The Laws of Nature: 3 Rules Governing the Success of Any Organism, Idea & Technology

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Introduction and Philosophical Questions

The question of what are we here for is as confusing as to whether a hot dog is a sandwich or not. Both questions are highly debated by the world's greatest philosophers, and yet no one has an answer. However, the question of how did we get here is a better place to start.

And conveniently, for the inquisitive innovators amongst us, it'll give us a lot of answers around how the flows of change work,

The Beginning of the Universe

The opening of the book, sapiens has one of the neatest summaries of the universe and science that has ever been written. And because you can't improve on perfection, I shall just simply repeat it for you. Now, Val Noah Harra states, about 13.5 billion years ago, matter energy, time, and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang.

The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance matter and energy started [00:01:00] to coalesce into complex structures called atoms. Which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.

The Story of Life on Earth

I. About 3.8 billion years ago on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.

So thanks Mr. Harra. From this short and simple paragraph, it becomes obvious that all known history is, but a small fragment of biology.

Three Rules of Biology

So today in the episode, we are going to explore the three rules of biology that govern the success of organisms and ideas.

We'll learn why competition is in our blood. Whether equality is even possible and what makes some nations religions or even meme coins grow whilst others disappear into oblivion.

, [00:02:00] welcome to How to Change the World, the History of Innovation with me, Sam Webster Harris, where I'm creating the most in-depth blueprint for world changing that exists.

In this episode, I'll be telling the story of life itself, a tale that started with Stardust stumbled through some soup and somehow, quite inevitably arrived at you listening to this podcast.

Where I am about to explain to you the three laws of biology as proposed by Will and Ariel Durant in the third chapter of their book, the Lessons of History. And it of course really expands on Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.

. Now this episode is one of our frameworks episodes, but I am double stacking a little bit today, as I'll also briefly cover the entire history of life as one does like to do on a Thursday

we've already learned so far in the [00:03:00] last episodes that if the history of life itself were a 24 hour day, then humans show up at four seconds to midnight we've also found that they really started rearranging all the furniture, setting fire, to practically everything and before we'd even taken over the world, we were already disputing who owned what.

In fact, probably the two most consistent traits that persists throughout all humanity is a profound ability to burn our food and fall out with our neighbors.

But we have plenty more important things to learn. As we go about our days lost in the importance of our own existence, it is easy to forget that we are just fleshy animals like any other. When we do sometimes venture into nature and get a chance to swim in the sea or walk in a forest, we might be reminded of our humble place in the world, despite our ability to destroy so much of nature.

Our 8 billion souls are actually a tiny minority compared to the sprawling mass of bugs, birds, fish, reptiles, and other mammals. Yes, they swim, walk, and fly about their lives tremendously unconcerned by the things [00:04:00] that we find important. They continue to sting and sing, bark and bite, leap and sleep regardless of whether one country has invaded another, or if the interest rate is too high for your mortgage.

In fact, they don't even care about what Kanye West last posted on the internet, even if he claims differently.

To the philosophers amongst us. It is no surprise that the seeking and mating, striving and suffering that plays out in the animals all around us is much the same as our own hunger for food and love. Our games of economic competition, personal status, and endless wars aren't just mirrors of nature.

They are nature.

In intellectual circles. In Silicon Valley, humans like to think in first principles in regards to their ideas. They can escape the limitations of social rules to think only within the bounds of physical possibilities.

This framework for thinking is something that I will of course be exploring on this show.

But something that I don't think is discussed enough is the laws of life and biology. So this episode is [00:05:00] here to the rescue.

Let's dig in.

The First Law: Life is Competition

Starting at the start, I am dropping you into what is known as the primordial soup and our first lo of biology, and that is that life is competition.

Picture Earth, 4 billion years ago, a boiling cauldron of chemicals. There's lightning cracking overhead, and the oceans fizz with possibility , and inside this bubbling mess, the first cells emerge tiny bubbles of order in the universe of chaos.

Now imagine, if you will, that you are one of these little blobs and you found a nice little chemical snack, but then you realize another blob wants it. Well, the first competition arises and in fact, every cell is fighting for a patch of chemical real estate.

Some start to invent new ways to eat.

One ingenious little blob starts turning sunlight into food using [00:06:00] photosynthesis.

