A New Story of the World
In December of 2003 I acquainted myself with the interdisciplinary study of human behavior when I read Dr. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Although he didn’t intend it that way, Dr. Diamond’s book was the outline for a screenplay about the agricultural history of the world. The screenplay begins with, “Once upon a time, the Mesopotamians over hunted their gazelle herds, had a lot of children, and began running low on food.” Those initial conditions are then followed by 10,000 years of people making whatever seemed like the best choices to them under their circumstances. Dr. Diamond did the same thing any great fiction writer would do, and conducted a lot of research to make the story and the choices the people in it made, realistic. Of course, making the agricultural history of the world realistic was his whole reason for writing the book.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a systems theory of how the interactions among soil nutrients, weather patterns, certain plants, certain animals, and a particular species of primate created the past 10,000 years of world history. To scientifically minded people, that’s simple enough to understand. But to anyone who, for whatever reason, believes there has to be more to life than soil nutrients and water molecules, the book is just someone’s opinion about something.
On the other hand, as a movie director, Dr. Diamond was a genius. Hollywood is a multi-billion dollar industry because theatre artists have gotten so good at asking and answering the question, “What is this person trying to do?” That applies on all scales, from individual actions, to characters’ goals in scenes, to their overall goals in the entire movie. Dr. Diamond figured out how to direct a movie where the answer to that question was always, “survive and reproduce by producing food as efficiently as possible.” As a work of literature, Guns, Germs, and Steel was revolutionary, because he had discovered a way to tell a realistic story of the world in which every single character involved always made the same decision. For this story at least, Dr. Diamond found a way to make decision-making a constant and leave geography as the only variable. Of course, as a scientist that was precisely his goal.
Within two months I made a couple of discoveries of my own, which at the time I thought were so obvious that I assumed scientists must have discovered them already. It seems I was mistaken. I now refer to them as the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity. Between them, I discovered the first principle of evolutionary psychology independently. My version wasn’t as concise as the official version, but at the same time, it also solved the problem of how to break human behavior up into units of manageable size, by dividing components of human behavior with additional first principles.
Obviously, theatre is not a branch of science. However, it is a study of human behavior that is roughly 100 times older than the field of evolutionary psychology. Through several processes of memetic evolution, it has produced a body of evidence and a system of thought that can be considered observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable.
For 2,500 years, actors, directors, and writers have been competing against each other to replicate human behavior accurately enough to make it believable to human audiences. The ones who are best at it tend to be the most successful, and future generations of theatrical artists build upon their techniques. That’s a cumulative adaptation to an environmental pressure.
In order for an actor to replicate human behavior believably, he has to create his character using observable evidence, universally, self-consistently, reproducibly, and in a way that’s debatable.
In order for a director to direct a movie or play believably, likewise it has to be built on observable evidence, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable. It is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, because all the observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable characters have to fit together along with observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable settings and events to create observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable plots.
The observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable characters create their observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable plots through a constant process of action and reaction. With every line of dialogue, the character who is speaking makes at least one decision. At least one character who hears him reacts to him. The character who is speaking can make more than one decision, a character who hears him can have more than one reaction, and multiple characters who hear him can have different reactions.
In each scene, each character has a goal that he attempts to achieve through his actions in the scene. All of his decisions and actions revolve around that goal. The characters’ conflicts of goals create the conflicts of the scene.
Over the course of the play or movie, each character has a goal. All of his goals in each scene, and all of his individual decisions in each scene revolve around his overall goal. Conflicts in the movie are created by conflicts among characters’ goals.
Typically, the playwright isn’t involved in the production of a play. Early in the rehearsal schedule, actors and directors go through the script phrase by phrase and ask, “What is the character doing here?” By reading the entire script, actors and directors get a sense of who the character is and what he’s trying to do. When the playwright wrote the play, he figured out, phrase by phrase (even if only subconsciously) how who each character was and what he was trying to do interacted with the character’s environment to create his individual decisions. By reading the script phrase-by-phrase and asking, “What is the character doing here?” actors and directors reverse-engineer that process.
The end result of all this is the realistic replication of human behavior.
