1.

WHEN
CREATIVITY
BEGAN

Please think for a moment about your mother, and imagine she is standing two steps away from you at this very moment.

Now think of your grandmother standing another two steps away, just next to your mother. There are three of you now. Then add her mother – your great grandmother – two further steps away.

Including yourself, that’s four people standing in a row and, as the average generation in human evolution has been approximately 25 years, you and these three women would, statistically, represent 100 years of evolution.

Go on, imagine the next four mothers – we are now approximately 200 years back in time. And then imagine the next mother and the next again and so on; all in a line: About 210-240 mothers along this line, you might be surprised to learn that all the women are black, even if you are white, and if we go about 1,700 mothers down the row, the women would look distinctly African, even if you are Asian or Inuit. In fact, these women would live in Africa.

If you go more than 8,000 mothers back, the womens’ brains would start to appear smaller and their bodes more hirsute and, even further down the row, you would note that the women become physically smaller and start to look more and more ape-like. Around 200,000 - 300,000 mothers back, your ancestral mothers are entirely ape-like; small, hairy all over, walking on knuckles. These would be the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees, and some scientists call them the CHLCA for “chimpanzee–human last common ancestor”.

Approximately 99% of the genetic material of modern humans and chimpanzees is identical, but 1% can evidently make a big difference and, when you speculate about what happened to separate us from chimps, there are some peculiarities you have to explain. The first is that hominins, which include pre-humans, have survived for as long as they have done. The average lifespan of mammal species on the Earth has been between three and four million years, but our species is probably 5-8 million years old already, if we count from CHLCA.

The second peculiarity is that we have developed our brains so fast - none of the millions of other species on Earth did anything remotely like that.

So what happened? The first critical factor is that pre-humans only lived in Africa, which had a very volatile climate, where many areas would alternate between humid jungle and dry savannah. These cycles meant that the populations of pre-humans oscillated between doing pretty well (jungle) and pretty badly (savannah), and when they did badly, they were reduced to small, isolated groups. Whenever this happened, there was more inbreeding, which led to accelerated genetic mutation. However, whenever times improved, populations grew and reconnected, resulting in a “battle of the genes” with the best ones winning.

This oscillation between isolation in small groups and reconnection to larger networks was effective. As paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History has commented, “(...) a population needs to be small if it is to incorporate any substantial innovation, genetic or cultural. Large, dense populations have too much genetic inertia to be nudged consistently in any direction. Small, isolated populations, on the other hand, routinely differentiate.”³

To put this another way, the innovation itself happens in small units, but, for it to spread, these units must connect with others from time-to-time. This is exactly what happened for our pre-human ancestors because, as Tattersall elaborates: “When conditions improved once more, the altered populations would have expanded again and come into contact with others. If speciation had taken place, competition and selective elimination would have likely occurred.” When previously isolated tribes connected and interbred, their children would have combinations of their recent mutations, which would often be disastrous, but sometimes very beneficial.

However, superimposed on this climate cycle was an overall trend towards colder climates and thus a gradual shift towards less forest and more savannah. Some of our CHLCAs stayed in the forests, while others moved to the open ground; possibly by staying put while the forests moved.

Because the CHLCAs on the more open land began walking upright on two feet instead of crawling and swinging in trees, there was genetic selection for different body-shapes. However, as those in open areas were more visible to large predators, their males found it difficult to guard a harem, so they each began to guard only their own female and her children. This may have been especially pronounced during hard times, where the females had to scatter around bigger areas in search of food (this is called the femalespacing hyphothesis).

When a male stays with the same female, we call it pair-bonding, and this only happens in around 10% of mammals. There is a reason why it’s relatively rare, because it can have limitations, but it also stimulates a capability for personal affection which provides a good basis for social-bonding and co-operation.

Something else happens: with pair-bonding, each child has a pretty good idea who its extended family is, since it knows the identity of its own father. To understand why this is important, consider chimpanzees, which, unlike humans do not have pair-bonding. Like primitive humans, chimpanzees live in tribes that are “patrilocal”, which means that males stay put, but females move to other neighbouring tribes. Also like humans, chimpanzees frequently attack such tribes and kill members indiscriminantly. However, human pair-bonders came to recognize some of these tribe members as their own sisters or children, so became more hesitant in their killing. Pair-bonding didn’t stop raids on other tribes, but it did lead to less agression and greater co-operation. We can see clear examples of this in more recent history, where European kings would marry their children to children of neighbouring kings in order to avoid wars with them.

Before we discuss co-operation in further detail, we need to look at a simple concept called social spaces. This comprises three layers, where the inner one is our known family, whose members we may help, even if we gain nothing directly in return. The second layer is our friends and members of the tribe/ culture with which we identify and have ongoing social relationships. We will help these, but we generally expect some reciprocity. Combined, these two circles constitute our social network.

