A Story of Stories

A story, for our purposes, is the complete array of a human’s beliefs—their beliefs around values and morality, their beliefs about their environment and the broader world they live in, their beliefs about what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, their beliefs about the meaning of life and death.

The Story Virus

At some point between 150-person ancient tribes and New York City, human evolution jumped off of the “survival of the fittest biology” snail and onto the “survival of the fittest stories” rocket.

But gluing together is a behavior. And human behavior lives in a magic laboratory of variety.Could that additional flexibility find a way to create a human beehive?

Let’s return to the world of ancient human giants. As we discussed, the glue of raw tribalism is only so strong, which imposed a ceiling on tribe size for a long time.

This is the power of human beliefs. Not only do they produce an endless array of behavioral varieties—a million little evolutionary experiments—they allow for the complete behavioral mutation of any one of them within a single generation. Sometimes within a single day.

Couple that with the complexity, flexibility, and revisability of human value systems and moral codes—and you have a species whose behavioral output is the product of multiple axes of wild variability.

Now consider ten human tribes, living, like the ten wolf packs, in a common natural environment. The human capability for delusion means that those ten tribes could vary widely in their perceptions of reality, and thus behave entirely different from one another.

In a lot of ways, human history is just a bigger version of this story. The same toolkit the Johnsons had access to in changing Lulu’s behavior has turned out to be a breathtaking evolutionary innovation.