Chapter 1: Introduction  ……………………………………………………………………………………  1
Chapter 2: The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior  ………………………………………  32
Chapter 3:  The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity  ………………………………………………………  47
Chapter 4:  A Condensed Body of Evidence  ……………………………………………………………    73
Chapter 5: Evolutionary Relativity and Memetic Evolution  ……………………………………………  182
Chapter 6: The Theory of Everything  …………………………………………………………………… 238
Chapter 7: A Redefinition of Scientific Political Neutrality  ……………………………………………  249
Chapter 8: Other Voices from the Front  ………………………………………………………………..   320
Chapter 9:  King of Kings  ………………………………………………………………………………   338

The Planetary Biology Library  …………………………………………………………………………   351

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Suppose Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin got together and decided to combine their theories, to turn the Theory of Evolution into a function of the efficient transfer of energy, and put biology onto the same playing field as astro-physics and atomic physics. It wouldn’t be hard.  Biologists have already done this in real life for other animals.

The big challenge is figuring out how the efficient transfer of energy applies to human behavior.  So Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin join William Shakespeare’s theatre company, to learn what he knew about human behavior, in order to write a theory for human behavior as a function of the efficient transfer of energy.

The big challenge in evolutionary psychology right now lies in breaking human behavior down into manageable components, without leaving anything out, in order to discover some sort of theory that encompasses the entire realm of human behavior.  Various evolutionary psychologists have discovered pieces of this puzzle, but no one has yet discovered a singular, universally applicable, and thoroughly useful theory of human behavior.

Theatre artists began searching for a singular, universally applicable, and thoroughly useful theory of human behavior roughly 25 centuries ago, in ancient Greece.  It has been discovered.  Today, actors, directors, and writers use it to win Oscar Awards for their stunningly realistic replications of human behavior.

There are just a few catches.  First, theatre artists have figured out how to do this largely intuitively.  Second, they had no way of connecting human behavior to its evolutionary origins.  Third, these are artists, not scientists, so they use different professional language.  Fourth, artists also use a fundamentally different definition of the nature of reality.  Fifth, artists have a fundamentally different definition of what constitutes observable evidence.

The hypothetical story of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin going to work in Will Shakespeare’s theatre company is a metaphor for my life.  A small fraction of a percent of people share my scientific abilities, but the same can be said of my artistic abilities, which is why I’ve worked in theatre for most of my adult life.  When I learned about the field of evolutionary psychology, numerous connections between theatre and evolutionary psychology were immediately obvious to me.

Theatre artists win Oscar Awards because they’ve discovered the evolutionary psychology equivalent of dark matter.  Now they use it effectively as the central component of their singular, universally applicable, and thoroughly useful theory of human behavior.

I call this book The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity because with a sufficient understanding of how sensory input interacts with humans’ (or other animals’) brains to produce output, a person can convert directly from one to the other, and can refer to sensory input in terms of its inevitable or potential energy output.  Great artists make the conversion intuitively.  At this point, enough is understood about evolutionary psychology that how artists do it, and why they produce accurate results, can be derived from first principles, and is supported by a body of evidence that is so large that, although it wasn’t collected in a closely controlled environment, consistent patterns of cause and effect can be identified.

This book is the most controversial approach ever to the most controversial field of study ever.  I’ve had to develop my own professional language to use in talking about my work, which is a hybrid of scientific and artistic professional languages.  Reading this book will require a considerable amount of creative thought, and a great deal of emotional fortitude.  I think perhaps I should remind everyone that new fields of study are pioneered first, and then people develop professional languages for talking about them.

In this book I cite very few references for two specific reasons.  First, this entire book is based on elementary principles of evolutionary psychology and elementary principles of theatre.  These elementary principles can be found anywhere; so leaving it up to anyone who is curious to look for them on their own is my proof of how elementary they are.

Second, and more importantly, despite how elementary these principles of theatre are, their applications are very complex.  My work is the product of my career in theatre.  No evolutionary psychologist can replicate my work just by reading a few pages out of a book.  An effective way to replicate my work would be to consult a theatrical director in person, with the goal of cross-referencing your two bodies of knowledge.

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In The Extended Phenotype, Dr. Richard Dawkins makes the statement, “Suppose a male canary wanted to bring a female into reproductive condition, what could he do?…  The particular pattern of sounds that he makes enters the female’s head through her ears, is translated into nerve impulses, and bores insidiously into her pituitary…  He stimulates her pituitary by means of nerve impulses.  They are not ‘his’ nerve impulses, in the sense that they all occur within the female’s own nerve cells.  But they are his in another sense.  It is his particular sounds which are subtly fashioned to make the female’s nerves work on her pituitary.  Where a physiologist might inject gonadotropins into her breast muscle, or electric currents into her brain, the male canary pours song into her ear.  And the results are the same.”

Dr. Dawkins then goes on to devote the rest of that chapter, various other parts of that book, and various parts of other books to showing how animals manipulate other animals psychologically to act against the manipulated animals’ survival and reproductive interests, and in the favor of the manipulating animal’s survival and reproduction.

Another example is that of anglerfish, which have evolved a worm-like lure above their mouths, and which hide in the mud of riverbeds dangling their small, wriggling, worm-looking lures above the mud, and thereby bait other fish into trying to eat the worm.  Instead of evolving powerful muscles to out-swim the other fish, the anglerfish has evolved a way to trick other fish into using their own muscles to bring them close enough for the anglerfish to eat.

Another example is the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and leaves its young to other parent birds to raise.  The young cuckoo bird is larger than the adult birds of other species, with a big mouth.  Young cuckoo birds have evolved to be so adept at psychologically manipulating parent birds into feeding them, that other parent birds have been observed carrying food to their own children in their own nests, passing by nests with young cuckoos living in them, stopping to give their food to the cuckoos.

Theatre is a 25-century old study of how humans manipulate each other psychologically.  It is a fundamental rule of theatre that in any interpersonal communication situation, each character is trying to manipulate the other.  The first character is trying to get the second character to act in a way that will benefit the first character’s interests.  Simultaneously, the second character is trying to do likewise to the first character.

Either or both character could’ve been manipulated ahead of time by one or more other characters, and each of those characters could’ve been manipulated by one or more other characters.  Human interaction can be a very tangled web of manipulation.

This is not to say that all human interaction is psychological manipulation in the sense that people usually think of psychological manipulation.  The common usage of the term implies conscious and malicious intent.  As I am using the term here, all human behavior is psychological manipulation in the sense that the sender’s goal for expending the effort to communicate is to get the receiver of the communication to act differently than he would’ve acted otherwise.  The sender’s goals may or may not be detrimental to the receiver’s interests.  The manipulation may or may not be done consciously.  It is always done subconsciously.

As a theatre artist who possesses the necessary talents, I’ve learned to perceive human behavior as what I can best describe here as mathematical entities.  That is, things that are similar to numbers and that function as numbers, but are not numbers in the traditional sense.

It would be appropriate to say that these mathematical entities I perceive can be regarded as coordinates in multidimensional mathematical space.  They are not linear numbers, but numbers that can move in many directions at the same time.

Everyone perceives human behavior this way.  I and other theatre artists are just consciously aware of it.  By figuring out how to dissect these multidimensional mathematical values, theatre artists have turned human behavior into the medium of a fine art.

For people who are not theatre artists, human perceptions, emotions, and interactions still create tangible objects in mathematical space.  These are not physical objects but they are patterns of cause and effect whose existences are so reliable people refer to them as physical objects.  A person needs to look no further than the English language to see this.  People talk about “the love we share”, “we had an agreement between us”, “under-standing”, “economic over-head”, or “that idea is beside the point”.

People’s emotions make them perceive subconsciously complex interactions of cause and effect that affected people while our brains were evolving.  Theatre artists turn human behavior into a fine art by figuring out how subconscious motivations produce physical output.

This is not to say that theatre artists figured out scientifically how subconscious motivations produce human behavior.  But it is to say that they’ve discovered consistent patterns of cause and effect.

In the same basic way that an organism is made up of many genes that interact with each other to create an organism that can survive and replicate 50% of the genes at a time, human behavior is made up of many factors that interact with each other to produce a single observable result.  The factors that interact to create human behavior were themselves created by genes and the interactions of genes.  We have those genes because they were the ones that survived over the course of our evolution.  For all intents and purposes, the field of evolutionary psychology is the Selfish Gene Theory applied to human behavior.

The consistent pattern of cause and effect that theatre artists have discovered is essentially a gigantic framework floating in space, because theatre artists have never had any way to anchor it to our biological origins.  Most artistic geniuses are not also scientific geniuses.  On the other hand, I must say that I’m amazed that Dr. Dawkins never figured out how to apply his own theory of the evolutionary origins of psychological manipulation to human behavior and theatre, considering that he’s married to an actress!