The third layer is everyone else, about whom we may not give a hoot or might actively be hostile too, even though (or because) we have never met them. When we include this layer, we have our entire social space. When pair-bonding started, our forefathers would - unlike chimps – understand that some members of their inner circle in fact lived among others in what they had thought of as their outer circle. So these people became middle circle, which meant that their social networks expanded.

The greater the number of “others” whith whom you can co-operate, the more advantageous it becomes to be co-operative, and we know today that human babies in simple tests show a far higher inclinations to help other humans than do small chimpanzees in terms of helping peers.⁴

Something else happened. Because our ancestors had literally come down from the trees, they had hands instead of hooves, and these hands were flexible because they had been used for holding on to branches while picking fruit and so on. As they moved into the savannahs, the pre-humans began walking mainly on two legs, which meant their hands were available for other activities, which offered up many opportunities; especially as they gradually developed opposing thumbs. This enabled pre-humans to do very simple stone-cutting, which seems to have started approximately 2.6 million years ago; they would surely have used branches as weapons. This stimulated so-called gene-culture co-evolution, whereby those best at using tools had the highest survival rates, which meant there was also a hand-brain coevolution.

THE SOCIAL SPACE. THE BETTER PEOPLE ARE AT COOPERATING BEYOND THEIR INNER CIRKLE, THE MORE SUCCESSFUL THEY WILL BE.

To sum up, the reason our species has survived for so long already and that our bodies, and especially our brains, have developed so quickly is a combination of five factors: 1) the frequent isolation in small units which altered genetic drift; 2) the reconnections into bigger networks for competition; 3) the increased personal compassion and expansion of networks after pair-bonding; and 4) the fact that they could still mate after they had been separated due to compatible DNA.

Here is something to think about: anthropologists and other scientists tell us that our species, which we call Homo sapiens, has existed for approximately 200,000 years - before that, there were pre-humans. They also say that the sizes of our brains haven’t changed much through all this time – in fact, people had slightly bigger brains in the Stone Age than they have now; the brain evolved from 1,500 cm3 to 1350 cm3. And yet, it is less than 5,000 years ago that some of our ancestors began to develop civilization.

Isn’t that odd? How was it that they walked around with these big brains for close to 200,000 years without even inventing a bicycle? What happened 5,000 years ago that pushed them from living in caves to flying aeroplanes and watching satellite television? What was the key to civilization?

Well, as we just noted, it wasn’t brains.

And it wasn’t physical strength either. Humans didn’t suddenly become stronger 5,000 years ago. In fact, it has never been about our physical abilities, because we are, by nature, a rather fragile species, as we also were 5,000 years ago. In line with sea cucumbers, common jellyfish and Daddy Longlegs, we lack such impressive features as strong claws or sharp teeth with which to defend ourselves; in biological terms, we are pretty much unarmed. Also, we cannot fly and, if we could, we would probably catch a cold anyway, because we lack the fur, scales, and feathers that might protect our highly sensitive skin. We cannot run or swim particularly fast, and to top it all, human females find it very difficult to give birth to our children, which are helpless for an incredibly long period of time.

We are, to put it bluntly, a bunch of rather wimpy sops, if not helpless weaklings and, as such, we answer pretty well to the standard description of animals destined for extinction: large enough to be eaten and slow enough to be caught. Considering things from that perspective it is no wonder that our early ancestors - as we shall soon see – came to the brink of extinction time and again. In fact, they were probably skinned alive and eaten by stronger creatures on a regular basis.

To understand how physically weak and vulnerable our species really was, we can start with our distant forefathers Homo ergaster. These ape-men lived as one species in Africa and then, approximately 1.4 million years ago, they split into two sub-species named Homo antecessor and Homo erectus, respectively. The latter later spread into Asia where, over a long period (perhaps between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago) they went into decline, until they only consisted of a tiny enclave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. These creatures (Homo floresiensis) were, when full-grown, just over one metre tall, and they died out 12-17,000 years ago, so quite recently, actually. There may have been other human sub-species and other attempts to leave Africa that we have yet to discover. For instance, we have one 40,000 year-old finger bone from Siberia that has deviant DNA suggesting it might be yet another sub-species now known as Denisova hominins.

The adventures of the people dying out on Flores and the Denisovans dying out we-dont-know-where, were not very uplifting but, meanwhile, our ancestors in Africa kept going, and some of them migrated to Europe approximately 1.3 million years ago. However, these emigrants also perished around 70,000 years later.

So that was yet another failure but fortunately our African pre-human ancestors were still around, and while most just stayed in Africa, a few made another excursion into Asia, where these also died out as in the previous attempt.

Yet another group migrated into the mostly harsh and cold Europe, where they survived several ice ages while evolving into a more physically-robust, bigger-brained sub-species called Homo neanderthalensis or simply “Neanderthals”.

These guys actually looked rather promising. In fact, if aliens had landed on Earth around that time, they could easily have assumed they were the future.

While all this took place, there was steady progress in Africa, since its Homo species’ average brain mass also grew – the ape-men became gradually less ape and more men. Their brains more than doubled in size due to the aforementioned gene-culture and hand-brain coevolutions.