There are ways of writing scripts, such as surrealism and hyperrealism, in which the playwright doesn’t attempt to replicate human behavior realistically, but writes the script around some theme and uses human behavior to illustrate the theme. That can make the human behavior unrealistic, but only to a point. In order for the audience to find the artistic piece emotionally satisfying, the human behavior they witness still has to be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable for all the information presented in the movie and all the great deal of information the audience knows from real life. The artistic process would still begin with the artists deconstructing their characters’ dialogue phrase by phrase to see how each characters’ decisions fit with all of his other decisions and all the decisions of all the other characters to tell the story the writer had written. Whatever theme the writer wrote the script around, the actors and director have to be able to reverse-engineer it in order to be able to perform it.
Human behavior could be presented that was completely unrealistic, but that would make it not understandable to the audience. Completely unrealistic human behavior would make the human behavior seem to the audience to be either completely abstract or else an attempt to replicate human behavior realistically that failed utterly.
No matter how you stretch the parameters of the audience-artist relationship, the degree to which audience members find the performance realistic is determined by their own real-life perceptions of human behavior.
All of this might sound strange and alien to official scientists, but among theatre artists this is literally high school level material.
The critical difference between amateur and professional theatre is that amateur actors pretend to be their characters, while professional actors “get into character”. For a professional actor to “get into character” requires him to build a character ahead of time.
Constatin Stanislavski, the great Russian director, discovered in the early 20th century that every single movement an actor makes in the part of his character can either add to or subtract from the credibility of his performance. Thus he pioneered a psychological approach to theatre in the attempt to find an efficient approach to replicate human behavior universally, self-consistently, and reproducibly. Ultimately, this depends on observable evidence, and it is debatable.
Professional acting is, essentially, domesticated schizophrenia. To create a character to get into, an actor constructs an alternate personality for himself. This artificial personality is partitioned from his own personality to a degree that stops somewhere short of psychological illness. The mental switch that the actor develops to “get into character” is an overall feeling of who the character is. When the actor “gets into character” he creates that overall feeling in himself, which brings with it the character’s entire personality. From this it can be seen that the character the actor creates is a gigantic schema, the size of another person’s entire personality.
In order for an artificial personality to be believable as a character, it has to be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable.
The entire body of evidence the actor is working with is the body of evidence the audience will have access to over the course of the play. That includes information presented in the play, things the audience know about people in general from their own life experience, things the audience feels to be true about people, things the audience will believe to be true about the character based on clues to his personality that are presented regardless of whether or not they bear on who the character is supposed to be, and their instinctive feelings about people. Each of these sources of beliefs the audience has about realistic human behavior creates opportunities for actors to make their performances either more believable or less believable, depending on whether they actively build upon the audience’s beliefs or, through ignorance or negligence, contradict them.
Over the course of 2,500 years, professional theatre artists have identified every source of the audience’s beliefs about human behavior and figured out how to actively build upon them. Every piece of evidence that will create the audience’s perception of believable behavior for the character must be actively used by the actor to create the character.
The audience’s perception of what constitutes realistic behavior for a character obviously is prone to corruption by subjectivity. However, the overall trend in theatre eliminates this element of subjectivity. Theatre is created for audiences. Distinct groups of people have distinctly different perceptions of realistic human behavior. Performances can be created for distinct groups of people with distinct perceptions of realistic behavior, but the more realistic those performances are made to those audiences, the less realistic they will be made to other audiences. The end result will be less overall success for the artistic work.
Religious productions performed for religious audiences are an obvious example of this. Godspell is a good example. A play based on Christian beliefs will look realistic to Christian audiences (or to audiences who practice Christian values in what they consider to be a non-religious manner). To any other audience though, there will seem to be some sort of reality void in the play—some source of influence on the characters’ behavior that is never made explicit to the audience in the course of the play, and that isn’t part of the audience’s general perception of the world. Taken together, all of that means that even religious plays are made most artistically successful—meaning their emotional effect is maximized—by using secular directing techniques.
Plays, and especially movies, that are targeted for a particular social group are another example of this. The more cultural values the audience needs to understand the movie, the smaller the potential audience becomes. The movie Dude, Where’s My Car? is personally meaningful to certain people, but it is not a great work of art.
World War II movies that were filmed prior to 1960 didn’t have to be great works of art as far as the realistic replication of human behavior was concerned. Since World War II personally affected every able-bodied man in America, and his family, for roughly 15 years after the war, everyone in America who had disposable income had been personally affected by the war. The war itself and its affects on human behavior didn’t need to be made explicit to American audiences within the course of the movie, because every audience in America took the effects of the war on human behavior for granted.
