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

Humans rally around ideas because they solve some of our problems, because they offer the biological blessings of the illusion of control, and because they are the threads that hold us together in the vast network of a superorganismic mind, weaving scattered individuals into a cooperative entity of awesome power and size.

The new king of the castle goes through a biological transformation simply because he’s moved up on the hierarchical ladder. For a monkey’s physiology, position in the pecking order is everything.

We humans, alas, are built with the same pusillanimous circuitry. When we are battered by forces beyond our control, we look around for someone smaller to punch.

Then, in 1962, the Scottish ecologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a careful observer of his country’s native red grouse, concluded that these birds sometimes sacrificed their reproductive privileges to keep their flock from starvation. The grouse, Wynne-Edwards contended, gauged the amount of food the moors could provide each year and adjusted their behav

They forgot that the real danger often comes from a people everyone has totally dismissed. So the great Persian leader Darius didn’t bother with the scarcely civilized yokels who squabbled interminably on a bunch of islands and rocky coasts to the west and who called themselves the Greeks.

Then, three years after Goodall’s book was printed, a series of incidents occurred that horrified her. The tribe of chimps Goodall had been watching became quite large. Food was harder to find. Quarrels broke out. To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two separate tribes. One band stayed in the old home territory. The other left to c

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

Among humans, groups have all too often been the prime movers. It is their competition that has driven us on the inexorable track toward higher degrees of order. This is one key to the Lucifer Principle.

If you occasionally feel that you are of several minds on one subject, you are probably right. In reality, you have several brains. And those brains don’t always agree.