This produced results. At some point between 400,000 and 1.5 million years ago, some of our ancestors began doing something no animal had ever done: they learned to control fire to keep warm and to cook food. This meant their stomachs and intestines had less work to do digesting food which freed up energy and space for other things, such as supporting the bigger brains which had enabled the smaller digestive systems in the first place. Brains use about 20% of our energy, so they don’t come cheap, but the gene-culture co-evolution made it practical.

There was more: Probably around 700,000 years ago, a genius invented the stone axe, and perhaps 500,000 years ago, the first tents made of skin were developed. This was followed by the wooden skewers some 400,000 years ago. These inventions were actually amazing when you consider that we were still at ape-man stage. But, then again, please note that it took them more than 300,000 years to come up with just four inventions. After this, though, their creativity started to accelerate :⁵

250,000 BC: Fine stone cutting

230,000 BC: Funerals

200,000 BC: Knives and rope

So this was another four inventions within a mere 50,000 years – still not a blazing speed, but faster. In the meantime, our ancestors changed so much genetically that, as already mentioned, from approximately 200,000 years ago, our ancestors started to look so much like us that we call them Homo sapiens. Meanwhile our (yes, now its “our”) creativity kept improving, and although it still wasn’t overwhelming, we do notice a continued acceleration:

100,000 BC: Serrated blades and domestication of wolves

90,000 BC: The needle made of bone

70,000 BC: Art and clothing

Now we are talking about five inventions within just 30,000 years! Furthermore, we also see for the first time how one invention (clothing) depends on three previous ones, since our knives could cut a coat up into pieces, while our needles and rope enabled sewing these together to create the clothing.

We are moving through history at a good pace here, but now we have to make another detour to introduce one more little model: the creative design space.

This relates to how innovation occurs: innovation is mainly about combining existing things in new ways. The creative Homo sapiens and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs put it succinctly:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.”⁶

Such a process becomes hyper-exponential. If, for example, we only have products A and B, then we can combine these in three different ways (if we ignore doublet combinations). However, if we double the number of existing products to four (A, B, C and D), the number of possible combinations rises from 3 to 14. So, if the number of creative building blocks grows in a linear fashion, it leads to an hyper-exponentially-increasing number of possible combinations. We can call this inventory of ideas ready to be recombined a “creative design space” and it was the process of re-combining within this that began around 70,000 years ago; the first time we know of where someone combined three prior innovations (knife, needle and rope) to make a new one (clothing).

THE CREATIVE DESIGN SPACE. SINCE INNOVATION IS LARGELY RECOMBINATIONS OF PREVIOUS IDEAS, THE MORE IDEAS WE HAVE ALREADY IMPLEMENTED, THE MORE NEW POSSIBILITIES WE HAVE WITHIN THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE.

The inner circle in the illustration above represents old technologies and concepts that no longer evolve very technically (such as knives, axes and ropes). Most of the change that happens in this area equates to a fashion shift – the technical concept of a knife changes very little, but we keep coming up with new artistic variations.

The next cirle illustrates newer ideas that are still evolving a lot technically (such as cars and airplanes). Within this area you will typically also see many applications developing around some core ideas; miniature versions of a similar creative design space. For example, the smartphone can now be seen as a relatively mature core technology, but the software applications for it continue to evolve very rapidly.

The outer ring represents what US biologist and complex systems scientist Stuart Hauffman has called “the adjacent possible” – it is what could, in principle, be assembled by recombining existing elements from inside the two inner circles, but which hasn’t yet been assembled. We shall study much of that later, but it includes creative computers and some amazing biotech stuff.

Back to our ancestors. One thing many anthropologists assume about them is that they probably learned to use language more than 50,000 years ago (plus/ minus a lot). Perhaps they initially used clicking sounds to communicate, and maybe that was all it was, because we do know that some of the most isolated and primitive tribes in Africa today use clicks as the core element of their language. One of these tribes is called the !Kung- people ( “!” stands here for such a clicking sound), and their way of life may give us a clue to what life was like before people left Africa.

It’s like this: In spite of very low population density, the !Kung people tend to run out of resources in any given location, but they solve this by moving around. Between 30% and 40% of their food is meat, and the rest is plants. Since they have virtually no possessions, they are all materially equal, and they share what they find or kill. They keep their sparse properties in leather bags, and women often carry a single child on their backs. When a woman gives birth, she leaves the men, and if there is something wrong with the baby, she kills it. They rarely have the next child before the previous one has learned to walk far enough because, as an anthropologist once calculated, a woman will, on average, carry each of her children almost 8,000 km on her back before he or she learns to walk. Just to put this into perspective: The distance from the French coast towards the English Channel to the south of Spain is in the region of 3,000 km, so it’s there, back and then some with a child on your back.

One more thing: the !Kung people don’t trade or, at least, they didn’t until they met modern people. That is important and we shall come back to it soon.