Others. Figure out ways to start eating the sunlight eater.

What we find is that the first arms race isn't fought with tanks and treaties, but with enzymes and cell walls, which sounds less exciting, but

you lived on the scale of nanometers, it would be just as terrifying.

They might not be fighting over entire countries, but instead little slices of sunlight, passing nutrients and scraps of sugar that all have someone laying claim to it.

Competition, it turns out, isn't just a feature of life. It is actually the engine. It's why bacteria multiply greedily and explosively.

The Evolution of Competition

It's also why 3 billion years later, some cells decided that the single life wasn't for them and they ganged up to form multicellular organisms under one grand individual alliance.

Some of the cells had the job of doing some breathing, others' energy,

the strongest set handled movement, and so on and so forth and it bestowed this much larger club of cells with emergent properties of life

they appear completely differently when we grow outta [00:07:00] the scale of nanometers.

Some of these tight-knit gangs of cells crawl around, others swim. Some invent teeth to eat each other, and the competition wages on.

Eventually Arthro pods. A source of millipede like creature were the first animals to crawl outta the oceans to get away from it all. On land, they found plants competing for sunlight and nutrients all over again. , they could see trees playing, never ending games of who can grow the tallest or the fastest.

And of course, as more animals arrived, the peaceful land for the milli peds was lost.

The need to start inventing claws. And camouflage began whilst, lost in the game of chasing.

Hiding. And outwitting each other

Sitting back here in the present day, humans have transcended competition with other species, but we continue to compete with ourselves in all manner of ways in sports or dating apps. Maybe a startup seeking funding or in the polite but cutthroat world of job interviews,

Just like the cells that learn to work together to form larger organisms. We are constantly forming teams. Of course we had [00:08:00] the tribes of old history. . But a company of today is just a tribe , competing against others in the market to pay its employees and more so its owners,

politicians and your local council compete, to lay claim to resources on whether they should renovate the cinema or patch the roads.

Your family, community club, church party, or nation are each their own organisms, every one of them, a team, probably competing in some way in a game for resources, status, or merely survival

across history. People have always used violence to gain more than their fair share. Even today, the United States with 4% of the world's population still controls 34% of its wealth. That isn't just through innovation, it's because they are willing to deploy violence, to protect their shores or to steal the oil of dictators that step out of line.

NATO advocates of course for peace because America wants to keep things as they are. And the moment that a stronger army from a different nation that it can take something by force. It usually does.

Of course, America wants its ally Europe to [00:09:00] invest more in defense for a reason to help keep Russia and China in check.

In the lessons of history, will an aerial Durant say that a competing group is like a competing individual, proud, selfish, ignatius, and partisan?

We are like this because our genes, remember millenniums of chasing, fighting, and killing to survive? They even say that war is a nation's way of eating. , They, after all, it promotes cooperation because it is the ultimate form of competition. And so ultimately, until all states on earth become a large and unified protective group, they will continue to act like selfish individuals.

So.competition might sound like a bad thing, , but it is simply a fact of life.

In fact, it is the reason there is anything at all, So next time you are elbowing your way for a spot on the tube or a last reservation in a restaurant, remember that every Olympics race, YouTube video, or viral meme is just a replay of the original contest in that primordial soup,

The Second Law: Life is Selection

And that leads us into law Number two,

life is selection.

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The reason the story of life isn't just a monotonous march of identical blobs, but instead a flagrant parade of all manner of inventive forms

from the simple to the magnificent, the minute to the monstrous. This all happens because of selection and the fact that we are different.

If competition is the engine of life, then selection is the steering wheel.

If we progress in the timeline from the first land animals , into the age of the dinosaurs, , we find that they reign supreme for 200 million years in all different shapes and sizes from as small as a chicken to as long as a blue whale

new species appeared, flourished and vanished as the experiment in survival and adaption played on. Now, I would like you to imagine for a moment you are a supersaurus and that is not a joke name, by the way. As a super sours, despite your tiny brain, You are the only dinosaur that as an individual will live over 70 years.

You might be surprised to find that you are 100 feet long

and your shoulders are 18 feet tall, bigger than a double decker bus. In [00:11:00] fact, with your long neck, you can reach up to the height of a five story house to graze on the treetops, which are your favorite.

So lucky you, because you are almost constantly eating.