To borrow Dan Dennett’s terminology from Consciousness Explained, theatre artists have figured out how to break human behavior up into components that have allowed them to assemble a Universal Turing Machine.  They feed it hypothetical values for the theoretical numbers I’ve described as input, and it produces realistic human behavior as output.

Every example of human behavior I make in this book is a run of the theatrical Turing Machine.  It can be scaled up or down by any amount.  By feeding it input at the beginning of a situation, and adjusting values if they change by outside factors during a situation, it predicts everything from communication tactics used by telephone salespeople to how individuals’ decisions created the political history of the 20th century.

Before I can run the machine, I have to show you what its components consist of and how the values of its theoretical numbers are determined.  Then I’ll make several test runs of it to show how it has been used to produce various movies.  Then I’ll turn it loose on the real world to show how it predicts real life given various sets of initial conditions.  Finally, I’ll show how it’s being used by various people in real life right now in the attempt to create different—and conflicting—versions of the future of the world.

I’m only referring to it here as a theatrical Turing Machine to establish the idea that theatre artists have created a self-contained thing that turns accurate input into accurate output.  Henceforth it is not useful for me to refer to it as a Turing Machine because calling it a machine implies that someone created it intentionally for its purpose.  Since people have an intuitive awareness of psychology, if a sufficient number of people tried sufficiently hard for a sufficient length of time, they could develop a mental model of human behavior that functions as a human behavior Turing Machine, without realizing they’d done it.   That’s precisely what has happened.  My purpose for writing this book is to show how the operation of the machine can be defined by a single theory.

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I should warn everyone that what I do isn’t science in the strictest sense.  I’m playing the same game on a much bigger field.

The Niesen tradition can be best described as, “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.”  Science has some major, obvious advantages at that over all other approaches.  However, other approaches have advantages to that over science.  The interdisciplinary approach to the objective study of human behavior is a fairly recent approach to science.  The Niesen tradition has a head start at that over formalized science that can be measured in generations.

I’m descended from four generations of engineers, and as every biologist knows, biology is engineering.  In fact, engineering has been such a fascination in my family as to derail engineering careers.  About 60 years ago my grandparents left the Los Angeles area where my grandfather was working as an airplane engineer, to move to the Redwood forest, so they could watch the greatest engineering feat in the world—biology—taking place all around them.

The critical difference between the Niesen tradition and science is that science, or at least, formal science, generally uses a bottom-up approach, by which solid points of reference are established and built upon one after the other.  The Niesen tradition depends more on a top-down approach, in which large bodies of information are accumulated first and solid information is then distilled from them.  Some scientists now call this the comparison method, and are using it in a formalized manner, but it is controversial even then, and I’m still playing on a bigger field than that.

My grandfather was an airplane engineer back in the early days of aviation, and he designed bombers during World War II.  Thousands of American men either lived or died by the calculations he carried out in his head with the help of a slide rule.  (They all lived—at least, as far as he had any control over their fates—because none of the planes he designed were recalled due to mechanical defects.)  His own grandfather was one of five architects who assisted Pierre Eiffel in designing the Eiffel Tower.  While “traditional” beliefs are usually contradictory to science, my family’s traditional belief that observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability are critical obviously isn’t contradictory to science.  Furthermore, using that scientific approach to studying the world without calling it “science”, has let us recognize that same approach to studying the world wherever we find it, whether it’s referred to as science or not.

Once you define the game as, “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible,” immediately it can be recognized that every religion and philosophy, many forms of art, and various other systems of thought are also attempts to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.  Without requiring their approaches to be observable, universal, self-consistent, replicable, and debatable, they have an obvious disadvantage to science, but that doesn’t immediately disqualify them.  It is possible for people to discover patterns of cause and effect that are observable, universal, self-consistent, replicable, and debatable without using a process that they refer to as science.   Art, philosophy, and religion are much less efficient means of discovering information that meets those conditions than science is, but all of them are also much older than science, each of them have been pursued by more people, and combined, they eliminate all constraints on thought.

Dr. Dennett describes best how we do this in Consciousness Explained.  If you play an E note on a guitar, you can get a set of information that can be used to define that note and recognize it if you hear it again.  But you don’t have any information to use to determine why that note sounds like an E played on a guitar.  If you then play an E note an octave higher, and play the same E on a piano or any other instrument, or play other notes on the guitar, you can build up a larger and larger body of information, compare the different notes to each other, and refine your understanding of what makes the E note what it is.

In my family, we have been using that trick to reverse-engineer philosophies ever since the Great Depression.  Once you identify humans as being essentially equal to each other, and you identify philosophies as different approaches people have found to give meaning to their lives—which is synonymous to calling them memetic tools that people use to construct set of ideas to keep in their consciousness and subconsciousness to optimize their success in dealing with the world, according to their own definition of success and according to the choices of philosophies they perceive themselves to have—you can study why philosophies are different from each other by looking at the decision-making environments where the philosophies originated and developed, which includes the sets of ideas that were in use in those decision-making environments that had been imported from other decision-making environments.  The development of philosophies is identical to the evolution of gene pools in the sense that all philosophies originated from the same source, in the sense that philosophies are always adapting to their changing environments, and in the sense that the reason it is possible to refer to different philosophies by different names is because all the intermediary philosophies that connect them to each other have died out.

Theatre artists also use Dr. Dennett’s trick to reverse-engineer emotions and emotional communication.  People who are especially perceptive to human behavior have an advantage in this in the same way that people who are especially perceptive to music have an advantage in using the trick to refine their understanding of musical notes. Without being able to anchor human behavior to definitive origins, theatre artists have discovered numerous highly developed hypotheses and partial theories, and tend to favor those that prove most useful in replicating human behavior realistically. For myself, over the years I have stored up memories of numerous conversations I’ve had that proceeded in completely unexpected ways because they didn’t fit any pattern of causes and effect I knew of.  I kept playing these conversations back to myself, trying to identify constants and solve for variables.

Obviously, the emotional origins of ideas and the ideas people establish as founding principles of philosophies are just two pieces of an even larger puzzle.

For one example, a religion is a means of observing the world that presumes the existence of supernatural powers, and various religions place additional restrictions on how their followers are supposed to think.  However, all religions combined eliminate all constraints on thought except for the presumption of a supernatural entity that the system of thought requires to meet the definition of “religion” in the first place.  All systems of thought combined encompass the entire realm of human thought.  This is important because many people who don’t limit themselves to thinking about things that are observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, have thought about a lot of things that scientists haven’t dared to approach scientifically.  My grandmother was an artist and philosopher, so she had her own approaches to figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, and her own reasons for being fascinated with the biggest engineering project in the world.

You could call this folk-science.  That is, the search for, and compilation of, pieces of information that are essentially folk-lore, which show patterns of cause and effect that prove to be observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable.  I haven’t discovered objective information through my own scientific experimentation, but by learning other systems of thought well enough to recognize objective information that other people have discovered.

Hence the reason I say I’m playing the same game on a much bigger field.  In effect, every system of thought is a collection of algebraic equations with multiple variables.  You could say that this is a system of mathematics that doesn’t use literal numbers, but uses units of logic and logical functions that can be best compared to mathematics for lack of better terms.  Alternately, you could say that every system of thought is a systems theory, where the interactions of constants and variables are intended to produce some end result, and may produce that result or may produce some other result.  A single non-scientific system of thought is useless for distilling observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable information.  However, when many non-scientific systems of thought are combined, some critical constants can be identified among the variables.  From there, remaining variables can be solved, and questions that are beyond the reach of, or seem to be completely irrelevant to, formal science can be answered.

For one example, among engineers there’s a saying that “development favors efficiency”.  “Efficiency” refers to the effective accomplishment of a goal, given the physical limitations of the environment.  Once you define the goal of life as its own propagation, and consider that process has taken place on a geological timescale, the entire Theory of Evolution can be derived from those three words.  That in itself is more efficient than “cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures” because the concept is conveyed in 40% fewer words, and the words are more understandable to the general public.  Furthermore, development favoring efficiency obviously applies to all forms of evolution, including memetic, behavioral, cultural, technological, and linguistic.