So this is how we think ancient people lived: Sparse population, often isolated, but then reconnected, primitive life, harsh conditions, no possessions, sharing almost everything, walking a lot, killing the weak and no trade. Harsh and primitive, but they did survive.

They only just survived, though, and approximately 70.000 years ago, humans almost became extinct, because genetic analyses tell us that, at this time, the global population probably fell to just 2,000 to 20,000 survivors - several scientists believe they were down to 5,000 individuals, which would have qualified them for a status on the “Red List” of endangered species. Perhaps this population decline was triggered by a gigantic volcanic eruption in Sumatra, which covered the sky with ash for several years and led to a dramatic temperature drop, but it could also have come from a devastating epidemic or war.

But they survived and recovered, and continued to innovate, as the next four inventions came in just 10,000 years – faster than ever before:

60,000 BC: Herbal medicine

50,000 BC: Boats, flutes, bone spearheads

Around this time, (around 50,000 years ago) their way of life had changed in ways that make anthropologists call them “modern” from then on, since their remains were fairly similar to what the !Kung people leave behind today, which apparently is modern to an anthropologist.

Now the story takes a twist, because a few thousand years later something happened that has puzzled scientists ever since they first learned about it. The event began when approximately 42,000 years ago, a small group of Homo sapiens left Africa, just as some of their ancestors had done several times much earlier. There is broad consensus that there may well have been several attempts to do this, but that only this group achived it at the time. Based on DNA analysis, some scientists believe that it was a single group consisting of approximately150 individuals that left Africa and then spread.⁷

Having crossed the Strait of Arabia they continued a (seemingly) very slow migration to India, after which some of them walked towards Europe. These migrations were spread out over many generations and their progress was so slow that, on average, they barely travelled more than a half-to-two kilometres a year - maybe 10 – 30 km within a generation. Europe’s new immigrants, at this stage, only numbered a few thousand, and anthropologists and archaeologists believe they typically arrived in clans of 20-30 individuals, each of which was loosely associated with a few similar clans.

Why did they migrate to Europe? It seems unlikely that it was a particularly attractive landscape because it was Ice Age and the Alps, for example, were buried under glaciers, which in some places were about a kilometre thick. In addition, a large part of Scandinavia and half of the British Isles was also covered in ice, and the lands just south of these regions could best be described as Arctic desert. The vegetation in the rest of Europe was mainly low and sparse; something in line with that of Iceland or northern Siberia today.

There was another problem: the Homo sapiens group was heading in the direction of the aforementioned Neanderthals. That sounds dangerous, because these people were very muscular, stocky and robust. In fact, their skeletons, of which we have found many, were stronger than those of Homo sapiens and tended to show physical impact damage reminiscent of the ones you see today at the rodeo riders (in other words, the kind of damage you can expect if you tangle with large animals or enemies from your own species).

Furthermore, the Neanderthals were well adapted to life in Europe. Because they were short and dense of build, they could keep warm more easily than the more slender Homo sapiens. The latter were all black at this time, while Neanderthals had fair skin and red hair which helped with absorption of calcium as the body synthesizes vitamin D from sunlight. In Europe, they had managed to survive four ice ages and they had probably learned to use clothes long before Homo sapiens.

Furthermore, Neanderthals do not seem to have been dim: their brains were bigger than those of Homo sapiens and they made tools as Homo sapiens did, including spear tips made of stone. Something that looks like a whistle has also been found in one of their caves, so perhaps they played music, and we know they buried their dead.

So Homo sapiens (humans) were slowly approaching these tough dudes, and it was almost inevitable that these two sub-species of the genus Homo had to fight. The winners should have been a foregone conclusion: the mighty Neanderthals.

The scene was set for an epic power struggle. As the newly arrived Homo sapiens first met Neanderthals in Europe, the latter had already lived there for approximately 300,000-400,000 years; they were the home team. In fact, Neanderthals had existed as a breed for 500,000 - 600,000 years and Homo sapiens only for approximately 200,000 years, when the two sub-species now ran into each other.

Various archaeological finds suggest that they definitely fought. For example, we have a Neanderthal cranium where one can see that the meat has been cut with a tool in the same way as Homo sapiens then cut deer meat. The crop marks indicate that even the tongue had been cut off - presumably to be eaten. Presumably, they had clashed once before, since earlier Homo sapiens had lived in the area we now know as Israel but, 80,000 years ago, Neanderthals walking east-ward apparently overcame them (unless they simply perished by themselves). So it would seem that the Neanderthals had won the first round. What was different this time?

This is what has puzzled scientists for so long: The earliest European skeleton of Homo sapiens found, to date, was in modern Romania and is 34,000 – 36,000 years old. Relatively soon after - perhaps around 30,000 years ago - Neanderthals became extinct. Actually, a few scientists have claimed they didnt really disappear, because non-Africans have, on average, approximately 3% Neanderthal genes,which suggests cross-breeding whether through rape or via free will. Bear in mind, though that some or all of this shared genetic material may be down to our common ancestors rather than inter-breeding. How, then, is it possible that Neanderthals came first and completely dominated the area, but that today 97% of their ancestors’ genes is non-Neanderthal?