In fact, you are so big that even the biggest predators don't concern you.

However, one day the sky lights up and the world is temporarily on fire and then very dark and cold.

It didn't matter how big you were, how many teeth you had, how loud you could raw, or how super your name was. No, the asteroid that just hit Earth, didn't send out a survey.

It just hit it and really killed the vibe.

Mainly the small, furry, feathered animals willing to eat anything, managed to survive this global blackout and move to the next round.

Sadly, nature is not at all sentimental, and dinosaurs would be completely forgotten if it wasn't for humans turning them into museum exhibits in action movies. But hey, that is just selection for you. And if you're not adapting, you are just dino soaring towards extinction.

Yep.

Inequality in Nature and Society

[00:12:00] There is no inherent right to existence and life is unequivocally unfair

as the Durant say. Since nature has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence, or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal, subject to our physical and psychological hereditary, and to the customs and traditions of our group.

We have diversity in health, strength, mental capacity, and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.

, yes. In her great wisdom, nature is not like a precision engineer making exactly what is needed. She follows a blind process that creates a random array of variation to see which happy accident works the best through survival and lets everything else die.

So inequality isn't a glitch in the system. It is the system.

Now, once civilization shows up with its complexity and competition,

the gap is just as obvious.

The people who invent, make, [00:13:00] or seize the, most of something useful tend to rise even higher, leaving others relatively behind. In every society, the act of creating value splits people by ability. Those who could build, lead, or invent were lifted not by justice, but by utility.

Society doesn't care how nice you are or how good your thing was yesterday. The more you contribute today, the more you rise.

When people stopped renting physical movies, blockbuster just died. In the end, the only equality of the marketplace is that everything must earn its place or be replaced. The Durant say that nature. Smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias for freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies.

And when one prevails the other dies.

Balancing Freedom and Equality

This is a little humbling to accept for our modern way of thinking, but .

When people are completely free to do what they want, their differences start to show and multiply. Just look at the 19th century in England and America. Freedom led [00:14:00] to innovation, ambition, and massive inequality.

So to keep things from getting too lopsided, some freedoms have to be limited state control on some aspects of banking or energy and a fair tax and legal system.

But if you go too far with state control, like in communist regimes, you end up with forced equality that actually strangles the whole system.

Imagine a school where the music teacher decides everyone will play same instrument and notes for an upcoming show. Very equal. , but now there's no solo for the great eight violinist and no triangles for the kids that never even had a music lesson.

Instead,

one big, inclusive, happy disaster.

we see that people with exceptional talents both want and need freedom to use them.

Meanwhile, those performing low economically are more likely to want equality. But a system that's built to keep everything completely equal ends up creating less for everyone.

And it's curious that despite our quest for more equality, we forget how much we celebrate inequality. We buy tickets to [00:15:00] see the best singers. We host competitions to find the best tennis players, and we give awards to the best actors.

And in fact, this is important. Doctors and pilots have licenses because if you're not very good at doctoring or piloting, you will kill someone. Yes. , we might say that we like to treat people fairly, but if you're going under the knife for surgery, you don't actually care if the surgeon tries their best.

If their best isn't very good, you only care if the surgeon is one of the best, and thus inherently you really don't like equality.

So instead of aiming for complete equality, we should aim for a better goal, equality of opportunity where we let everyone develop their talents freely.

Not just because that's fair, but because it makes a stronger society when groups come to compete after all, which they do, the ones that let their people thrive and develop their individual talents usually come out on top.

,

So to summarize, equality of opportunity is good, but forced equality of [00:16:00] outcome is not now the debate of where to draw a line in topics like how much inheritance is good versus bad, how much should we subsidize education or healthcare, et cetera, is. A, a much greater step into politics beyond the scope of this podcast where I'm trying to not be political, but even biology it seems, has some opinions on the matter,

The Third Law: Life Must Breed

Now onto the third, law, life must breed.

So if competition is our engine, and selection is the steering wheel, then reproduction is the fuel that keeps the whole of vehicle of life moving. Without reproduction, the story of life .

We'd have ended before the first paragraph of the first chapter. If we rewind for a second back to our primordial soup 4 billion years ago, , the remarkable thing about the first genetic code was not just that it's self organized, it had a relentless urge to keep copying itself.