For another example, hope is the universal currency of humanity, because people always work for whatever gives them the most hope.  Hope is a person’s perception that a certain course of action offers the most effective means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA.  I don’t bother to cite references or experiments I have personally conducted to discover this, because I trust that a moment’s reflection will render it self-evident.  Hope is a central theme of every religion in the world, most philosophies, and many other non-scientific studies of human behavior, and has been discovered by anthropologists to be a universal constant of humanity.  If any official scientists would like to find a pattern of cause and effect that doesn’t render a person’s perception of the effective preservation of their DNA synonymous with hope, you’re welcome to try, because I already know you can’t do it.  Meanwhile, by distilling objectivity from compiled systems of thought I’ve established a common point of reference among evolutionary psychology, religions, philosophy, economic systems, the natural environment that our economic systems depend upon, and the man-made political systems that make our human economies function… or break down.

For another example, the first novel I wrote was a futuristic retelling of The Tragedy of MacBeth, which, as much as anything else, was a story about how the greed, treachery, and other human characteristics that drove the plot of the ancient tale haven’t changed, in spite of how much technology people have developed since the original was written.  The challenge I faced in writing that book was, how do I portray the witch sisters in a science fiction story?  So I looked around to find out how real-life Witches have resolved the paradox of practicing magic in a scientific world.  I already knew that the lead singers of two of my favorite bands were Witches, so I didn’t have far to look.

The basic solution within the Witch and general Pagan community is that religion is the differential between objective knowledge and everything else in the universe.  The first principle of Paganism is “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”.  It is a religion because it fulfills the qualification of presupposing the existence of supernatural entities, but it doesn’t define what those entities are supposed to be.  The goal of Paganism isn’t to define what those entities are, but to figure out what they are, and how to cooperate with them.  It’s a goal to strive for, despite the fact that no one reasonably believes it can ever be completed.  As a saying among Pagans goes, “the journey is the destination”.

Ultimately, Paganism isn’t a separate thing from science; it’s just a different point on the same spectrum.  It’s pre-science, both in the sense that it was an attempt at figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, which pre-dated science, and in the sense that it is a system of thought devoted to continuing to figure out how the world works, without any other limitation on what people are supposed to think about or how they’re supposed to think.  People thinking about something in the first place is a pre-requisite to people figuring out scientifically how that thing works.

It’s an ancient Pagan belief that everything in the universe is connected, and now that’s been discovered scientifically.  Another ancient belief is that the Earth gave birth to life on Earth, and now that’s been discovered scientifically.  Another ancient belief is that humanity depends on the Earth for their lives, and now that’s been discovered scientifically.  For these and many other reasons, science doesn’t conflict with Paganism, but supports it.  The supernatural forces of Paganism aren’t supernatural in the sense that they must be unprovable, but only in the sense that they are the forces that make the universe work, and the universe is much bigger than humanity.  They are unprovable precisely because humanity isn’t capable of understanding everything in the entire universe, and that itself is understood scientifically (give or take some ongoing debate).

As with any good idea anyone has ever had, it’s easy for people to lose sight of the original idea of figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, get distracted by aesthetics, and start focusing on the things that exist in the universe rather than on continuing to search for the patterns of cause and effect that make those things work.  Many Pagans have taken advantage of the absence of control on what they are allowed to think and use it to justify selfish, childish humanocentricism, claiming that they’re contributing something useful to the world by interpreting the world intuitively and believing that whatever they feel must be true.  But that’s true of every religion.  While most Pagans don’t practice their religion in a way that’s compatible with science, it is possible to do, and some Pagans do it.

Since the first principle of Paganism is “Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”, and there are no limitations imposed on what people are allowed to think about, in order for Pagans to be able to function in groups with any degree of cohesiveness has depended on their discovering observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable patterns of cause and effect that lie behind human behavior, including aspects of human behavior that are considered scientifically unapproachable.  The general Witch/Pagan solution to practicing metaphysics in a scientific world where many people who believe in metaphysics obviously disagree with each other on how metaphysics work, states that a person’s attempt to influence the world metaphysically begins with his taking action to build up some sort of spiritual energy in himself and some sort of feeling of connection to the world, focusing his spiritual energy on the effect he wants to have on the world, and then the effect either happening or not happening.  This says nothing about existence or non-existence of metaphysical forces, although most Pagans assume it does.  Of much greater interest to me was that they discovered an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable pattern of how people feel they should  be able to affect the world metaphysically.  Years later I learned how Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D’Aquili had discovered these things formally, which they reported in their book Why God Won’t Go Away.  But I had already known this for years, and I had been building upon it ever since, so I had a big head start over anyone who waited for the official scientific book to come out before they noticed it or thought about it.

Those are just a few simple examples of how I do what I do.  Using processes such as these it’s possible to derive objective definitions of things like good, evil, beauty, humor, and happiness, by identifying under what conditions people feel those things and what components those feelings are made up of.

Some of what I do consists of deconstructing conversations I’ve had with various people over the course of my life.  Thinking back on them now, I can see how the other person was using their emotional communication in the attempt to trigger emotional reactions in me that would create schemas and lacunas in my subconsciousness that would direct my behavior in the direction they wanted it to go, and I can see why they felt the need to do that.  Now if I were to direct that scene in a play, I can see why the other person would act the way they acted to try to get what they wanted from me, and why that seemed to them to be the most effective way to try to get what they wanted.  I know that from a scientific standpoint that’s completely useless, because there don’t seem to be any controls or testability involved.

(I know the argument can also be made that memory is fallible.  That is true, but I think it’s reasonable to say that the memory of a person for whom human behavior is the medium of his professional occupation is fallible in relation to human behavior only in the sense that the memory of an algebra teacher would be fallible in remembering the license plate of the getaway car of a robber who had just held up his family at gunpoint, or that the memory of anyone is fallible when it comes to applying his professional abilities and skills to a uniquely challenging situation that directly relates to his professional occupation.)

My solution has been to connect my folk-science to established first principles of formal science.  The analyses I give of these situations essentially are instructions that any professional director of a typical theatre company could follow—provided he had a firm grasp of evolutionary psychology—and direct a scene that would look very similar to my real-life experience.  I know this can be done without conducting the experiment myself because one person having an idea of how an interpersonal interaction should look and then explaining to other people how to replicate it is precisely what theatrical direction consists of, and theatrical directors do it all the time.

I’ve refined the patterns I use to their greatest possible parsimony, because I use the interaction of the smallest possible number of factors in human behavior with obvious evolutionary importance, beyond which the elimination of any one of them would make the scene unreplicable by a director.  I can imagine that this could be formalized scientifically by teaching multiple theatrical directors firm grasps of evolutionary psychology and then having them follow my instructions to direct scenes independently of each other, and seeing how similar to each other they turn out.  That literal experiment would be labor intensive to carry out, but that process would simply be a much more complicated version of the commonplace theatrical habit of directors and actors evaluating performances for their realism by comparing the directors’ artistic choices to the choices they could’ve made with their own abilities and skills.  .

Environmental and human evolutionary science have established many critical constants.  Combined with other constants that can be distilled from compiled non-scientific systems of thought, I have found that solving for variables has ceased to be a meaningful challenge.  In the same way that scientists could study a thousand snowflakes and discover that the process that would make them all unique would also make every snowflake in the world unique, with the systems of thought I’ve compiled, combined with first principles of evolutionary psychology and environmental science, the only pattern of cause and effect that could create them would also have to create the remainder of human behavior.  That is, whatever human behavior I haven’t been able to study can only be small parts of the large patterns I have discovered.  It’s been years since I’ve heard of any human behavior that falls outside the patterns I’ve been working with.  In the dozens of books I’ve read on evolutionary science, I’ve seen numerous formal discoveries that I had already predicted, and numerous other formal discoveries that have broken human behavior down into smaller components without challenging the interactions of my larger components.
Now I should point out that official academic recognition for my work is not among my highest priorities. This is simply an attempt, however crude, at an academic book about what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.

This is important for me to specify because there are some other standards of measurement that are used to differentiate between science and non-science that my work can’t meet for reasons scientists didn’t anticipate.

For one example—I know there’s no way to say this without sounding conceited—to say that a discovery has to be peer reviewed to qualify as science is to assume that the person who made the discovery has any peers in the first place.  For reasons that I hope will become apparent over the course of this book, my combination of abilities and background life experiences that gave me the perspective on the world that was necessary to make my discoveries, is not a combination that I can realistically expect anyone else to share.  The story of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein joining Will Shakespeare’s theatre company was an abbreviated metaphor for my life.  To make the story complete, the three of them would have to hit the road with Jack Keroac, then the four of them would have to learn to ride motorcycles from Evel Knievel, then the five of them would have to ride through the desert with Geronimo, then the six of them would have to serve in the Army of the Potomac under George Washington, then the seven of them would have to learn to write science fiction from Jules Verne, then the eight of them would need to meet Johnny Rotten and join the Sex Pistols, and then the nine of them would need to join Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  If it sounds like any of these things don’t have anything to do with science, may I remind everyone that observation begins with perspective.