So here’s the odd scenario in a nutshell:

1.Neanderthals lived in Europe for 300,000-400,000 years, surviving four ice ages.

2.They were perfectly adapted for their environment, extremely strong and robust and had bigger brains than Homo sapiens.

MAP OF MIGRATIONS OF HOMO SAPIENS AND THEIR PREDECESSORS THROUGH TWO MILLION YEARS. AS THE GRAPH SHOWS, IT WAS CERTAINLY NOT EASY FOR THE EARLIER HOMO SPECIES TO BREAK AWAY FROM AFRICA.⁸

3.Homo sapiens arrived in Europe about 80,000 years ago but subsequently disappeared - they were probably defeated by Neanderthals in the Middle East.

4.Homo sapiens arrived again in Europe approximately 34,000 - 36,000 years ago and prevailed.

5.Within just a few thousand years after the second arrival of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals had been squeezed into a corner of Europe, then a corner of Spain, before becoming extinct.

Over time, there have been made many theories. Some researchers have suggested there was a crucial difference between the two species’ form of intelligence which gave Homo sapiens an advantage despite their somewhat smaller brains. At one time, a specific candidate for the crucial difference was even considered, a specific variant of the gene FOXP2, which helps us to talk. However, new DNA analysis demonstrated in 2009 that Neanderthals actually had the same variants of this critical gene.

Another theory about Neanderthal disappearance assumes that the frequent climatic changes in Africa from which Homo sapiens had just emigrated, made them more flexible than Neanderthals. Nowadays, climate change has become a fashionable theme, but if we look at the current case, this explanation borders on the ridiculous, because there were also large variations in the seasons as well as long-term climate variability in Europe, and glacial weather fluctuates much more than hot weather. In addition, if you live close to a kilometre-tall ice wall, it is really not that easy to tackle cold days. And it was precisely Neanderthals and their predecessors - not Homo sapiens - who had practised this for 300,000-400,000 years.

When you inhabit an entire continent like the Neanderthals did, but end up living on a tiny, natural fortress at its very edge after a competing species has arrived, then your problem is hardly lack of resources or disease. No, you are fleeing a stronger enemy – in this case, Homo sapiens. But how could Homo sapiens be stronger?

We need help here, so let’s introduce three renowned biologists to the stage: Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright and Matt Ridley.

Professor Dawkins is probably the most famous of the three. He received a doctorate in zoology from Oxford University in 1966 and has spent most of his career as a lecturer and, later, professor at Oxford University. In 1974, he published his book The Selfish Gene, in which he pointed out a curious phenomenon: intuitively we believe that people who survive “pass on their DNA”.¹⁰ Okay, Dawkins claimed, that is true in a literal way, but just think about this: when we die, our genes don’t, if we have children. After all, before our death our DNA has been smart enough to make copies of itself, which then live on in our offspring. These children’s bodies will eventually also perish but, before this happens, our genes will, typically, again have managed to copy themselves. Seen from that perspective, the genes use us.

Dawkins therefore described the genes as “selfish”, though he apologized several times in the book since, of course, genes do not possess selfish feelings or any feelings at all. But they are automatic self-copying machines, like viruses, and, as such, they have, through natural selection, found a way to replicate themselves – and yes, they use our bodies for their purpose.

This may sound like sophistry, but it explains the fact that many individuals are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to protect their children or family: in doing so they also protect their DNA. Of course, this is not how we see it ourselves. We see it as saving our loved ones but thereby we lose our own lives, whereas our genes win out, and love is a lovely little trick DNA came up with to ensure its own duplication once pair-bonding became useful.

Dawkins’s book was an immediate bestseller, and it revolutionized the thinking of many biologists. But, funnily enough, it had, towards the end, a rather short chapter, in which he pointed out, almost as an after-thought, that something similar could be seen within human ideas and behaviour. Based on the Greek word “mneme”, meaning memory, he noted that there are numerous small ideas or behavioural traits in our various communities, which replicate themselves as genes do and which thereby manage to survive every individual or even their civilizations. These “memes”, as he called them, were therefore also selfish self-copy machines, which also used people as their carriers.

Memes are the concepts, behaviours or sayings we use in our everyday lives, which we often consider self-evident, but they also include specific details of our behaviour and elements of our cultural style. In contrast to genes, a single meme is sometimes able to penetrate an entire community within days or weeks. Interestingly enough, we are not even aware of many of our memes. For example: children can be good at grammar, which is a set of memes, without being able to explain them. Shared memes help us to interact with people we have not met before, as if they were a kind of social glue.

