Michael Muthukrishna Talks His Book
Energy and Evolution
Michael Muthukrishna talks with Razib Khan.
About minute 25, Muthukrishna gets into the thesis of his book, which is that energy transitions drive evolution. First biological evolution.
eventually, you get proto photosynthesis, turning into proper photosynthesis, where the sun the sunlight, the photosynthetic process results in little chemical batteries, little chemical sugars, ATP. And this means that there's a new thing that evolution can exploit. So new, larger organisms can not, they don't have to just worry about taking energy directly from the sun, they can eat other organisms, right.
Then cultural evolution.
fire was an energy technology that allowed us to pre digest food, processed it in a way that made all of those calories more bioavailable to us. That was the first energy technology. And it's the energy technology that led to a larger brain. And you know, probably larger groups to the next energy revolution was a solar technologies, not a chemical technology like fire, but a solar technology. And that was agriculture. So we had the, you know, we constant instead of like walking around trying to find grain, or, you know, hunting animals, we started to, to look after animals and breed them. And we started to plant grain and harvest the energy of the sun to do it more efficiently.
He argues that the excess energy provided by coal was what enabled England to cooperate at scale and launch the industrial revolution. If I understand his thinking, he is suggesting that humans have cooperated at a scale determined by energy. With fire, humans cooperate as a small band of hunter-gatherers. With the “solar technology” of agriculture, we can feed grain to ourselves and to large animals. This facilitates cooperation at the scale of a state. With coal, the British could cooperate at the scale of a maritime empire.
His book comes out on October 31. I plan to read it right away.
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I always find the coal argument unpersuasive. China has lots of coal, but they never really seemed to use it. England had large colonies in the New World well before coal became important. So, what are we explaining by way of what again?
It seems to me a lot of all this environmental determinism has been motivated by a desire for national outcomes to be a result of things other than culture and ideas. Some materialistic source has to exist so that "anybody who lived there would have succeeded," otherwise one has to admit that how society is rules and organized matters, as well as the cultures that exist in the society.
I wish a transcript were available. I just can't listen. I would be interested to know whether they discussed humans now occupying nearly all niches and whether and why that is necessary.
I know it's deeply unfashionable to invoke hubris in human affairs anymore - and I am certainly aware of my own inclinations, differing sharply from those of others on these blogs - but in re his and Razib's "degrowth economics" is a "deadend for dynamic human flourishing" whatever that precisely signifies to them - I do wonder if there is a little gap for Hubris to slip her foot in.
That gap would be the assumption that there is only simple human choice where "degrowth" is concerned.