Having shown you these examples of how marketing plays and movies to the subjectivity of certain audiences diminishes the realism of their replication of human behavior for audiences outside that group, I think it should be obvious why Hollywood has been built on Stanislavski’s techniques. The more people who find the human behavior replicated in a movie to be realistic, the more successful the movie becomes. While it is true that every genre of movie is targeted to a different audience, who have different beliefs about realistic human behavior, and all Hollywood movies are targeted to American audiences, it is also true that the more successful the movie is, the more money it makes. Making the greatest possible amount of money on a movie would require the human behavior portrayed in it to be believable to the largest number of people. To do that, the artists need to produce movies that don’t depend on their audiences’ perceptions of realistic human behavior being influenced by any religious, cultural, personal, or otherwise external sources. All the information the characters’ behaviors are based on has to be explicit or implicit in the movie, or must be beliefs about human behavior that are universal to humanity. Obviously, any belief about the origins of human behavior that is universal to humanity is a direct product of human evolution.
It can be argued that any movie targeted to American audiences is still corrupted by subjectivity. However, given that America is probably the most culturally diverse country in the world, the closest Hollywood artists can come to falling into that trap is to replicate human behavior believably for the segment of American society that has the largest amount of disposable income. Hollywood action movies in particular are notorious for physical inconsistencies and logical fallacies. However, those are still confined to the audience’s lack of understanding of the external world. Since the audience members still see human behavior all around them every minute of their waking lives, the human behavior artists replicate around such inconsistencies still has to be realistic, given that those things were possible. If a shotgun blast could knock a person back 10 feet, how would he react to it?
The body of evidence used to create a character must be universal. All information presented about the character has to be incorporated into the character in order to make him realistic. To do otherwise would create logical fallacies in the character. That in turn can lead to holes in the plot. Since the plot of a movie is created by the reaction of the characters to events and each other’s actions—environmental pressures, in other words—if the artists ignore some of the evidence presented about a character, the audience will feel like the character isn’t believable, even they don’t know why.
This can be seen in the behavior of the character while he is interacting directly with other characters or his surroundings. It can also be seen in behavior that’s implied but never shown. Back-stories that are given about characters are an obvious example. A back-story about a character can be a general overview of his history or of how he dealt with a situation that isn’t retold in as much detail as the events in the movie. Either of those possibilities implies choices the character made, and thereby present information about the character.
Information can be supplied about characters more indirectly still by things like costuming, makeup, hair, and props. If a character is wearing certain clothing, it implies that he made the choice to put on that clothing. Why did he choose to put on that clothing? If he had a choice among articles of clothing, why did he choose the ones he did? If he didn’t have a choice, why didn’t he have a choice? Why do the clothes he’s wearing look the way they do? All of those choices present information about the character.
The body of evidence that is used to create the character has to be self-consistent in the way that all the evidence fits together, and in the patterns of behavior it predicts. Universality and self-consistency in character creation are essentially inseparable. If the actor’s use of information isn’t universal, the information presented to the audience versus the information the actor uses in replicating the character’s behavior won’t be self-consistent. If his behavior isn’t self-consistent, often it will conflict with information presented to the audience.
Behavior that isn’t self-consistent can be seen in any amateur theatre company. Amateur actors look like people pretending to be other people. No matter how good of a job amateur actors do of imitating performances given by professional actors, if they don’t know the trick of creating their characters and getting into them, the end result will be that all of the actions they take in the part of their characters won’t be the characters’ actions. The easiest way to recognize this is that the big actions the actor takes will be consistent with his character, but his little actions (such as his posture and his use of his hands while not talking) will be consistent with himself in real life. Also, the tones of voice and other emotional communication he uses in the part of his character will be generally close to realistic but will lack subtle texture and fine detail. The result of that will be a two-dimensional performance—a representation of human behavior, as opposed to a replication of human behavior.
A professional actor replicates human behavior by becoming his character. Essentially, a professional actor is an emotional machine shop. The general technique is for the actor to feel his character’s emotions early in the rehearsal process, remember his feelings, remember how he acted upon them, and then more or less shut those feelings off. He continues to feel the feelings enough to act upon them, but he is distant enough from them that they don’t influence his control of his mental faculties. He learns to produce the outward effects of the emotions without being personally affected by them. You could say he makes himself his own puppet.