For another example, one of the hardest parts of my work for scientists to understand, I’m sure, is the difference between professional etiquette among artists and professional etiquette among scientists.  Among artists, and especially among artists who work in groups, like theatre artists, effective communication consists of one part establishing an irrefutable body of evidence, and one part encouraging creative thought among others.  Professional artists understand this well enough that no one bothers to make the distinction when they’re doing one and when they’re doing the other, and usually people do some of both at the same time.  I know that I do it, but I don’t know how to stop doing it sufficiently to participate in an alternate professional etiquette.

A lot of scientists think it’s conceited of me to claim credit for things I didn’t technically discover.  But among artists, if I make a statement that is literally false, and you correct my mistake and reply with a statement that is literally true, for me to say, “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” is a legitimate statement.  I put information into your brain that was somewhere close to literally true, and I encouraged creative thought on your part, and the combination of the two led you to the correct answer.  And reaching the correct answer was what I meant to do.  If I put information into your brain, and that triggered thoughts in your brain that led to the correct answer, which of us is responsible for the discovery?  This is the memetic equivalent of the biological argument that life doesn’t begin at conception because life is a continuous process.

Ultimately, the answer to the question of which of us is responsible for the discovery is:  I don’t care.  Particularly among the artists I work with, if you take life more seriously than the average member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, nobody’s interested in your point of view anyway.
Another qualification of science I’ve heard scientists mention is “defendable”.  Where I come from, “defend” is not a word you use in conversation with strangers, and certainly not with strangers with whom you wish to remain on good terms.  Where I come from, “defending” is what pistols and shotguns are for, and submachineguns and assault rifles for some people.

What I have to say in this book is debatable, which is to say that reasonable men and women can talk about it and thereby refine it and expand their understanding of it.  I am fairly certain that there are some official scientists at least who would be interested enough in my work to follow it up in their own ways.  However, since I don’t work as a scientist, to present my work in a format that official scientists would consider defendable is beyond the limitations of my resources.

More importantly, however, since official recognition for my work isn’t my goal, and since in my vocabulary, defense is an action you take in response to someone else’s attack, and an attack is an attempt to eliminate another person from competition as efficiently as possible, if you make the inaccurate prediction that I am highly interested in official academic recognition for my work and you take action accordingly in the attempt to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible, your efforts won’t even be relevant to my interests.  I can defend myself as well as I need to to neutralize the threat any official scientists may pose to me as a byproduct of their actions, but it won’t be a defense that you’ll be able to recognize, because it won’t be a defense mounted in the effort to reassert my scientific credibility, as you expect.  The people I write the rest of my books for are people like me who are trying to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.  I measure my success by the degree to which those people are better able to understand the world as a result of my work.

(If I seem to be contradicting myself because you assume it isn’t possible for people to defend themselves with shotguns and simultaneously not to take life seriously, first of all, everyone I know isn’t an artist, second, over the course of an artistic career you live in a lot of lower class neighborhoods, and third, art, as opposed to aesthetic technology, is creative, and creativity depends on new and unexpected combinations of ideas.)

That brings me to another critical difference between formalized science and my work. Rather than pursuing it out of simple curiosity and talking about it in the abstract, I pursue my work with specific goals, and talk about it in terms of how it can be used to achieve those goals.  A lot of ivory-tower academics are having trouble figuring out why the general public shows so little interest in science.  The answer is simple, but formalized science isn’t capable of solving the problem.

Communicating information to another person effectively depends on making the information personally meaningful to them.  For most people, information doesn’t become personally meaningful until you tell them what they can use it for.  That seems at first to contradict the idea of scientific political neutrality.  But scientific political neutrality only exists in the abstract.  Once people apply science to anything it becomes political.

Teaching is the effective communication of ideas, and engineering is the application of science.  Both of those constitute big parts of the Niesen tradition.  Personally, I’ve taught high school, I’m certified as a flight instructor, theatre turns effective communication into an art, I’ve been trained in architectural drafting, and I’ve had half a dozen careers devoted to the application of discoveries toward various goals.

This paradox between formalized science and the learning styles of the majority of the public seems at first to render the goal of scientific political neutrality impossible to attain.  I’ve resolved the problem by talking about my work in terms of specific ways it can be used toward the goal of effective political neutrality.

Effective political neutrality depends on the elimination of conflict—that is, the use of science to resolve situations in which two people have mutually exclusive goals.  Over the course of history, many different people and groups of people have developed conflict resolution strategies.  Some of those are compatible with science under some circumstances.  Developing effective conflict resolution strategies simply depends on identifying traditional conflict resolution techniques that depend on an individual using information independently, or both people using information in conjunction, showing how scientific information can be used in those techniques, and in some cases, showing why the traditional information that has been used works in some circumstances but not in others.  That makes my version of political neutrality the active defusing of political situations, as opposed to an attempt at political inertness that only works in the abstract.

The alternative to active political neutrality would be contrived negligence of effective political neutrality.  Given that the first principle of evolutionary psychology states that all human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her, any person who gets hold of new information can be expected to use it to try to advance his or her goals in life.  If scientists report scientific information in terms that only a few people can understand, and those people’s educations enable them to achieve elevated positions of decision-making power in our social systems—political positions, in other words, regardless of whether or not their occupations are nominally political—it is inevitable that some of those people will use their privileged access to information against people who don’t have access to that information.  Furthermore, it is inevitable that some people would use that information against other people even if the information was available to everyone.  Dr. Nobel’s discovery of nitroglycerine was an example of a politically neutral scientific discovery that someone who didn’t care about political neutrality immediately turned into weapons, which, by definition, are implements whose purpose for existing is to increase political inequality.  Likewise, Albert Einstein’s politically neutral discovery of mass-energy equivalence led to the Nazis’ highly politically biased decision to begin the research and development of the atom bomb.

Ultimately, it is inevitable that any scientific discovery can and will be turned into a weapon by someone.  The origins of the paradox between abstract and effective political neutrality has been discovered scientifically, with the first principle of evolutionary psychology.

My definition of political neutrality as active political neutrality leads to further political ramifications.  I discuss these at length toward the end of this book.  In brief, first of all, the billions of deaths that the Club of Rome predicted in the 21st century will be an inescapably politically biased event.  Formalized science is incapable of actively defusing that situation, because with the possible exception of some ivory tower academics, people care more about their lives than they care about science.  If a few, or all, of those people have access to certain information in a situation like that, they will use it for political goals.

Second, it cannot be ignored that effective political neutrality is an active threat to most political systems in the world, because political neutrality is not the goal of most political systems in the world.

Luckily, there are various groups of people who have been searching for effective solutions to these problems for longer than environmental science or evolutionary psychology have existed to officially identify them.   Some of those people have a great deal of experience at putting effective political neutrality into practice.

I care about science and I care about people.  I care about governments and politicians to the extent that they use science to the benefit of their people.  Beyond that I don’t waste any pity on them.

When it comes to environmental science I’m no James Lovelock, and unfortunately, neither is anyone else (except, of course, Dr. Lovelock himself).  But I can understand exponential growth and thermodynamics well enough to make them personally meaningful to people and thereby push their understanding of the world decisively in the direction of being able to take action to escape environmental disaster.  To that end, I have already set events into motion that no one, including myself, can stop.

By connecting the observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable patterns of cause and effect that have been discovered over the course of 25 years of evolutionary psychology to the observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable patterns of cause and effect that have been discovered over the course of 25 centuries of theatre, I’ve found there is little or nothing that rebellious teenagers in the industrialized world can’t learn about evo-psych by watching movies, and there’s nothing that Third-World guerillas can’t learn about evo-psych or planetary biology by telling stories around campfires.  And let’s just say I know people who know people…

The line I’m treading between science and treason is so fine that any 12 people chosen at random to serve on my jury probably won’t be able to tell the difference.  Activists here in America have already gone to prison for publicizing information that’s inconvenient to powerful people on a much smaller scale than what I’ve done.  But I’ve made a lot of friends in low places, many of whom have a lot more experience in prisoner support networks than ivory tower academics have.

The final critical difference between formal science and my work is that my work has another specific purpose.  Let’s not play word games.  A person who believes in imaginary things, who refuses to accept observable evidence that contradicts his beliefs, and who acts upon his beliefs in a way that harms other people, is mentally ill.  Unfortunately, that includes many Americans, and President Bush.

Science is intended to be politically neutral.  My work is a full frontal assault on religious fundamentalism.

