Chapter 26: The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior and The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity / You Thought the Title of this Chapter was a Joke, Didn’t You?:
When I wrote the last book, I assumed that everything I was saying was so obvious that official scientists must already know about it, so all there was left for me to do was to explain it to the public. Looking back on it now, however, it seems that either I’ve made a number of contributions to the field, or that I’ve re-discovered a number of important landmarks on my own from a different direction.
Science is the study of observable evidence. A scientific theory is a logical conclusion drawn from observable evidence that can be used to make accurate predictions. But in my case there’s a catch…
If you were the only person who could see, and everyone else in the world was congenitally blind, where would you look for observable evidence to prove that rainbows exist? You couldn’t say, “Look up there in the sky, it’s right there in front of you.” You couldn’t tell people about light rays passing through water droplets suspended in the atmosphere, because nobody would know what a light ray was. People would know what heat rays were, because they could feel them coming off the sun, but those wouldn’t feel any different from heat rays that came off a radiator. Why would the ones that came out of the sky have some special property that affected some mysterious organ of your body and gave you additional information about the world, while the ones that people used to heat their homes in the winter didn’t?
Painting turns visual imagery into art. People who have great sensitivity to visual imagery make better painters than people who have average sensitivity to visual imagery. People who practice painting for years improve upon their visual sensitivity. People who work among painters for years learn techniques for replicating visual imagery on canvass that people who don’t work as painters don’t learn.
Now take that last paragraph and replace the word “painting” with “theatre” and the term “visual imagery” with “human behavior”.
Theatre turns human behavior into art. People who have great sensitivity to human behavior make better theatre artists than people who have average sensitivity to human behavior. People who practice theatre for years improve upon their sensitivity to human behavior. People who work among theatre artists for years learn techniques for replicating human behavior that people who don’t work as theatre artists don’t learn.
Thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the industrialized world has seen human behavior replicated by theatre artists so many times that explaining how it’s done is very easy. That’s how I wrote the last book.
So here’s the surprise beginning to this book:
The fine points of human behavior that I discussed in the last book are observable evidence to theatre artists because of theatre artists’ collective perceptivity to human behavior. By explaining how theatre artists replicate human behavior on stage, that perceptivity was fairly easy to render observable to the general public. By drawing logical conclusions from that observable evidence, I was able to use it to make accurate predictions about basically the entire realm of human behavior.
All of this should be perfectly obvious to any run-of-the-mill scientific and artistic genius who’s worked in theatre most of his adult life. The catch is, as far as I can tell, scientists haven’t yet figured out how theatre artists replicate human behavior in terms scientists can consider observable evidence. So I spent the last book singing songs about rainbows, only to discover afterwards that the people who seemed to be experts in the field are congenitally blind.
Scientifically speaking, I guess I used something other than observable evidence to draw logical conclusions that can be used to make accurate predictions. That means that the last book is one gigantic scientific theory that works for everyone except scientists.
(Okay, technically the last book wasn’t a scientific theory that works for literally everyone except scientists. It wouldn’t work for religious fundamentalists who don’t believe in evolution, either.)
For anyone who is willing to believe that science works pretty well most of the time but there are still some things that scientists haven’t yet recognized as scientifically valid despite considerable evidence to support them, the last book does function as a gigantic scientific theory.
So I guess I’ll start this book by explaining how I wrote the last book. For scientists, it might be something approaching observable evidence. For everyone else, it’s a lesson in how techniques of storytelling can be combined with scientific principles to understand the ever-unfolding story of the world.
There is so much I could’ve said in this chapter that I published a full-length version separately, in my book The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity. That’s a denser, more-or-less academic presentation for people with something more than a high school level understanding of evolution and psychology.
The Bible is a story of the world, and so is this book. Unlike the Bible, by the end of this book (meaning the volume after this one) I show everyone how I wrote this book so you can write your own story of the world and get it to correspond well enough with other people’s stories of the world that you can work together and get along with each other. Ideally, instead of being a few different religions and philosophies made up of lots of people each who disagree with each other and fight over stuff all the time, you’ll be billions of different religions and philosophies consisting of one member each, who can agree with each other and cooperate, while maintaining your individuality.
If all goes well, by the time I’m done saying what I have to say I will have rendered myself superfluous to writing the continuing story of the world. But that’s going to take at least one more volume after this one…