A good example of behavior that isn’t self-consistent performed by professional actors can be seen in the movie Johnny Mneumonic. This is especially illuminating because the characters themselves are self-consistent with all the information presented in the movie, but they are not also self-consistent with the audience’s understanding of human behavior. At first glance it looks like the leading actors aren’t acting very well. But on closer inspection, it can be seen that they are doing a good job of playing a script that’s almost impossible to act in some places.
The problem was that William Gibson wrote the script. He wrote the short story the movie was based on, and he’s the godfather of his literary genre. But he had no (or negligible) script writing experience. He didn’t seem to understand that the differences in artistic media require movie dialogue to be written differently than literary dialogue. There is one particularly painful scene in the movie in which Keanau Reeves’ character delivers what’s essentially a soliloquy of something his character thought about in the book, in the presence of Dina Meyer, who played the movie’s heroine. But no information about his character presented in the movie, or any information an audience could be expected to base their perceptions of human behavior on, indicated that his character would ever talk like that. Then Dina Meyer had to react realistically to his unrealistic dialogue, which made her reaction look unrealistic. The two actors’ use of all the information presented in the movie to create self-consistent characters didn’t make the characters self-consistent with the information the audience based their perceptions of human behavior on. In order for the actors to make their character’s behavior self-consistent with all the information given in the script, they had to develop a sense of cause and effect that also needed to include other information that was never presented to the audience. Hence their performances don’t look self-consistent as far as the audience can tell.
The end result was, once again, characters whose behavior was being influenced by something the audience could never perceive. But rather than the audience being consciously aware that the character’s behavior was being affected by something they themselves didn’t know about, here the actors had to build self-consistent characters around unrealistic dialogue. That means the characters had to be self-consistent in a way that would make them say unrealistic dialogue. But to any audience member who wasn’t very familiar with the artistic process whose end results he was watching, the realistic performance of unrealistic dialogue just looks like an unrealistic performance.
Reproducibility works differently in theatre and Hollywood than it does in science, but it’s important for two reasons.
First of all, Stanislavski’s greatest effort and biggest contribution to the art was a systematic approach to replicating human behavior efficiently. Plays and movies are produced on schedules and on budgets. Actors have limited time to perfect their performances. Efficiency at replicating human behavior produces better-developed replications of human behavior.
Prior to Stanislavski’s day, actors used abstract techniques to try to develop their feelings for who their characters were. The result was that actors might play parts that they fit perfectly once or twice in their careers. The rest of the time their performances were acceptable. Now, thanks to Stanislavski’s work, great actors make perfect fits to their parts on a regular basis.
Second, awards are won and lost according to how well actors apply Stanislavski’s techniques. In the same way actors use Stanislavski’s techniques to build their characters, judges use Stanislavski’s techniques to deconstruct their characters, to see how realistic they are. Obviously judges don’t recreate every play and movie that’s made to compare the performance of another actor to the actor they’re judging, but they do watch the performance from the point of view of directing the actor themselves and seeing how well his performance lives up to their expectations.
The importance of debatability in theatre is obvious. Actors and directors have to be able to talk about what characters are doing and why.
Stanislavski was able to replicate human behavior so believably because he discovered roughly 100 years ago that a combination of thought and feeling motivates behavior. That meant that replicating behavior realistically depended on replicating thought and feeling realistically.
Through their cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures, theatre artists have discovered a universal mental structure of humanity that can be used to replicate the entire realm of human behavior observably, universally, self-consistently, reproducibly, debatably, and ultimately, realistically, by breaking human behavior down into units of manageable size without leaving anything out.
Individual actors replicate human behavior believably by building their characters and then getting into them. The characters the actors build are, in effect, systems diagrams that show how all the different parts of a character’s thought processes interact with each other to produce his behavior.
When I started learning about evolutionary psychology, I immediately saw a lot of obvious connections. Obviously this is useless to neurology, because it says nothing about where in the brain each of these thought processes originate. But as far as identifying how ideas originate and develop, every play and movie is an exercise in memetic evolution, because the plot of the play or movie is created by the cumulative adaptation of each characters’ ideas and actions in response to environmental pressures created by events and other characters’ actions.
Over the course of a play or movie, memetic evolution takes place one decision or reaction at a time. Even a fight scene is a process of two characters each making a series of conflicting decisions.
Since ideas and feelings motivate action in real life, from this it can be seen that all of human behavior is an evolutionary process.
The stories that are told in movies and plays are processes by which small individual decisions build up to big climaxes. Those stories are told realistically by realistically portraying human behavior one decision at a time.