I’ve read a number of books whose authors have told fascinating, and obviously important, stories of the world in terms of the replication of genes, the stability of the global environment, the Laws of Thermodynamics, exponential growth, systems interactions, factors contributing to the rise and self-destruction of civilizations, people always acting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, and so on.  These are good stories in the sense that they develop an idea from a beginning to a middle to an end.  However, they aren’t great works of literature in that they lack plot and character development and other crucial factors required to make information personally meaningful to large audiences.

It didn’t take me long to see that with the constants identified by scientists, other constants that have been derived from non-scientific bodies of information, and the solved variables they led to, I could easily tie all those stories of the world together into one big story that would serve as both a story of the world and an encyclopedia to life.  With my background in fictional art—primarily theatre and novel writing—my breadth of perspective on the world, and the eventful life I’ve led, I have all the non-fictional plots and characters I need to tell most of that story of the world.  The rest I could fill in with outlines of hypothetical movies, each of which would be a mental model of the actions of people in certain situations to test them for realism—which is the literary equivalent of a scientific hypothesis, and another example of a way that people who aren’t scientists have found to search for observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable patterns of cause and effect.

It was during the evolution versus intelligent design debate here in America that I figured out how to do all this.  The full meaning of what I’d discovered was inescapable.  The Bible is a story of the world and a reference book to life.  So is every other comparable religious text.

Literary techniques have been developed because they have specific emotional effects on audiences.  The Origin of Species will never be able to compete against the Bible as the founding document of a popular system of thought because while The Origin of Species is scientifically valid, the Bible is artistically complete.

Science and religious fundamentalism are separate things on the surface because they’re two different systems of thought intended to fulfill two different purposes.  But they have mutually exclusive goals, which puts them into conflict with each other.

The fate of the world is not going to be decided by whose concept of reality is more scientifically valid than whose, but by who gets the most people to cooperate with their version of reality.  Whichever side can compete most effectively will prevail—which is how evolution has always worked.

Theatre and fiction writing are studies of conflict.  In order to win a conflict unconditionally, you must prevent your opponent from achieving his goals, you must make him understand that you actively prevented him from achieving his goals, and one way or another, you must leave him nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nothing left to fight with.  The fact that religious fundamentalists believe in things that are unprovable, and therefore un-disprovable, presents a challenge to that.  But considering it impossible is not an option.

The singular advantage that religious fundamentalists have over scientists is their public support.  That will be the determining factor in the conflict, and that defines the conditions that must be met to neutralize religious fundamentalists politically.  The reason they are able to attract that public support is because they seem to have answers for everything, while scientists don’t.  The only way to defeat that would be to find an answer to everything scientifically, including to questions that formal science can’t answer.  This is where combining scientific constants with derived non-scientific constants to solve for all variables has served me best of all.  Strictly speaking, it isn’t science, it’s figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible.  Since most people—meaning the people who make up the public support for science or religious fundamentalism—care more about figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, than they care about formalized science, for most people, that’s good enough.  I can show how I produced my work well enough that scientists could formalize it for their own sake, but in the meantime I have a world to save.

With that, my ideological duel with President Bush was on.  He is the most powerful man on Earth, but I’ve got a few things on my side that he doesn’t, beginning with a functional understanding of reality.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, suffice it to say that if I don’t seem interested in defending myself from ivory tower academics who attempt to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible, it’s because there are a lot of people with guns in the world who want to eliminate me from competition as efficiently as possible.  Like I said, I’m playing the game on a much bigger field.

Filed under: k: The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by Ezra
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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.

Filed under: k: The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by Ezra
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The interdisciplinary study of human behavior began with what Dr. E. O. Wilson called sociobiology, which is now more commonly known as evolutionary psychology.  In 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo founded the Club of Budapest, which was intended to use the interdisciplinary study of human behavior as the foundation for the peace movement equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
In my family, the interdisciplinary study of human behavior began three generations ago.  My grandmother, who was not a scientist, but a philosopher, came within one logical step of discovering the first principle of evolutionary psychology on her own:  Everyone always does the best they can to try to provide for their needs.  The one thing she didn’t figure out was that everyone’s needs are always the preservation of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.

From the philosophical point my grandmother reached, the one logical step remaining to turn her discovery into the first principle of a branch of science was an aesthetic formality.  Once you recognize that everyone in the world is equal to yourself, that everyone always makes what they believe at the time to be the best decisions they can, and that everyone always believes, on some level or another, that every decision they make is right at the time they make the decision, the only thing that leaves to be determined is the origin of everyone’s perceptions.  Discovering that is the fundamental goal of evolutionary psychology.

My grandfather, as I said, was an airplane engineer.  But despite his and my grandmother’s diametrically opposed view points on the world, they were happily married for 67 years.
We are a large family of exceptionally talented people.  We are engineers, architects, biologists, forest rangers, philosophers, writers, dancers, painters, musicians, teachers, trades people, activists, and adventurers, from a wide range of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds.   This has made the interdisciplinary study of human behavior inseparable from everyday life in my family.

From this foundation of perceiving and interacting with the world, and our de facto interdisciplinary study of human behavior, it should come as no surprise that in my family, people don’t have opinions.  We have collections of observable evidence that indicate patterns of cause and effect that are universal, self-consistent, and reproducible, and that better be debatable—because they will be debated.  This is true for some of my family members more than others, but in effect, in my family, if a particular thought process doesn’t function as a scientific hypothesis, it doesn’t even qualify as an idea.  If it doesn’t account for all related observable evidence, it’s either incomplete or erroneous.

Once you understand the logic behind the biochemistry that makes evolution happen, what evolution makes happen is simply the biggest engineering puzzle in the world.  All of evolution is simply a balance of costs, benefits, uses, adaptations, improvements, trade-offs, solutions to problems, margins of error, and so on.  If you grow up in a family where men have been mathematicians, architects, and engineers for four generations, you learn how all those things work from conversations around the supper table.  After that, conceptually there’s nothing left to evolution that you can’t learn by reading books on your own.

My eight years of post secondary education were in four seemingly unrelated fields.  I have half a bachelor’s degree in acting and technical theatre, dual associate’s degrees in building construction and automotive technology, and I’m a commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor.  At first glance that might seem like the resume of someone who can’t figure out what he wants to do for a living.  But on closer examination it can be seen that my eight years of post secondary education have revolved around human behavior and various ways simple parts of systems interact to create wholes that seem to be greater than the sums of their parts, which can be seen by anyone in America in the course of their day to day lives. All told, I have now written over 2 million words on the products of my education.  In order to study what interested me, I had to pioneer my own field of study, which meant there was no one waiting at the end of it to award me a Ph.D. for my work.

Outside of my academic life I’ve taught myself how to write novels, I’ve helped set up two punk community theatre companies, I’ve been homeless on the streets of a major U.S. city, I’ve belonged to a street gang, I’ve known numerous convicted felons personally, and I’ve been engaged to a convicted murderer for three years.  You just might say that I’ve witnessed a lot of human behavior that typical ivory tower academics are never exposed to.

1968 was a pivotal year in my life.  That was the year Dr. Aurelio Pecci founded the Club of Rome, which was intended as the Manhattan Project of the environmental movement.  It was also the year Dr. King was assassinated.  My dad could’ve been one of the scientists involved in the Club of Rome easily enough, as could his own father if he’d chosen a different career.   On the one hand, some of the greatest scientific minds in the world had discovered that if humanity, or at least civilization, is going to survive the 21st century, radical social change will be necessary.  On the other hand, the greatest American activist of the 20th century had figured out how to make radical social change happen.  My dad realized that radical social change happens in the streets, and it happens because someone figures out how to explain to a lot of people—and ideally, a majority of people—why the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, how things are going to have to be done differently, and why doing them differently is going to benefit everyone.  So instead of becoming just another ivory tower academic, he set out on a life of adventure—which is to say he carried on the tradition his own parents began—kept up with advances that were made in science over the years, and raised my brother and me the same way.

From the time I first learned to talk, I was raised on physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, statistics, mathematics, and systems theory.  I don’t work as a scientist, because by the time I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background.   So I set out into the world to learn about things I didn’t already know how to do.

I should point out here that a big reason I don’t talk about science the way official scientists talk about it is because I learned how science works at a different time of my life, and I don’t pursue it now as my occupation.  First I learned how to think like a scientist, and now I’ve had to backtrack and try to figure out how to talk enough like a scientist that the rest of you can understand me.   In my family, the concept of a pattern of cause and effect that’s observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, is usually what we refer to as, “It’s obvious.”  Then we discuss it and refine the point, and sometimes the idea gets thrown out altogether.

