The Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior:
I talked about this enough in the last book that I don’t need to remind you about it. There are just a few things I need to clarify.
I started with the five fundamental units of evolutionary psychology, which Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had shown to be the source of all human thought, as far as religion was concerned. I tried to figure out if those fundamental units could be the source of all human thought as far as everything was concerned. But how could I measure the interaction of components of thoughts?
That wasn’t hard. I could cross-reference thought with human behavior. So who had discovered an all-encompassing pattern of human behavior?
There were two I’d heard of. One was the Five Human Motivators, which I’d learned in my small business management class when I was getting my Building Construction degree. I had been working on a scene in a futuristic novel where the heroine was telling a couple of the heroes how advertizers were predicting human behavior and turning everyone into mindless consumer robots. I knew those five backwards and forwards. The other cross-reference I thought of was the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs, which I had learned all about in my Flight Instructor training, which I’d just finished two months before.
How could I be sure that the Five Human Motivators and Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs were all encompassing? That was easy. Advertizing and education both depend on getting and holding people’s attention. Consider the means, motive, and opportunity that advertizers have had to find ways of getting and holding people’s attention, and what was the likelihood that they’d overlooked anything?
By establishing the origins of people’s thoughts and the entire range of behavior it produced, I found I could replicate the entire range of human emotion that would motivate the behavior.
The next question was, what, apart from the genetic origins of human thought, would affect emotions and resulting behavior?
I had taught myself to write novels by reading lots of books and working in theatre. A simple and all-encompassing list of outside factors that affect human behavior was easy too: abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background. Every author must know that.
This gave me 18 points of reference: instincts for survival and reproduction, abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate, motivations for survival, safety, reproduction, social, self-gratification, self-actualization, and self-fulfillment, the additional motivation for fulfillment of self-fulfillment that I added, and the outside factors of abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background.
These 18 points, and various combinations of them, are recurring themes in religion, philosophy, literature, and any other large bodies of work that examine human behavior.
As this relates to science, obviously all of these would be critical to human evolution. As Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had already demonstrated, once you can establish that, it isn’t necessary to identify the parts of the brain evolutionary components of thought originate from. If those components of thought were critical to evolution, the fact that humans did evolve living among those factors is proof that something, somewhere in our brains works in whatever way it needs to work to make us think about those things.
In the last book I compared these recurring themes among studies of human behavior to algebraic equations with multiple variables. To solve all those equations, I just had to invent my own system of theoretical mathematics. That analogy served its purpose, because pretty much everyone who has been to high school has at least heard of algebra, equations, and variables.
What I was really thinking of was a part of Neal Stevenson’s book Cryptonomicon. One of the characters is a mathematical genius who works on breaking enemy codes during World War II. Early in the book Mr. Stevenson talks about the character’s mathematical ability as it relates to code breaking by saying that if a person was to walk though a large city with irregular-sized city blocks, and someone was to keep track of how long the person spent walking on sidewalks, how much time they spent crossing streets, and when they switched from walking on a sidewalk to walking on a street and back, you would get an irregular pattern. If you kept records like that for thousands of people who walked through the city at random, you would get a whole bunch of patterns. Most people would look at all those thousands of patterns, shrug their shoulders, and forget about them. But the hero of this story would immediately see that some of the patterns overlapped with each other in some places. Then he would spread the patterns out all over the room and stay up all night staring at them and sketching his own patterns on paper. Then in the morning he would hand you a street map of London.
I’d just done the same thing, in a different context.
Scientists and mathematicians had already found a way to deal with multiple irregular patterns and find consistent regular patterns among them, and then break them down to figure out how the interaction of simple systems created the complex patterns. It’s called chaos theory, or alternately, systems theory. I can’t honestly say that I invented systems theory independently, because I learned about it indirectly from a few different places. In flight school I learned how all of weather was caused by the transfer of heat through the atmosphere, and how the sun shining on the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, geography, the freezing and thawing of water, and a few other minor things, all made energy move through the atmosphere in ways that interacted with each other. Then Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili had just shown how two instincts and three mental abilities interacted with each other to create all of religion, and Dr. Diamond showed how the interaction of geological factors interacted with universal characteristics of our species to create the history of agricultural civilization.
In effect, in both books these scientists factored individuality and free will out of human behavior altogether. Dr. Newberg and Dr. D’Aquili showed how all of religion was a product of an interaction of five fundamental thought patterns of human brains, which the people attached to those brains act differently upon depending on their living conditions. Dr. Diamond showed how universal human motivations can be factored out of the differences among cultures that shaped world history, and in retrospect we can see that the agricultural history of the world was the product of differences in geography, over which effectively identical members of a species were spread.
Scientists and mathematicians have developed a system of codes for drawing systems diagrams, in the same basic way that computer programmers invent programming languages and musicians use musical notation. There is no way a person could draw a traditional systems diagram for all of human behavior, to show a universal pattern of what interacts with what and how in every situation. But theatre artists have figured out their own ways to draw systems diagrams of human behavior. Every play or movie you’ve ever seen is a systems diagram of human behavior. The artists don’t draw it on paper; they draw it in your mind. They show you what interacts with what. You could draw a traditional systems diagram for any scene in a play or movie, and every entry in the diagram would be one of these 18 factors.
So even though I can’t say I invented systems theory completely independently, at least I can say that I seem to be the first to have thought of applying systems theory to religion, philosophy, and literature all at the same time to derive a collective definition of the essence of human existence.
The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is so obvious that I print it on the front cover of all my books. The Ultimate Question was the hard part.