Considering that the entire movie and theatre industries are bodies of evidence of how individual decisions lead from beginnings to endings, I think it’s safe to say that the entire realm of human behavior has been replicated. Empires rise and fall by the collective decisions of individual people.
By recognizing how individual people make decisions, that pattern can be scaled up to see how groups of people each affected by the same environmental pressures will tend to make the same decisions and create sociological forces. The collective decision making process of a group works somewhat differently at the social level than at the individual level, but it’s only a difference of scale. For each individual making a decision, each other person involved in the decision-making situation is a part of the person’s decision-making environment. In a large group of people, each person simply has a larger number of other people in his environment.
From there it’s easy to scale back down again to see how a majority of people making the same decisions would create opportunities for other people to make other decisions.
Since theatre artists have figured out how to deconstruct the origins of human behavior so well, the best theatre artists I’ve known can use the same techniques to deconstruct human behavior equally well in real life. By breaking human behavior down into component parts in real life, they can then reassemble it to make it work more effectively for them. It is common for theatre artists to use their theatrical talents in dealing with each other in order to streamline the human relations in their theatre companies in order to be able to work with each other more efficiently. It is also fairly common for theatre artists to use their theatrical talents in their everyday lives, with the result that they are able to get along well with people they meet. They do this mostly subconsciously.
In theatre and fiction writing, character, setting, and theme are all different ways to construct human behavior around a theme. If a human-like character had evolved from a cat, how would he act? (As in the British science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf.) If all the characters were Russian soldiers in the siege of Stalingrad, how would they act? (As in the movie Enemy at the Gates.) In order to illustrate the differences between people whose primary goal is personal success versus people whose primary goal is social acceptance, how would the characters have to act? (As in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.)
Soon after reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, I discovered that by establishing 18 points of reference that were obviously of critical evolutionary importance, I could reconstruct the entire realm of human behavior.
By constructing all human behavior around the individual’s pursuit of the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required, in which the benefits were always survival and/or reproduction, I found the entire history of the world became a realistic play about the entire history of the world. All the stereotypes of people that are easy to make in the short run but are the bane of realistic performances in the long run, vanished. Pre-colonial Native Americans were no longer savages, Germans and Japanese were no longer insane between 1941 and 1945, the North Vietnamese were no longer animals who learned how to turn coffee cans into land mines, crossing the Atlantic no longer had a mysterious transformative effect on Africans that turned them from barbarians into noble oppressed people with lots of soul, and Islamic terrorists were no longer homicidal maniacs but people with goals they felt were important.
Since then, in the all the movies I’ve watched, all the dozens of books I’ve read on evolutionary psychology, general evolution, and the human predicament, and all the interpersonal interactions I’ve personally been involved in or can remember being personally involved in, I have never witnessed any behavior that falls outside my framework.
The same framework I’ve discovered for human behavior can also be used just as effectively for all other animal behavior. In the behavior of other animals, some of the 18 points of reference are simply inactive. The animal’s behavior is created by the interaction of the remaining points of reference. As Charles Darwin predicted, all behavior that seems to be unique to our species is caused simply by a difference in scale, not by a difference in kind, of the factors that create animal behavior.
Once I established how factors of evolution created human behavior, I discovered that entire history of our species could be considered a script that was written by evolution. This may sound like a tautology, but the history of the world is extremely realistic, because I can’t find any way to write the history of the world that would be any more realistic. Evolution was the greatest playwright of all.
From there, with sufficient background information, it’s easy to see how combinations of human constants and situational variables led individuals or groups of people to make the decisions they made over the course of history.
From there, it’s easy to recognize why people are making the decisions they are making now.
It is obvious from our ever-deteriorating global environment that a lot of decisions need to be made which currently are not being made, if global disaster is to be averted. By recognizing how decisions are made and what decisions need to be made, it’s easy to recognize why necessary decisions are not currently being made. The theatrical model of human behavior gives a fairly short and easy to use checklist of factors that interact with each other to show how physical and social environments interact with people’s minds to make certain ideas seem the best. With all the work other people are doing at identifying problems and finding potential solutions, a universal checklist that can be applied a virtually infinite number of ways can let people coordinate their efforts much more effectively, and much more effectively defeat people who, for whatever reasons, are opposed to those problems being solved.
Unfortunately, my work presents a number of challenges to the traditional concept of scientific validity.