That might seem like a sloppy approach to science, but then, sloppy is as sloppy does.  In reading books by leading scientists of the world, it never ceases to amaze me how often they fail to put their own science to use in their own lives.   Why did Dr. Lovelock, the greatest environmental scientist in the world, have four children?  (Dr. Erlich only had one.  Charles Darwin had 10, but he does seem to have been putting his science to work, because there was no global environmental crisis back then.)  At the end of A Devil’s Chaplin, why is Dr. Dawkins’ open letter to his ten-year-old daughter only 10 pages long?  My dad taught me most of that stuff when I was five.  The next day he taught me about aerodynamics.  The next day he taught me about astronomy. With every action they take, every person and Muppet on Sesame Street is exhibiting phenotypic behavior in the attempt to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, simply because it isn’t possible for actors (or anyone else) to imagine and then take any action that they don’t perceive to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.  When your kid asks you why old people look so funny when they eat, you can teach him about biology and systems theory at the same time, just by telling him that it’s caused by the interaction of the old person’s deteriorating control of their facial muscles and their deteriorating hand-eye coordination, which leads them to hold their mouth and the rest of their face in strange-looking ways for unusually long periods of time because they have to optimize their chances of getting their food in their mouths, and it takes them longer to get their fork from their plate to their mouth. Is this an answer to a four-year-old’s awkward question, or is it college-level bioengineering?  In family, it’s called “figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”.

Here’s my favorite example.  In The Hobbit, when Gollum and Bilbo are dueling with riddles, Gollum tells one that goes:

This thing, all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers,
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stone to meal,
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down!

Bilbo answers the riddle correctly when he says, “Time”.

When my dad read me the book, he had to interrupt the story right there momentarily and tell me that actually the answer was the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Those are just a few of examples that spring to mind.  The entire realm of human knowledge is available all around us; it’s just a question of knowing where and how to look.

To me, science isn’t a system of thought and body of evidence that Atheism applies to everyday life; science is just a specialized application of Atheism.  When you learn to perceive the world in terms of patterns of cause and effect and observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability, you learn how to be an Atheist by default.  (That’s the easiest way to describe it, anyway.  Technically it would be better described as Post-theism, which is to say, supernatural entities don’t need to exist or not exist, but we better not depend on them existing either.)

Working in theatre has given me some other advantages that official scientists evidently haven’t thought of yet.  The simplest is that, as every scientist who studies human evolution knows, jewelry, sculpture, music, and eventually painting were invented by Cro-Magnons.  There is considerable evidence to suggest they probably invented dance, poetry, singing, and a rudimentary form of theatre also, but those wouldn’t show up in the archeological record.  As every artist knows, art is the expression of emotion.  The biggest difference between amateur artists and professional artists is that amateur artists figure out how to turn their own feelings into art, while professional artists figure out how to turn other people’s feelings into art.  And as every human evolutionary scientist knows, emotion is a more powerful motivator by far than intellect.  That means I’ve spent most of my adult life working among people who are the heirs to a 60,000 year old tradition of figuring out how to communicate effectively with other Homo sapiens.

From their own direction, theatre artists have developed a dual first principle for replicating human behavior, which are only two logical steps removed from the first principle of evolutionary psychology.  They are:  No one ever does anything for no reason (which psychologists phrase as:  All human behavior has meaning); and: people always expend their energy in the most effective way they can think of.

With one logical step this dual first principle can be rephrased as:  People always pursue the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.   At that point, theatre artists have discovered artistically what my grandmother discovered philosophically, and what Dr. Diamond used as his first principle to show why calories of energy expended to calories of energy produced led people to make the agricultural choices they made.

By defining benefit as the effective preservation of DNA, we arrive at the first principle of evolutionary psychology:  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
The dual first principle of theatrical human behavior has an advantage over the first principle of evolutionary psychology in that it neatly divides human behavior between a universal brain structure and the effects of sensory input on the universal brain structure.  The “no one ever does anything for no reason” first principle led me directly to the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, by defining what people’s reasons are.  The “everyone always expends their energy as efficiently as possible” first principle led me directly to the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity, by defining how people perceive the efficiency of the energy expenditure for the choices they make.

By relating evolutionary psychology to movies, I’ve made evo-psych seem so obvious to high school dropouts that they’ve wondered why nobody thought of it before.  Indeed, I’ve heard from a lot of high school drop outs, in essence, that if someone could’ve taught them an all-encompassing perspective of human behavior, and simultaneously put it to use in their education, their education would’ve made a lot more sense to them, and they wouldn’t’ve dropped out of high school.

Filed under: k: The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by Ezra
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One problem I always have in explaining my work to scientists is why I think it’s possible for artists to use their intuitive perceptions of human behavior to discover observable evidence.
May I remind everyone that all perception is subjective.  Scientific objectivity is derived by triangulation among numerous people’s subjectivity.

The question is:  What number of people needs to be able to perceive something subjectively in order for it to be considered objective evidence?

An easy line to draw would be to say that objectivity depends on everyone being able to perceive something directly with their senses.  But that definition doesn’t work, because it disproves the existence of stars.  Stars aren’t observable to everyone, because they aren’t observable to blind people.

An easy solution to that problem would be to say that objectivity depends on most people being able to perceive something subjectively.  But that raises the question:  Most people compared to what?

This definition solves the problem for a lot of things.  But quantum physics depends on objective evidence, and quantum particles aren’t observable to most people.

Quantum particles can be considered objective evidence because they are perceivable to most quantum physicists.  Quantum particles are observable to quantum physicists because quantum physicists possess the abilities, skills, and resources necessary to perceive them.

In the same way, the things I have to say about human behavior are considered observable evidence among theatre artists because most theatre artists possess the necessary abilities, skills, and resources to perceive them.  From that starting point, theatre artists have proceeded to define objectivity by triangulating among their subjective perceptions.

It could be argued that in order for something to qualify as objective evidence it has to be observable to people using their five natural senses.  This definition saves stars from blindness-induced non-existence, but it disproves calculus.  The physical act of observation, absent some mental process to connect meaning to the observation, will render the evidence unobservable in practice, because people will forget they’ve seen it.  The information will not pass through the person’s psychological sense filters and register in conscious memory.  But if observation depends on mental processes attaching meaning to observations, again we’re talking about subjectivity.  To most people using their five natural senses, calculus is meaningless because it’s unintelligible.

In the same way that it’s possible for some people to render calculus, quantum physics, or any other complicated pieces of information objective by possessing the mental abilities necessary to attach the correct meaning to them, it’s possible for theatre artists to possess different mental abilities to correctly attach meaning to different pieces of information.  By attaching meaning to their perceptions, both groups are able to use the information in self-consistent manners.  For scientists to claim that they are capable of doing this with their work but artists are incapable of doing it with their own work simply because the scientists themselves don’t know how to do the artists’ jobs, isn’t science.  Forced ignorance by a social consensus of the majority that a small group of exceptionally talented people shouldn’t be allowed to know anything everyone else doesn’t know, is what I call mental communism.  As a friend of mine, who coined the term, pointed out to me, the Communists tried to make everyone equal by forcing them to live at equally low economic levels, and where did it get them?   Now a lot of people in America try to make everyone equal by forcing them to live at equally low intellectual levels, and where does it get us?  People use this tactic all the time to try to prove scientists’ discoveries are wrong.  I find it ironic that scientists should use it against other people.

When my grandfather designed airplanes in the early days of aviation, the line between objectivity and subjectivity was completely different from what it is today.  In the days before airplane engineers had computers, his brain was the computer.  He was using objective mathematics to make his calculations, but he was making those calculations in his head.

Now one of my uncles is a sound engineer.  He does the same job my grandfather did, but in a different context.  My grandfather had to use a subjective process to conduct his objective calculations, because no one had yet figured out how to build a machine that could carry out the objective calculations objectively.  The ultimate proof that my grandfather’s calculations were correct, as were the calculations of anyone who used their own brains to double-check his work, is that none of the planes he designed crashed due to design flaws.

Now we do have machines that can perform objective mathematical operations objectively.  But we still don’t have machines that can figure out how to arrange music in ways that will make people enjoy listening to it.  Now my uncle’s brain is the computer that does that job.  The proof that he succeeds is the fact that people enjoy listening to the music he arranges.

It follows from this that scientists’ and artists’ definitions of objectivity are not two separate things, but two points along the same spectrum.  They are not differences in kind, they are differences in scale.

It also follows from this that at the very end of the scale, objective evidence could exist that only one person was capable of observing.  It is known that objective evidence exists that no one is capable of observing.  It is easily conceivable that objective evidence could exist that only two people could observe.  Why should the range skip that intermediary point?  For that matter, the simple fact that one of the two people who could observe a certain piece of objective evidence could murder the other person, reduces this question to simple arithmetic.

