Our Eight Great Contests

Humanity has seen four great eras so far: animal, forager, farmer, and industry. And each era had two key levels of evolutionary competition: individual and group. This makes for eight great contests that have shaped our world.During the ~500Myr year era of animals, max brains doubled roughly in ~40Myr, which was also roughly the typical cycle period of biodiversity and mass extinctions. Most animals lived in families of ~6, and had two key contests: competition between organisms specified by DNA, and competition between species of organisms, re DNA-specified features of organisms that couldn’t vary easily within species. Turns out, between species competition actually mattered more than within species competition.~1Myr ago, DNA then evolved humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, which has allowed us to evolve far faster than other animals. Humans then doubled in ~250Kyr, in the context of ~100Kyr ice age cycles. Slowly DNA was tamed to allow most behavior to be controlled by…