It turned lifeless chemicals around it into organized life. And if it didn't do that, it would've just [00:17:00] been a momentary flash of some organized molecules it would've then fallen apart, been forgotten, , and you would never have existed.

Over time as these replicating pieces of genetic code evolved into more organized little blobs, some that accumulated resources through different tricks, as like eating each other or eating the sun. Well, these techniques were simply different strategies to build enough energy to then duplicate.

Another quote from the Durant,

they say that nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that can't reproduce abundantly. In fact, nature has a passion for quantity. She likes large litters and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few.

We find that nature is highly indifferent about individuals as their survival is only temporary. After all, it is only a species that survives the passages of time. Furthermore, nature doesn't care about civilization or barbarism

or whatever your strategy might be.

The Gift of Existence

Whether you eat a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables or like a black widow, you prefer to eat your own husband. As [00:18:00] long as you keep having babies, nature will bless you with a gift of a continued existence. And in a nutshell, that is all progress is.

Human Progress and Fire

When we consider the advancement from unicellular life to multicellular life, , a fun fact about humans is they are 30 trillion cells

which in perspective does seem like progress.

And continuing with the human story, , when humans discovered fire, it wasn't just a handy tool for warmth and warding off predators. It made changes to our digestion, brain and society that lasted , purely because of one crucial factor.

People with fire had more babies.

Our fertile species that could dominate in any niche. Instead only became constrained by local resources to the point , that we expanded again and again across the entire planet.

Agricultural Revolution and Civilization

Once humans had reached their first capacity limit across the entire globe and couldn't find new territory to populate, they had to innovate a new way to grow the population. And remember that nature doesn't care about living standards. The agricultural revolution meant a huge drop in our quality of life with harder labor, a [00:19:00] terrible diet of just a few crops and much more disease.

However, on average, the extra energy availability allowed nations that farmed to grow and outcompete their wild neighbors.

It is surprising to realize that human civilizations that succeed are not always the most civilized or the kindest, or even the most intelligent. They are the most fertile ones.

Fertility and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

and this story repeats with every great civilization.

Was ancient Rome worried about low birth rates. You can bet their Caesar salad. They were, by the first century BC birth rates were dropping and the state did grow anxious. In fact, Julius Caesar himself tried to bribe and cajole Romans into having more kids.

He gave them tax breaks, public honors. He even banned childless women from being allowed to wear jewelry.

The empire's fate was tied to its population . When birth rate's full, new infertile rivals are always waiting in the wings, eyeing up a pizza. Your land.

Population Dynamics: Japan vs. Nigeria

Right now, let's do a hypothetical [00:20:00] demonstration of numbers pretend that you are interested in maths and that Japan and Nigeria both have a population of 1 million people each. Now, Nigeria currently has a fertility rate of 5.2 children. Per woman.

Whilst Japan has just 1.2 children. If we were to let these numbers play out for a hundred years, , that's almost four generations and just a blink in evolutionary terms. Well. By the end of this 100 year experiment, Nigeria's, 1 million people, has ballooned to 46 people whilst Japan has shrunk to just a minute 0.15 million people.

So in just a few generations, Japan, which started at the same size, suddenly ends up 293 times smaller. So you can see why nations worry about low birth rates,

Ideas and Religions: Survival of the Fittest

However, this law about reproduction is not just about babies. Ideas themselves want to breed too.

Businesses, languages, TikTok dances. If they don't spread, they disappear. The world's most successful religions didn't just [00:21:00] have catchy stories. They had the best share button built into them. That's why you've heard of Christianity and Islam, but not the court of Bel or Sibille, within which the priests all had to castrate themselves, which does seem like a very offputting rule to recruit more priests.

Regardless. Everything around us in the world is in a constant state of being replaced. Politicians that keep a party alive, students and teachers that keep a school running, even the GPS satellite system survives because humans keep putting up new satellites faster than the old ones fall back to earth.

Ultimately every business divides by reproducing something that people want,

whether that's a cup of coffee or a pencil, or books that we buy,

Apple only survives 'cause every few years people keep buying millions of new iPhones and laptops.

Conversely, Kodak died because people stopped buying the camera film that they produced, and their model simply stopped replicating.