The best way I can describe the way I perceive human behavior is that I’m aware of electricity flowing through people’s brains.  I’m generally aware of where it’s coming from, where it’s going, where the person thinks it’s going, whether or not they’re right, where the person is trying to make it go, and whether or not they’re succeeding.  Basically, that flow of electricity makes me aware of the circuits the electricity is flowing though, but not necessarily of what the circuits are attached to. I perceive this about people I meet in real life, and I have learned to apply it to an artistic medium.  I think it’s safe to say that most or all great theatre artists perceive human behavior the same general way, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.  I’m not the greatest theatre artist who’s ever lived—that would be Will Shakespeare, the Charles Darwin of theatre—so there are other theatre artists who are more perceptive to human behavior than I am.

Personally, I can sense the flow of electricity from landmark to landmark, and sense that I’m sensing that, but until I discovered the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, I couldn’t tell what the landmarks were.  My mother is perceptive of human behavior to the point that she can walk into a room full of people and know almost instantly what everyone is feeling.  Considering that Will Shakespeare turned human behavior into 29 full-length plays that he wrote as poetry, which are unrivalled after 400 years, he must’ve had a sort of telepathy that worked so well he could use it on imaginary characters.

This isn’t literally a sixth sense.  (At least, I don’t believe it is, although I may be mistaken.)  It’s a very highly developed interaction of the usual five senses, which makes some people aware of certain information that other people can’t perceive.  It’s analogous to the way in which a genius IQ effectively gives a person intellectual superpowers that 99% of people assume aren’t possible for people to have.

For myself, I’ve spent most of my life feeling that most people I meet talk “wrong” and think “wrong”.   I used to try to tell people that they weren’t talking correctly, but I gave that up long ago because it never worked.  I could never figure out how to explain to people that electricity wasn’t moving through their brains the way they believed it was.

The best example I can give of this is superficiality.  A person has what I can best describe as a depth of consciousness, which develops as a combination of natural perceptivity of the world and life experience.  Materially wealthy people generally have less of it than materially poor people, culturally conservative people generally have less of it than culturally progressive people, culturally insulated people generally have less of it than culturally worldly people, older people generally have more of it than younger people, and people who were raised on Hollywood entertainment generally have less of it than people who weren’t.

When a person observes a certain thing, they make an emotional attachment to the thing to give them their sense of its significance.  There’s a certain amount of significance they could give it, a certain amount they do give it, and a certain amount they believe they give it.  They always compare the amount they believe they give it to the amount they do give it, without always being aware of how much they could  give it.  Suppose they believe they’ve assigned it a significance of 50%.  If I’m aware that their depth of perceptivity is only 50% of what it could be, that means they’ve only assigned it an absolute significance of 25%.  So I don’t agree with them that the thing is 50% significant, or when they act upon the belief that the thing is 50% significant, or when they try to convince me that the thing is 50% significant.  It’s much easier for a person to give themselves a sense of meaning to their lives by not developing their depth of perceptivity than it is to develop their depth of perceptivity, because a shallow perceptivity is much easier to fill up.  If we assume that as members of the same species we all value our lives equally much, for a younger person, a culturally conservative person, a culturally insulated person, a materially wealthy person, or a person who was raised on Hollywood entertainment, it’s easier to substitute quantity of sensory input for significance of sensory input.  Preoccupying themselves with sensory input for its own sake eliminates the need for the critical thought that the development of depth of perceptivity depends upon, and thereby enables them to make their lives feel complete for the least possible expenditure of effort.

At this point I can make a transition from my natural perception of human consciousness to a scientific approach to its application in theatre.  What I’ve referred to as depth of perceptivity is synonymous to a systems diagram of their consciousness and subconsciousness.

Amateur artists attempt to replicate human behavior by knowing the things their characters know.  They aren’t very successful that way, and usually they can’t figure out why.  Professional artists replicate human behavior by developing an understanding of how their characters think, thinking that way, and taking action accordingly.

In effect, a professional actor develops an understanding of how it’s possible for people to think, even though he doesn’t personally think that way.  Then he uses that to draw a mental systems diagram for how his character thinks.  He then fills in that systems diagram with all the information his character has that’s relevant to the play.  A lot of his mental systems diagram consists of empty boxes, and a lot more consist of boxes whose information is much more general than it would be for a real person.  But what the actor needs to replicate the behavior of his character is the systems diagram itself, not the information in it.

Every facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, thought, word, and action that a character in a movie or play ever uses or makes is a product of the character’s genetic makeup and every life experience that’s had a lasting effect on him.  This is true for people in real life, which is why professional actors have had to figure out how to do it onstage in order to replicate human behavior believably.  With every facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, thought, word, and action of a person you meet in real life, you get a sense of who the person is.  Professional theatre artists can decide ahead of time who a character is, and then reverse engineer the character’s life to see what combination of genetic makeup and life experiences would’ve made the character who they are.  Alternately, professional theatre artists can decide on how a character’s genetic makeup and life experiences created who he is, and then use his facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, thoughts, words, and actions accordingly to give the audience their sense of who he is.

Usually, professional theatre artists use a combination of the two, by doing the latter, developing a general sense of who the character is, and then doing the former to fill in the details, by figuring out how the combination of genetic makeup and life experiences affected him personally.  In effect, a writer starts with a universal template of a Homo sapiens’ brain, fills in its major characteristics, applies life experiences to it, determines who the character is at the beginning of the movie, and determines how the events of the movie affect the character’s behavior.  That covers the character’s speech, actions, and most thoughts.  The director and the actor then work together to determine who the character is as a unique individual, and the emotional affect the character’s genetic makeup and life experiences had on him. That determines the aesthetic details of how the character does the things he does.  That covers tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures.  The result is a realistic replication of a person.

A novelist has to be able to do all of those things himself.  The artistic medium allows less of some, but more of others.  To teach myself how to write novels, I had to teach myself how to do all of this.

With a character’s facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, thoughts, words, and actions, theatre artists give audience members a sense of who the character is in the sense that the audience members are meeting the character as a real person.  Personally, I get the sense of who the character is in the sense that I could live his or her life (which is not to say I would want to).  If I watch a movie enough times, I could go through and tell you why a character smiled the way he did at a particular moment, and likewise took every other action he took in the movie, in spite of the fact that the actor probably wasn’t even consciously aware why he was making those acting choices at the times he made them.   Any professional director could do likewise.

This might sound complicated, but as I said, these are elementary principles of theatre at the professional level.  It takes an extreme sensitivity to human behavior to reach the professional level, but only in the sense that it takes an extreme degree of insightfulness of another sort to be able to visit the Galapagos Islands and unravel the origins of species as the cumulative adaptation to environmental pressures.  Centuries before Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, William Shakespeare had already turned the contents of that book into works of art, 29 times.

* * *

At first glance it seems that I must be comparing other people’s depth of perceptivity to my own, which would make my observations completely subjective and therefore scientifically invalid.  This isn’t true (to the extent that it’s possible for any scientist to eliminate his own subjectivity from his observation process).  By perceiving other people’s depth of perceptivity, I quickly add them to my own perception of depth of perceptivity.  That means I constantly expand my own perception of depth of perceptivity to include the depth of perceptivity of everyone whose depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered.

It’s worth noting here that everyone’s depth of perceptivity has a different shape, which means many people’s depth of perceptivity includes things that other people’s don’t.  That means that the floor of my perception of depth of perceptivity isn’t flat, but is made up of the combined shape—meaning lowest points—of the depth of perceptivity of everyone who’s depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered.  (At least, that was true for most of my life.  Now that I’ve figured out how expand my depth of perceptivity by first principles rather than empathically, I can say the floor of my depth of perceptivity is flat—and interpersonal interactions are much less of an adventure these days.  But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll keep talking about it in the present tense, just because it probably applies to many other theatre artists.)

This seems at first glance to limit my depth of perceptivity to the combined depth of perceptivity of the relatively small number of people I’ve met in my life compared to the total population of the Earth.  This isn’t true either, for two reasons.

First, my perception of the combined total of the depth of perceptivity of everyone whose depth of perceptivity I’ve ever encountered has made me realize how much it’s possible to perceive about the world, and consequently, how much of my own compiled depth of perceptivity I’m not personally using.  That has turned my life into an experiment in how to do everything there is to do in the entire world in one lifetime.  And that has necessarily brought me into contact with an ever-increasing number of people, with an ever-expanding combined depth of perceptivity.  That’s made my perception of depth of perceptivity increase at an exponential rate, and that has turned my quest for depth of perceptivity into an autocatalytic process—or you could say a cascade effect.

