viable EROEI level of 7, when the need to smooth out intrinsically variable solar and wind power via energy storage is taken into account. The replacement of greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels will require much more nuclear power as part of the solution to our problems and the development of a new energy source, fusion, to drive humanity to the next level of development.

I see a number of problems with this EROI concept, at least as presented in the figure Muthukrishna references. It gives an EROI value of 75 for nuclear and 4 for solar. These energy sources involve little or no fuel costs, respectively, making the investment dominated by capital costs which are typically given in terms of cost per unit of capacity, as dollars per watt. One watt of capacity translates to 8.77 kwh per year. Over a 20-year solar panel lifetime, this comes to an energy return of 175 kwh. Division by the EROI value of 4 for solar gives an energy investment of 48 kwh. If we multiply this by the average cost of $0.124 per kwh for the US in 2022 I get $6/watt as the cost for solar in energy terms. Yet I find the costs for utility-scale solar are around $1.2/watt. This suggests a five-fold reduction in the investment cost for solar has occurred in the more than 15 years since the data used to construct the EROI figure was generated, making the modern value for EROI for solar closer to 20. I can do a similar analysis for nuclear. Over a 50-year lifespan the return on 1 watt of capacity would be 438.5 kwh, which divided by the 75 EROI gives an investment of 5.85 kwh and a cost of $0.73 per watt. Figure 1 from this report suggests a typical cost of $3/watt for Chinese nuclear, while costs in the West seem to be about $10/watt. Both of these figures show that most of the cost for nuclear does not come from its energy inputs. Nevertheless, these costs are real and need to be taken into consideration. Hence, I suggest converting them into energy units, in which case the cost of nuclear in China is about 24 kwh per watt capacity. Dividing this into the 438.5 kwh return from that capacity yields an effective EROI of 18 for China. This is close to the value of 20 obtained from modern solar. These values suggest that Chinese nuclear and solar are similar in energy investment return, which is consistent with the fact that China is building lots of both. In contrast, the $10/watt cost in the West translates to an 81 kwh investment and an EROI of 5.4, less than the threshold of 7 for economic viability, making nuclear not viable in the West. On the other hand, the EROI of around 20 more modern solar is viable, which can explain why solar, but not much nuclear, is being built in the West.

Hügo Krüger informs me that before 1973 US costs were about the same as the Chinese value, in which case nuclear would make sense, as is clearly the case in China. So why is it so much more expensive in the US today? The answer Noah Smith gives is America doesn’t build stuff anymore because of political impediments. He also notes that this failure to build means America cannot fight large-scale wars for long because of an inability to build the armaments needed to maintain the war effort. As I noted, the reason why American doesn’t build things and why we would be hard-pressed to defeat a peer opponent is that we have a business/economic culture that awards prestige to builders of shareholder value, not real stuff like nuclear plants, armaments, or infrastructure in general. As I have written about extensively, today we operate under shareholder primacy (SP) business culture. Executives state outright that their objective is to maximize shareholder value (that is, market capitalization). As a result, the profits generated from the economy now flow into financial markets in the form of dividends and share buybacks. These money flows serve to build up stock market capitalization rather than the economy, resulting in a nation that doesn’t build stuff.

Muthukrishna writes (p 214) “the era of growth is over, and we are living through a Great Stagnation in productivity as we run out of ways to improve energy efficiency through non-energy expanding technological innovations.” This statement isn’t really true. Although growth in productivity, measured in terms of GDP is not as high as it once was, this is to be expected because raising productivity of this sort is not the objective of economic activity in modern America. Today the objective is financial growth, the performance of which is best measured in terms of the Buffet ratio (market capitalization/GDP) which reached record levels in 2021. For a longer-term perspective see my article on anomalous behavior in the stock market. As for energy-expanding innovations, I discussed two of them earlier, nuclear power which is already widely used to provide electric power and solar PV, which may well be suitable for producing synfuels. I also noted that the EROI for solar cited by Muthukrishna is way too low and that both solar and nuclear have decent EROI values and should be pursued as China is already doing. The chief impediment to returning to the high productivity growth world of the past is the current shareholder primacy culture. We need a way to use cultural evolution to navigate a path to a culture that can more effectively utilize the energy-expanding technologies right in front of us. The issue is not a shortage of inputs, but cultural. And how to better solve a cultural challenge than with cultural evolution?

Although cultural evolution was much discussed nowhere was it applied to explain the problems we face and how is could be used to address the problems we face. I had hoped to see such a culture-focused discussion and was disappointed. But I still very much recommend the book because of the insights and different approach to the subject that its meshing of energy with cultural evolution is going to provide for me and other readers interested in this subject.