In fact, there is even a saying in podcasting that if you aren't growing, you are dying. Which of course is much the same for business. And [00:22:00] it is more true than many of us like to admit, when the idea of growth for growth sake can seem greedy, but by this logic existence itself is an act of greed,

, so this seems like a good moment for me to recommend that you share this podcast with a friend so that it doesn't die. Just saying, it's a law of nature that I, for one, don't want to argue with.

And on the subject of arguments and dying, we have a little extension topic.

The Three Horsemen: Famine, Disease, and War

Growth has always been constrained by the three horsemen of apocalypse,

famine, disease, and war. These have always served as natural checks on any population.

An abundance of food, can create too many mouths, which of course leads to not enough.

When we think about agriculture, humans, . Were always in a race that increased capacity through new innovations of tending or fertilizing their crops

or protecting them from pest disease or robbers.

Over history, we see that every increase in food supply abundance was quickly canceled out by increased births,

Which sometimes led to disastrous consequences. Imagine your living in rural [00:23:00] France in the 1690s. The harvest fails again. Neighbors are disappearing and ultimately 2.8 million people starve. And that's not just a big number. It's villages, families, friends.

Meanwhile over in the castle, Mary Antoinette had the clever idea to recommend that if peasants had run outta bread, they should start eating cake. Well, today we have a reversal in Fortune where the poor literally eat the burgers, pizzas, Mars bars, and cake that marry antoinette's would be recommending whilst the rich afford their avocados, asparagus, and grass fed steak.

However, currently in the wealthiest nation in history, 74% of Americans are overweight, and in fact, 43% of all humans on the planet are currently overweight.

The abundance we live in of 8 billion people on the planet who mostly suffer from eating too much food, is entirely reliant on ammonia fertilizer. Without it, our farmlands would only support half the world's current population,

which is amazing how propped up our entire [00:24:00] existence is by this single support beam.

And on that, let's talk about disease

overcrowding in cities and living closely with animals breeds diseases that throughout history have chronically ravaged our species.

It happened a lot more after the agricultural revolution when we started building settlements.

Very handy. Inventions like soap and sewers did improve things a lot. Because of these and also organized food systems, ancient Rome was the first city to reach 1 million inhabitants. But of course, that didn't last as their society collapsed.

A thousand years later, the black death in the 13 hundreds killed potentially 200 million people globally,

mostly over Eurasia, where 25% of the population was wiped out.

That's roughly the same as every population . Of every capital city in every country disappearing twice.

So if you are interested in the size of cities, while it wasn't until the 19th century after vaccines were invented, that London became the first city to reach 2 million inhabitants. And it wasn't until 1950 [00:25:00] after antibiotics were invented, that New York and Tokyo became the first mega cities to reach 10 million people.

Amazing as it is that these inventions help us not die.

It's important to realize that they also help us live together.

But remember of course, that isn't something we've always been that good at because we have the last apocalypse, which is war

from our ancient history of tribal conflicts to today.

War, as I said earlier, was a way of one nation to eat another. Now, of course, you don't want to kill everyone in a different population

War, although incredibly scary and terrible is usually less deadly than a plague. The most bloody battle, the most bloody battle in the War of the Roses, the Battle of Toten is estimated to have killed 1% of the English population, which is definitely a lot.

, 15 million people died in the first World War, , whereas 20 to 50 million people died in the Spanish flu pandemic a few years after,

over our agricultural history. The average death rate was about 15% of humans by violence, which to be fair is a lot of humans

What might surprise you is that if you consider the 20th [00:26:00] century and you even include the first and second World War, it was still by far the most peaceful century in human history to be alive with about a 5% death rate by violence. I.

Before that , about three times more people were dying each century. That does put it in perspective.

Now, today, in the 21st century, we seem to be closer to about 1% death by violence

so far, which hopefully stays the same or gets better,

but we'll see. At least for now, more people are dying by suicide and in fact, twice as many people are dying from diabetes

and in the words of Yuval Noah Harra sugar is now more deadly than gunpowder.

So why did we used to have so much war? Well, war used to be the main way of acquiring resources to survive. In 1847, when an Irish family stared at an empty table, their potato crop had failed again. Outside, though ships loaded with edible grain, left for England.

' cause England had won the wars over the Irish.

