from Blair Fix
The game I play is a very interesting one.
It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.
— Richard Feynman
Like Richard Feynman’s game of science, evolution is stuck in a straitjacket. It is driven by chance. But evolution is not free to explore every path.
Take, as an example, the evolution of organism size. While it seems like there are many routes to bigness, I propose that there is fundamentally only one: sociality. In the march towards ever-larger organisms, there have been three major revolutions. All of them involved the merger of previously autonomous organisms into a new communal creature. I call this route to bigness ‘size through sociality’. It is a tale 4 billion years in the making.
The drive towards sociality, I argue, is a response to a basic feature of geometry. As objects get larger, their volume grows faster than their surface area. This fact of space causes problems for harvesting energy. It requires that big organisms harness and distribute energy on a limited surface-area budget. The easiest way to solve this problem, it seems, is to merge existing structures. Hence the evolution of bigger life is deeply connected to the evolution of sociality.
The evolution of ‘big’ is also connected to human culture.
Modern human institutions may represent a new transition in the evolution of life — a transition from massive organisms to supermassive superorganisms. But as with the rest of life, this evolution occurs in a straitjacket. The size distribution of human institutions seems to follow the same pattern as the size distribution of other organisms. In fact, it is an extension of this pattern, upping the size of life to new proportions.
In this light, human cultural evolution may be a variation on an old theme: size through sociality.
The tyranny of geometry
As I child, I loved playing with toy cars. I made the little vehicles jump over great distances, usually with the gleeful hope that they might explode. But the toys always took the beating with ease. When I imagined doing the same stunt with life-sized cars, however, I knew that they couldn’t withstand the punishment. But I didn’t know why.
Today I do. It’s because the size of an object changes how it behaves. The reason owes to a simple feature of geometry. As objects get larger, their volume grows faster than their area. This fact affects the objects’ properties. Read more…
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