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By Root 653 0

of things that each individual knew how to make. Consumption could grow more diversified, while production grew more specialised. At first, the progressive expansion of the Species’ culture was slow, because it was limited by the size of each connected population. Isolation on an island or devastation by a famine could reduce the population and so diminish its collective intelligence. Bit by bit, however, the Species expanded both in numbers and in prosperity. The more habits it acquired, the more niches it could occupy and the more individuals it could support. The more individuals it could support, the more habits it could acquire. The more habits it acquired, the more niches it could create.

The cultural progress of the Species encountered impediments along the way. Overpopulation was a constant problem: as soon as the capacity of the local environment to support the population began to suffer, so individuals began to retreat from specialisation and exchange into defensive self-sufficiency, broadening their production and narrowing their consumption. This reduced the collective intelligence they could draw upon, which reduced the size of the niche they occupied, putting further pressure on population. So there were crashes, even local extinctions. Or the Species found itself expanding in numbers but not in living standards. Yet, again and again the Species found ways to recover through new kinds of exchange and specialisation. Growth resumed.

Other impediments were of the Species’ own making. Equipped by their animal ancestry with an ambitious and jealous nature, individuals were often tempted to predate upon and parasitise their fellows’ productivity – to take and not to give. They killed, they enslaved, they extorted. For millennium after millennium this problem remained unsolved and the expansion of the Species, both its living standards and its population, was sporadically slowed, set back and reversed by the enervating greed of the parasites. Not all of the hangers-on were bad: there were rulers and public servants who lived off the traders and producers but dispensed justice and defence, or built roads and canals and schools and hospitals, making the lives of the specialise-and-exchange folk easier, not harder. These behaved like symbionts, rather than parasites (government can do good, after all). Yet still the Species grew, both in numbers and in habits, because the parasites never quite killed the system off which they fed.

Around 10,000 years ago, the pace of the Species’ progress leapt suddenly ahead thanks to the suddenly greater stability of the climate, which allowed the Species to co-opt other species and enable them to evolve into exchange-and-specialise partners, generating services for the Species in exchange for their needs. Now, thanks to farming, each individual had not only other members of the Species working for her (and vice versa), but members of other species as well, such as cows and corn. Around 200 years ago, the pace of change quickened again thanks to the Species’ new ability to recruit extinct species to its service as well, through the mining of fossil fuels and the releasing of their energy in ways that generated still more services. By now the Species was the dominant large animal on its planet and was suddenly experiencing rapidly rising living standards because of falling birth rates. Parasites plagued it still – starting wars, demanding obedience, building bureaucracies, committing frauds, preaching schisms – but the exchange and specialisation continued, and the collective intelligence of the Species reached unprecedented levels. By now almost the entire world was connected by a web so that ideas from everywhere could meet and mate. The pace of progress picked up once more. The future of the Species was bright, though it did not know it.

Onward and upward

I have presented the case for sunny optimism. I have argued that now the world is networked, and ideas are having sex with each other more promiscuously than ever, the pace of innovation will redouble and economic evolution