These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

They appear to want some of the same things most of us want: recognition from their peers and communities and better lives for the people they care about. Being

Hence, we are more likely to accept a dangerous idea if it aligns with our own experiences and is supported by the people we value.

The answer derives from the fact that what is good for groups is not always good for the individuals comprising them. For example, both multicellular organisms and social insect colonies are functionally specialized and hierarchically organized collectives that are highly successful in maintaining and transmitting accumulated knowledge, in the form

Conventional economics asks how agents’ behaviors (actions, strategies, forecasts) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these cause. It asks, in other words, what patterns would call for no changes in microbehavior, and would therefore be in stasis or equilibrium.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

Redundancy provides insurance against loss. The American chestnut largely disappeared from the forests of the northeastern United States, but other species filled its niche. In 2004, though, when Chiron, one of only two companies providing flu vaccines in the US, announced that its plants in Liverpool were contaminated, our house of cards was at re

Traditionally things can be hidden in two fundamentally different ways. Things can be hidden in space, and they can be hidden in time. To hide in space means that phenomena lie beyond the scope of our everyday senses because they are either too small or too distant to be detected without amplification. Things can be hidden in time by being too fast

Importantly, evolution is not about optimization in the abstract; it is about optimization relative to other genetic variants within and across species. While we are evolving, so too are our enemies (like the influenza virus) and our friends (including the microbiomes in our guts). To a large extent, evolution is about preparing for the unknown, be