There are many interesting examples of how memes can survive for centuries or millennia, until their original cause is completely forgotten. In Spain, for instance, it is customary to hang smoked hams in the ceiling of restaurants and bars, but you don’t see the same in, say, France or Italy. This is a meme that evolved during the Spanish Inquisition, where Muslims and Jews were given the choice to convert to Christianity, emigrate or be robbed, tortured or burned. Many chose to convert and, to dispel any doubts during the Spanish Inquisition, they began to hang hams from their ceilings, since Jews and Muslims cannot eat pork.To this day, the Spanish maintain the meme of hanging hams from the ceilings of their bars and restaurants, even though most are not aware of the reason behind it. The bodies perished, but the memes survived.

That was a bit about memes, but now we need to introduce our next philosophical biologist: Professor Robert Wright. He graduated in socio-biology at Princeton University and has since written various highly acclaimed books covering game theory, religion, the human mind and more. His book Nonzero published in 2000 was described by Fortune Magazine as one of the 75 most important books ever written about the business (even if it isn’t a business book at all).¹¹ In this book he argued that the main driver of biological and cultural progress was cooperation.

Cooperation? Do we not all know from Charles Darwin, that the logic of progress is the survival of the fittest, which actually seems to mean a brutal jungle-law that does not sound like co-operation at all? Yes we do, but Wright’s argument was not opposed to this.¹² It was rather an elaboration, in which he pointed out that the evolution of life from the very beginning has been driven by the benefits of what one may call “nonzero” “zero-sum” or “win-win” transactions. Whenever the biological building blocks, such as molecules, organelles, cells or individuals randomly discovered new opportunities for collaboration, their chances of lasting survival through replication improved tremendously.

This brings us right back to our social spaces and creative design space, because recombination and co-operation is kind of the same thing. In other words, the best co-operators became the fiercest competitors. Human bodies are walking creative design spaces, which implies a tonne of co-operation. Just think about it; our bodies are molecular military alliances, if not huge metropolises of cooperating cells. The human body depends of various bacteria, and we cannot survive without these. It also has more than a billion different types of immune cells. Each of these is only found in very small numbers, but if the body is attacked by an alien element, they will quickly multiply through a complex collaboration between its many cells and enzymes to take up the fight and protect the entire metropolis of cells (and thus the selfish DNA).

So co-operation is key, and it can evidently extend beyond the individual. Just imagine this: a caveman named Fred Flintstone meets another named Frank Fisherman. Fred is good at making flint axes and Frank at making fishing nets. So Fred and Frank now swap an axe for a net. We call this a nonzero transaction (where nobody gets nothing) or a win-win transaction (both are happy). But there may be more to it, because as the two exchanged goods, they also exchanged information and ideas. When Frank comes home to his cave, it may well be that he has been inspired by Fred to make his first flint axe, and vice versa. In other words; the exchange of goods was a voluntary win-win transaction that could not be reused, but the accompanying exchange of ideas or memes was another win-win transaction that could be repeated indefinitely.

Think of it this way: While we were still sleeping peacefully on Saturday morning, the baker around the corner was baking bread and he was doing his best because otherwise the clients would choose another baker. Two hours later, as we arrived in the shop and asked for bread, he smiled and passed it across the counter, and we said “thank you”. Then we paid him, and he responded with a “thank you”.

None of the parties involved in such a transaction is likely to be personal friends with any of the others and many may not even know one another. This means we conducted a 1) depersonalized 2) voluntary 3) win-win transaction 4) under competition.

Here comes the point: The concept of making voluntary exchange transactions with strangers is mankind’s greatest idea – it is far more significant than, for instance, the control of fire or invention of the wheel. It is bigger, because trade is what we can call a meta-idea - it’s a great idea for coming up with more ideas. Furthermore, because it can be conducted outside the small circle of our friends and family, and because it is voluntary (each person is free to do it with someone else or not at all), it can mutate with blazing speed if there is no specific resistance, which makes it an incredible engine of creativity. Why? - Because:

When you trade in a “market” with strangers beyond the inner layers of your social network, there is no longer any forgiveness for a bad product or attitude, and you have to compete on harsh terms against others.

When there is competition, people wonder about how to get the best deal or make the most competitive offer. So it makes them think hard and become selective and demanding.

While the social networks leads to more trade transactions, trade transactions also increase social space.

It is not difficult to see what this leads to. It leads to more of the same, where products and services get ever better.

Trade can happen because people desire money, status, security, fun or anything at all; it does not matter in the case of this argument. What counts is that innovation happens when we make voluntary win-win transactions in a competitive environment. .

Let’s turn the argument upside down and consider how life was (and occasionally still is) without it. In primitive society, where livelihoods predominantly relied on using limited natural resources, people were encouraged to create win-lose (yes, win-lose) transactions with all but their most immediate friends and family. Members of a tribe would help each other, but they would fight intensively for food, loot, territory and women against other tribes with whom they were not family-related. They would not co-operate beyond the core of their social group.

This was how life was for almost anybody in the distant past. However, after trade was invented, you could gain by doing something for others – even if you didn’t know them. The more cooperative you were, the more you would gain. And if you could think up a completely unfulfilled demand and be the first to fulfill it, you might gain even more.

