A theory of everyone

For the longest time, medicine was really just an accumulation of things that we discovered over the years, but it really accelerated once it became an evidence-based field. It will accelerate even further the more it integrates a deeper theoretical understanding of how the body works and how it evolved, for example.

How we create a cultural evolutionary process that's more efficient, is absolutely essential to tackling the problems that we face around the world. As I often say, we didn't actually design anything. What we see are the end products of people trying all kinds of different designs, and the successful ones continue on. We talk about the Magna Carta; we don't talk about all the failed versions of the Magna Carta that preceded it. We talk about the US Constitution; we don't talk about the Brazilian version or other constitutions. Why? Because they worked.

Take the United States, for example. Justice Brandeis once described every state as a laboratory. Every state is trying different things rather than having everything completely centralized and decided by the federal government. Let's take something like non-compete agreements. Should we have non-compete agreements or not? On the one hand, companies need to protect their IP. On the other hand, you want a system where ideas can flow freely. Which one is correct? Impossible to know in advance. Now, there's an obscure 19th-century law that prevents anyone from interfering in a person's right to accept a job in California, and as a result of that, non-compete agreements were unenforceable. Now, this was a massive boon for the tech sector.

Did the benefits of sharing outweigh the need for companies to protect their IP? Hard to know, but over time, because it worked so well for the tech sector, other states began to copy it. Eventually, in April 2024, it became federal law. It took a very long time, from the 19th century to 2024, to become federal law. That is an accidental application of something that we know works. If it had not worked, it would have just failed for California, as many laws do across the United States.

Why? It wasn’t because he was stupid, but because he didn't understand that the world was made up of discrete elements that fit together in a periodic table, that recombined and separated and so on in very specific ways. Now, once we had the periodic table, we could move away from the world of alchemy into the world of chemistry. What I would argue is that today a lot of the human and social sciences are really in the world of alchemy, even though we have the beginnings of the periodic table. We have a kind of theory of human behavior, theory of everyone, theory of cultural evolution and so on that enables us to do things, and it points to things that look like alchemy, things that are almost certainly going to go wrong.

The stillborn nuclear age is one of the reasons that we are in the climate crisis that we're in today, rather than being able to transition to a more electrified grid, far more efficient, and generate electricity through nuclear and eventually through solar, where it's available to us. In terms of climate change, I would say at the moment the attention really needs to be on repairing the damage that we've done and adapting to the damage that is about to arrive. That means figuring out ways to deal with mass migration, finding ways to govern ourselves under more diverse conditions and reducing the threat of large conflict. One of the predictions of the science is that the world is safer and violence has declined, but the reason that has happened is because we have been cooperating in larger groups, and that means that within those groups, your probability of coming into conflict has reduced. We have organisations like NATO, for example, that are not going to go to war with one another, but that also means that the potential scale of a coming conflict is going to be much, much larger. The world is more peaceful today, but it's also more dangerous.

Take something like solar. It's going to be fantastic the closer you are to the equator. In places like Britain, solar is unlikely to be the solution. We don't have the land, and we don't have the sunlight. Nuclear is going to be a far better option for the UK and Europe. Thinking about this at a systems level, thinking about what is actually available to us, will enable us to make the necessary transition and give us the options that we need to help clean up the planet – and invest in the things that don't create a bigger mess for our children.

Most of the things that we think we understand about the world are on the basis of trust. We believe that it is germs that make us sick and not spirits. I'm not saying it's not germs that make us sick. I have every reason to believe that it is, but I also have every reason to believe that most people accept that on the basis of trust in the scientific community. We see the people around us washing their hands and behaving in ways that there are these invisible animals, that we have not personally seen and don't know all that much about, that seem to make us sick and not spirits. Now, if you grew up in the Amazon, the Guarani tribe, let's say, you would believe that it was spirits that were making you sick. You would anger the spirits and provide evidence of the noises you heard in the forest of the spirit waking up, or the wind blowing and so on, just as in modern society, people will say, I saw under a microscope, I watched this documentary and so on. If we want to reduce the influence of misinformation, it's not about information. It's about restoring trust in the sources of information.

In order to restore that, we have to try our best to be less biased and try our best to be less political and just relay what it is that we're discovering. Science doesn't work because any one of us can do that – we cannot do that. Science is a collective enterprise where we are incentivized and rewarded for showing one another that other people are wrong. Creating the space for dangerous ideas, creating the space for people to argue with one another without concerns around the political implications of that, is absolutely essential to restoring trust in the scientific process and restoring trust in scientists.

We don't move forward in science because any particular scientist goes, ‘Hey, I'm totally wrong about this. Now I realise the truth: it's this. It's not hypothesis A, it's hypothesis B.’ Instead, it's because they've been fighting for hypothesis A their whole lives, and someone else comes along and provides stronger evidence for hypothesis B, and that scientist might not change their mind, but the next generation of scientists evaluate with a common basis for evaluating that evidence. Actually, it is hypothesis B, and hypothesis B persists through the ages. Innovation is not about the innovator. It's about the collective brain.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025