As a result in the potato famine, 1 million Irish people died . Whilst the English population was fine

In the [00:27:00] modern day, you can still conquer oil fields by war. But we live in a mostly knowledge based economy. The magnificent seven are all technology companies, apple, Amazon, alphabet, meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, whereas 70 years ago it was oil, steel and cars,

Products that were pumped or mined outta the ground.

Now when we consider famine, disease and war, we can see how much they held the growth of human society back over the ages.

Although they no longer hold us back in the same way now, they are still a permanent presence in our lives. Our systems breakdown could expose our huge leverage of population compared to food capacity. A new plague could still spread, and times of peace don't last forever, especially during imbalances of power and inequality, which as we've learned is a permanent feature of life.

Modern Challenges and Fertility Trends

Interestingly, we found ourselves now with a new conundrum . As different limitations seem to be affecting our fertility rate,

New trends in society, , economics, equality and interests

Are changing, how we reproduce.

But of course, the fundamental [00:28:00] law that adaption is essential to survival will always be true.

So fertility and population growth is something we'll discuss further in future episodes about systems. But now we can bring this all together

as we've learned. If you want to take your ideas to the next level, don't buy a ladder. Use some biology.

You should understand and appreciate the power of competition, selection, and reproduction.

It is honestly no wonder that these rules are the staple elements of any nature documentary. In it. We might see gorillas competing for food and mates

with lions showing displays of courage

And of course feathered birds with funny dances and fancy songs.

They of course, have a seemingly unnecessary requirement to show animals boning and having babies, , which might make some families uncomfortable, but this is just reality and life is reproduction, and reproduction is life.

So what does this all add up to?

The Laws of Biology in Action

We began with Stardust, visited the primordial soup, the thunder of the dinosaurs, the fertility and cleanliness of the Romans, and we took these lessons into the present day where you, a bundle of [00:29:00] organized atoms happened to be listening to this podcast, wondering about what it all means, and more importantly, asking yourself who you're going to share this episode with so that this podcast doesn't die , before I get to the end of the saga that we have ahead of us.

We have only just got started and we've been getting our fundamentals together. The three laws of biology aren't just some practical tools for biologists studying animals.

If history is a river, these laws are the current beneath the surface. Sometimes they are gentle, sometimes they wildly bash us against the rocks

and suck us into whirlpools and don't spit us out for a few hundred years. However, in the long term, they do keep moving us forward. So if you want to innovate and build something that lasts, you need to work with the current and not against it. The world doesn't reward the cleverest idea on paper.

It rewards the idea that can compete and multiply in the wild. It rewards the unfair advantages, but only for a short time

before the inevitable requirement to adapt comes back.

Conclusion and Future Episodes

And that is our framework over for the day

[00:30:00] now as we are still early days into the show. Just a little reminder ,

that these framework episodes are as much why the show exists as the history ones. To not just tell stories of history, but to extract the patterns, mental models and practical lessons that anyone can use to nudge the world in a better direction, or perhaps just be a little bit more informed about how it really works.

Armed with the right understanding. After all, we can be part of the next great leap forwards, and hopefully avoid the collapses of our past, at least for a while

Now, in terms of sources for this episode, I used Will and Ariel Durant's book, the Lessons of History, and specifically the third chapter on the laws of biology.

We also snuck a cheeky peek into the intro of Val Noah Harare's book Sapiens. And if you're interested, the start of his second book, homo Deus has an entire chapter on famine, disease, and war.

This episode was written, edited, produced, recorded, et cetera, entirely by me, Samuel Webster Harris,

I even make all the [00:31:00] music.

My wonderful designer is Francisco Koha, and Jeremy Ends is my podcast mentor, and they are both available to hire , and I can highly recommend them,

? I'm delighted to say that I hit my long running goal of releasing this episode in Time for the Full Moon. Now, will our next episode be out with a new moon and this become a regular feature? Who knows? But what I can say is that the next episode will be about the cognitive revolution and the development of advanced language and cooperation skills, and perhaps surprisingly things like capital punishment, male aggression, and the great domestication of our species.

So something to look forward to .

In the meantime, I hope this episode gave you a new way to look at the world. The next time you see a new idea, technology, or way of living, perhaps you will ask how well it competes. What unique advantages or adaptions does it have and can it reproduce like bunny rabbits,

right? What we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean.

So stay curious.

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