First, the evidence that’s used in theatre is observable, but only to people who are highly perceptive of human behavior. This includes all great theatre artists, who tend to perceive it the same way, which is how realistic human behavior has always been replicated. But I can’t make any promises how observable it is to scientists.
Second, if you can’t observe all of the evidence I’m using, you can’t tell if my work is universal, because you can’t tell whether or not I’m leaving any evidence out.
Third, reproducing my work would require evolutionary psychologists, environmental scientists, and theatrical directors to teach each other what they know. There are numerous people who could each replicate parts of my work, but I sincerely doubt there are many who could replicate all of it. To say that a certain person’s work has to be reproducible assumes that someone else possesses the skills and abilities necessary to reproduce the work. That’s a good criterion and it works most of the time, but there is no guarantee that it’s completely infallible.
Fourth, I use the term ‘debatable’ rather than ‘refutable’ or ‘falsifiable’ because refuting or falsifying my work seems all too easy to scientists who don’t work in theatre. But may I remind everyone that my body of evidence consists of all of Hollywood, plus all of Broadway, plus all the rest of the theatre and movie industries, as well as all of television and literature, and it’s at least 2,500 years old. If you honestly believe you can learn more than I know about the patterns artists have discovered amidst the chaos of human behavior in less than one career, you severely overestimate yourself.
Fifth, I’ve run up against the same problem Dr. Lovelock encountered with the Gaia Theory. A theory that encompasses the entire realm of human behavior renders it impossible for the humans who are studying it to think of anything that lies outside the realm of human behavior. A theory for the operation of a system of which we are all a part, renders it impossible for us to compare it to a similar system. Ultimately, by the very act of attempting to study my theory of all of human behavior, you are participating in my theory. You make yourself a subject of your own experiment.
Sixth, without being able to tell whether or not my work is observable, universal, reproducible, or debatable you really have no way to tell whether or not I’m just making it all up.
Self-consistency is my salvation. The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior is a web of eighteen factors whose interaction can be used to replicate the entire realm of human behavior. A singular universal systems diagram can’t be drawn to show how they affect all human behavior, but in any situation a systems diagram could be drawn to show how they create the pattern of decision-making (and consequent behavior) that took place in that situation. Every movie or play you’ve ever seen in your life is a systems diagram made of these eighteen factors. I draw my systems diagrams with words just like any writer does, but anyone with the necessary skills could draw a systems diagram for a movie, play, TV show, or novel just as easily.
The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity is a demonstration of the effective existence of spiritual/emotional energy. Spiritual/emotional energy is the dark matter of evolutionary psychology, because it can’t be observed directly and probably doesn’t literally exist, but it can be observed indirectly and it acts as though it does exist. Although it is scientifically invisible, it is the central component of theatre, and over the course of 2,500 years, theatre artists have refined their understanding of what it is and how it works to the point that they use it to build their realistic human behavior.
Then I show how the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity predict the origins of morals, the origins of belief in the supernatural, the origins of human social behavior, Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech, the evolution of political systems, and the molecular history of the 20th century. Then I show how a friend and I used my two theories in setting up our most recent theatre company, to create artwork that severely stretches the bounds of reality. The art our theatre company produces is just highly condensed life. It isn’t different in kind; it’s only different in scale. From there, there is no distinct point where our art ends and our audience’s lives begin. It can be said that our art is made out of life, but it can just as easily be said that we turn our audience’s lives into art.
The good news is that everyone in the industrialized world has already seen the theatrical model of human behavior play out, thousands of times. That’s made it easy for me to explain to people how movies are made and then explain how the evolutionary origins of our perceptions make us think the way we do.
In the same way that Dr. Diamond used paleo-botany to write an agricultural history of the world, and other people have traced other systems of cause and effect down to ultimate causes and first principles, with a firm grasp of theatre, evolutionary psychology, and science in general, a person could combine all of those projects and fill in some gaps to write a scientific encyclopedia for every aspect of human behavior past and present, and how that evolutionary self-awareness can be used with foresight to choose our own futures.
I’ve already done this. My book 42—Evolutionary Science and Its Uses in Everyday Life, Civil Rights, and World Peace, Volumes I, II, and III, is over 1.2 million words long. I begin with basic conceptual understandings of genetic inheritance and atomic structure, and then I build up from there to personal behavior, social systems, religions, governments, economies, the environmental crisis, and ultimately, planetary biology. This book is a condensed version of that project.