I started my post-secondary education studying acting, because at the time, being a movie star, playing lots of different characters in lots of different situations seemed to me the furthest extent of a life of adventure a person could lead.  But in the process of learning how to be a movie star, it didn’t take me long to learn how to be a movie star  in real life.  Rather than playing roles and having fictitious adventures, I could just be the roles and have real adventures, and save myself the trouble of auditioning for the parts.

The other reason my perception of the depth of perceptivity isn’t limited to combined depths of perceptivities I’ve personally encountered is analogous to the way a scientist’s intellectual perception of the world isn’t limited to scientific experiments he has personally conducted.  Most of what any individual scientist knows about science he learned about from scientific experiments conducted by other scientists.  In the same way, in order to play a character onstage or in a movie, a talented actor has to develop a shape (including depth) of perceptivity for the character he’s playing, and then act upon that in the role of his character, instead of acting upon his own shape of perceptivity.  To do otherwise wouldn’t be acting, it would be an amateur reciting lines onstage and pretending to be someone else.

As the saying in theatre goes, acting is doing.  In order to replicate the behavior of another person, you have to develop a shape of perceptivity for the other person and act upon that.  That means that while in character you have to conceal your own shape of perception from everyone else—which includes me.

Since actors have figured out how to replicate the entire realm of human behavior, a relatively small number of people necessarily has figured out how to replicate the combined depth of perceptivity of everyone who has ever lived—or at least, a rough but thorough approximation of that.  In the same way that various scientists can each study a different part of science and then another scientist can read about all of their discoveries and thereby develop a broad understanding of science without personally replicating each of their experiments, various actors can each learn how to replicate a shape of perceptivity for certain types of people (meaning roles each actor is best at), and another actor can learn about all of them and thereby develop a broad understanding of the combined shape (and therefore depth) of human perceptivity.

This might seem at first glance to limit actors to replicating shapes of perceptivity that fit within their own shape of perceptivity.  This isn’t true either.  That wouldn’t let them replicate human behavior believably.  In the same way that systems theory is the study of the interaction of variables—rather than the variables themselves—so it is with acting.  An actor doesn’t need to know everything that his character knows in order to play his role, he only needs to know that his character knows what he knows, and know enough specific things that his character knows to be able to apply it to the small portion of the character’s life he’s portraying.  That means the actor doesn’t need to perceive everything his character perceives, he only needs to perceive his shape of perceptivity.  That gives him a framework into which he can fit all of the specific things his character knows and acts upon over the course of the play.

To transition from art back to science now:

Actors replicate human behavior believably by forming mental systems diagrams for their characters’ consciousness and subconsciousness, and filling in details as necessary to portray the character in the play or movie.

Each actor develops a different systems diagram for each of his or her characters.
Actors learn how to do this, mostly intuitively, by a combination of talent and experience.
For actors to portray the entire realm of human behavior believably, they’ve necessarily had to develop character systems diagrams that, combined, encompass the entire realm of human consciousness and subconsciousness.

Therefore, it is conceivable that a person who possessed sufficient talents and experience could combine all of those character systems diagrams into a single systems diagram.

* * *

Now perhaps you can see why I said that I don’t bother citing references because no scientist could learn how to do what I do just by reading a few pages in a book.  I’m sure that by now most scientists and actors in the world assume I’m just making stuff up, because what I’m saying is so complicated there’s no way to test it.  This is the best way I can think of to explain how I do what I do, because I don’t have and OFF switch for my perceptive abilities.  I have no idea what it’s like not to be able to perceive the world the way I do.  All I can tell is that most people can’t, as evidenced by the fact that usually people can’t understand what I’m talking about.  For most of my life I’ve assumed that all of these things I’ve been talking about were so obvious that everyone could do them.  Beforehand I assumed the world was just incomprehensibly complicated, because I didn’t realize that most people were forming their perceptions of the world using only  five senses.   I sense depths of perceptivity; I don’t sense the existence or non-existence of perceptive ability.

If you lived in a world where everyone else was congenitally blind, they’d say the same things about you that you’re probably saying about me right now.  “What?  You think you have five senses?   But we can’t even understand what you’re talking about.  How are we supposed to prove the existence of this so-called ‘fifth sense’ of yours?  And even if we could, what would be the point?  How would we ever be able to use it for anything?”

The only difference between genius and insanity is that geniuses figure out how to prove the things no one else can perceive about the world are real.

Filed under: k: The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by Ezra
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Finally, I would like to comment on the infamous question someone once asked about, “Couldn’t you just dumb science down a little to make it more understandable to women and minorities?”

My folk-science approach is vaguely similar to that, in as much as I’ve made science accessible to more people.

It must be recognized that White men dominate science because they dominate the economy.  That White male dominance of the economy gives White men, more than any other group, the luxury of focusing their attention on abstract ideas.  Since every other group has less of an economic safety margin separating life from death, it follows that the members of that group would tend to feel it more important to think about broader, more generalized topics whose effects are more tangible.  Of course, women also have their evolutionary reasons for feeling that there are things that are important to think about that are so intangible and so abstract that men haven’t figured out how to study them scientifically.

The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior breaks the origins of human behavior up into 18 components that could be referred to as second-order modules.  I knew that biologists and psychologists would know more about the evolutionary origins of psychology than I did in terms of specific areas of the brain having been created by different evolutionary events and creating certain components of thought.  How the Mind Works by Dr. Steven Pinker is a thick book about first-order modules that build the origins of human thought up from neurology and the evolutionary factors that created our neurology.

The second-order modules I deal with are created by the interactions of the first-order modules Dr. Pinker deals with.  As he shows in his book, there is a great deal to learn about evolutionary psychology.  But therein lies the problem.  Most people will never read his book.  Most people, if presented with that much information they need to learn to understand how evolutionary psychology works and why it offers the potential of showing us everything (or at least, nearly everything) about how people think, will never perceive reading his book to offer them the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA.

I knew that if I could show how each of my 18 second-order modules connected directly to survival and reproduction, and were critical to natural selection, biologists and psychologists would be able to break them down further from there—which Dr. Pinker and various other people are in the process of doing.
With my use of second-order modules, I solve a lot of problems evolutionary psychologists haven’t yet solved.  I begin by encompassing the entire realm of human behavior, and then breaking it down.  I establish energy as the standardized currency of human behavior—which it is in theatre, and which many people consider it to be.  Once I establish how it’s done, I can convert from the energy that people feel motivates their thoughts and behavior while in any particular emotional state, to agricultural productivity to the consumption of fossil fuels and back.  Finally, I turn Hollywood into an evolutionary psychology classroom, by showing how my 18 second-order modules that are the product of natural selection are used to direct movies.   Now I can make evolutionary psychology conceptually understandable to high school drop outs in about half an hour.

This solves the problem of how to make science accessible to more people by making it something that doesn’t require them to focus a lot of attention on abstract, intangible ideas.  This approach to evolutionary psychology begins with people thinking about everything that is practical and tangible to them.

As a lot of women and minorities—and White working class men, I might add—I’ve met, and who college professors will never meet, have said, to call the materially affluent White men’s domination of the education system classism just doesn’t express the idea adequately.  It is economic segregation.  You didn’t notice this happening to you, but when your parents purchased your middle class childhood, they also purchased a middle class vocabulary, middle class speaking habits, and a middle class perspective along with it.  Now you found your education systems on the assumption that anyone who is smart enough to get into your education systems must be middle or upper class, or at least, must be smart enough to know that being middle or upper class is the best choice.  Now a lot of working class people who try getting into your middle class education system don’t find your words personally meaningful to them and can’t understand why you don’t teach classes about things that are actually important for people to learn about.  So then they drop out and go back to working in your factories or whatever.

It seems to me that the materially-affluent-dominated education system has settled into an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Middle class people succeed in the middle class education system, and they become the next generation of administrators and professors.  The system is immune to invasion by working class people, because not enough working class people can invade it at the same time.  The system holds itself in balance, because when middle class people compete against other middle class people, consciously or subconsciously they limit themselves to competing in ways that will perpetuate their middle class lifestyles.

Now the materially affluent people who dominate the education system have surrounded themselves with people who talk like them, think like them, act like them, and who they feel they can trust.  That other group of people, who seem to need science dumbed down for them, are made up of a lot of people who don’t talk like them, who hold strange beliefs, who do strange things, and who seem to resent the materially-affluent, education-system-dominating White men who think their education proves they’re smarter than everyone else.

Now you have an in-group and an out-group.  Every psychologist knows what happens next.  Then materially affluent White men think they’re doing the out-group a favor by suggesting they should offer the out-group an education that requires less intelligence to understand.

Filed under: k: The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity by Ezra
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