This changed the mentality from seeking win-lose transactions to pursuing win-win transactions and in particular innovative win-win transactions. So people started to expand the circles of people with whom they would co-operate and, with this, came greater exchange of ideas and an ever-growing creative design space.

In this we have our key to civilization. Come to think of it, this key is, in fact, so obvious that we almost certainly can assume that if there are intelligent beings on other planets who have developed civilizations, that is also how it started for them. Trade must be the universal key to civilization.

One man who saw a lot of this long before our biologist Robert Wright was the philosopher and economist Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, first described how it is mainly voluntary win-win transactions that drive progress of civilizations. In fact, he contrasted this with slavery, which he not only considered unfair, but uneconomical: “ ... I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves,” he said. Furthermore, while he thought it was useful to colonize new land, he believed it made no sense to maintain central control over it forever, since it made the people there unfree. He compared this with the Greek colonies of antiquity in Italy and elsewhere, which had ruled themselves. The original city state from which the colonizers came viewed each colony as “an emancipated child over whom she pretended to claim no direct authority or jurisdiction”. No, people should rule themself, be free and do things voluntarily. As Smith famously explained:

“It is not from the butchers, the brewers, or the baker’s benevolence that we get our dinner, but from their own interests.”

So there we have our baker again, but please note: no shared ideology is necessary among those who co-operate. A model for a good society doesn’t need to be any more emotionally attractive than an engineers’ model for an engine. It just needs to work well, and voluntary win-win transactions under competition really does work.

When we co-operate with people beyond our personal social network, we may be dealing with strangers who we do not like, and the principle will work anyway. Cavemen Fred Flintstone and Frank Fisherman can both be stupid, selfish pigs - they may still co-operate well through trade, if it is in their mutual interest. And that co-operation may give each of them new ideas, lead to specialization and encourage greater work effort.

Is it a shame if they dont like each other particularly? No, it is actually best so, because if friendship becomes a part of it, we end up with nepotism and tribalism, which restrict competition, choice and creativity.

Come to think about it, there actually is something emotionally appealing about this whole concept after all. If a Frenchman buys something from China, he does not know those who made it and they do not know him, but they co-operated anyway and, in a global economy, everybody seems to work for everybody else. That is why it is somehow beautiful (and why the concept of self-sufficiency isn’t).

It is important to understand that trading is different from the widespread symbiosis that is essential to ecology and nature, such as when bees fertilize flowers in return for nectar or when small fish, rather heroically, clean the teeth of sharks. Natural symbiosis does not include any examples of two creatures in the wild that randomly meet and then spontaneously negotiate the exchange of two different objects. Nor is symbiotic exchange in nature versatile in the sense that the same creatures may negotiate the exchange of something entirely different the next time.

But human interaction is now versatile, and here we come back to one of Robert Wright’s two central insights: evolution is a gigantic multi-player game where the winners overwhelmingly are those who are best at facilitating co-operation, i.e. facilitating win-win transactions (Adam Smith saw the same). Building on that, his second insight is this: Since those cultures and civilizations best at stimulating win-win transaction become strongest, there will, for all mankind, be a general trend towards more win-win and less win-lose. It is this to which Wright’s book’s subtitle - “The logic of human destiny” - referred: man’s logical destiny is to enable yet more win-win transactions (we probably lost Adam Smith there). Many civilizations will, at some point, begin to head the opposite way, of course, but these will (sooner or later) find themselves in the trash bin of history alongside other nations that preferred central command and forced transaction to decentralization and voluntary action.

Let’s now return to the question of why Homo sapiens (man) beat Neanderthals, and here we need to introduce our third super-biologist: Dr Matt Ridley. Like Dawkins, he took a Doctorate in zoology from Oxford University. Then he served for a number of years as the science editor of The Economist magazine. He has also written a number of books about genetics and society.

In 2010, he published a book called The Rational Optimist, in which he argued that the crucial difference between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals didn’t lie in their external circumstances or genetic differences, but in their memes. But what differences might those be, and how can we trace differences in the memes of cavemen tens of thousands of years ago?

Ridley’s answer was very simple: examination of excavated objects from Neanderthal dwellings showed these always came from their immediate neighbourhood. For example, if archaeologists found axes, they would always be made with the types of stones that could be found fairly close to that particular habitat. In Homo sapiens’ European settlements, on the other hand, archaeologists would often find objects that had clearly come from far away, so could only have be acquired via trade with strangers.¹³

Before the invention of trade, both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals must typically have seen all strangers as a threat to their own safety and their reaction would often have been to kill before being killed – win-lose, in other words. But these dynamics must have changed after they developed the concept of trading. Instead of planting his stone axe in the stranger’s skull, a man would perhaps seek to swap it for fifteen beautiful seashells.

