The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

For a brilliant evocation of this aspect of life, see “Shedding Life: On the Mysteries of Dying, Cell by Cell,” by Czechoslovakian research immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub, Science 86, April 1986, 51–53. See also Wicken, “Thermodynamics, Evolution and Emergence,” in Weber, Depew, and J. D. Smith, Entropy, Information, and Evolution, 166.

Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism. We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die. There’s more. Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom been demonstrated to hurt us, but we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control. And without s

Stress is not a product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary.

Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order—these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle.

The Japanese know what we have forgotten: that work and challenge are the keys to a vigorous life.

The sculptor at the end of his day simply sweeps away the heaps of useless dust and shards of stone. So does Nature. But those discarded scraps from the natural workshop are the bodies of creatures who moments before were alive, creatures like you and me. Nature creates by placing her inventions in competition with each other. In the world of human

For the athlete under high stimulation, there is more time. His world is richer, and far more data is processed by his brain. One difference between a society on the rise and a society in decline may be that the rising society is on the fast clock. It sees each impediment as a challenge, absorbs information quickly, and finds new ways to overcome i

The brutal fact is that the more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be. That holds true in our lives as individuals, and it holds even more true in our life as a nation.

The nation slipping downward averts its eyes, but the country on the rise is often vigorously alert, looking for the tiniest opportunity to lunge toward the top. Instead of turning their backs and hoping for peace, superorganisms on the move often manufacture confrontations.

Once Bismarck was confident that his military buildup was complete, he did not flinch from confrontation. Far from it. He sought it out.