So, as Ridley suggested, that was in all likelihood the answer to the conundrum: when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals clashed 24,000 – 36,000 years ago, the former had invented trading, and latter hadn’t. As we saw earlier, there was no evidence of trade between Homo sapiens in Africa and previous attempts to migrate from Africa had thus been made by tribes which did not yet trade. But when Homo sapiens later ran into Neanderthals again, it became a struggle between traders and non-traders.

Undertaking trade facilitated more peaceful networking among Homo sapiens which in turn, made it possible for them to exchange ideas, memes and information, and it enabled them to co-operate in warfare by assembling larger armies to defeat small groups of Neanderthals one at a time. Furthermore, as they were now traders, the Homo sapiens would probably have fought each other a lot less than the Neanderthals fought one another.

So it was, in all likelihood, memes, rather than genes, that eventually led our ancestors to victory, and it was different approaches to transactions, that really mattered, and not environment or resources.

What were Homo sapiens trading? The early European trading objects included flint and seashells and, later, came salt, amber, zinc, copper, gold, silver, furs, jadeite axes, textiles, oils, gemstones, wine, pottery, trained horses, walrus ivory, slaves, silk, glass and more.¹⁴

This was attractive stuff, which brings us to the point that trade encourages diligence. Many scientists have formulated theories stating that increased leisure time frees up time to create the elements of an effective culture. Maybe so, but, as we shall see repeatedly in the course of this book, most people do very little if they do not identify a clear incentive. When anthropologist Robert Carneiro visited the Kuikuro tribe in the Brazilian jungle, he noted that they had far more food than they needed. In fact, it took them only a few hours a day to gather the necessary fruits to survive. So what did they do with their remaining time?

Nothing, they were just dozing. But when the Europeans showed up with lots of exciting things that could be bought in exchange for Cassava (root vegetables native to the area), the tribe’s Cassava production went through the roof. The possibility of trade gives people an incentive to work harder. Trade is a perpetual generator of creativity. As such, it is also what scientists sometimes call a “change agent”.

Nothing progresses without change agents. Nature provides strong genetic change agents through oxidation, virus infection, radiation, sunlight, cosmic rays and other means. These have changed our genes, mostly for the worse, but occasionally for the better, and competition combined with these change agents has taken us from strands of DNA in a primordial soup to the very complex beings we are today.

Like natural evolution, the effects of voluntary win-win transactions between people accumulate. When the British first crossed the Atlantic to begin the colonization of North America, they sailed in ships that were inspired by early shipbuilding traditions of the Normans, north Germans and Vikings. They had gained their knowledge of navigation from astrological observation plus their alphabet from the Greeks and their algebra from the Arabs. Their cannons, gunpowder and compasses were Chinese ideas, their maps were printed with a German technology, and their number system was developed in India. If they had not previously driven intensive international trade, they could never have combined all these amazing innovations and technologies and would thus never have been able to colonize North America.

Trade is such a strong idea that today its effect is clearly visible from space at night. It is simply brighter in places where voluntary and international trade is most common. The clearest example of this is seen when astronauts fly over the Koreas at night. They will note that North Korea, with the exception of some light in its capital and a few other places, is simply pitch black at night, whereas the sister state of South Korea is bathed in light. Although the two countries have similar ethnic populations, population density and natural resources, and although until 1945 they formed a united and homogeneous country, the economic difference is now huge, as the differences in light intensity demonstrate.

And that difference keeps growing. A study showed that South Korea’s light intensity increased by 72% between 1970 and 1999, while North Korea over the same period decreased (yes, fell!) by 7.4%.¹⁵ Former US president Jimmy Carter visited North Korea in 2011 and reported afterwards that approximately one third of the children there were malnourished and that authorities had just halved people’s daily rations to just 700 calories. The recommendation in the West is 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men, and the health hazard boundary is located at 500-800 calories.¹⁶

So here we have two neighbours with the same common history, climate and natural resources and one of the world’s most homogeneous ethnic populations, and yet one has, within three generations, become 20 times richer than the other.

South Korea is a global trading nation. North Korea has based its society on socialism combined with a principle they call “juche”. This means self-sufficiency.

NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA FROM SPACE. THE NORTH IS A CENTRALIZED SOCIETY PURSUING SOCIALISM AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY. THE SOUTH IS AN OPEN MARKET ECONOMY ENDORSING GLOBALIZATION.

Of course, we can never prove beyond doubt that Homo sapiens out-competed Neanderthals because only the former had invented trade. But it sounds a lot like the North Korea/South Korea story and, one thing we do know, at least from recent history: voluntary co-operation under competition is the primary source of creativity, civilization and prosperity. Ideas for improving such co-operation lead us forward, and ideas that prevent it lead to stagnation, decline or collapse. In fact, as Ridley has pointed out, there are no examples anywhere in the world of communities that lost ground, in terms of their economy, once they had opened up free trade - even in cases where their neighbours did not reciprocate. The strongest supporters of free trade have often sprinted from their neighbours - just think of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Mauritius, Botswana and Chile.