Excerpt

I describe historical patterns that I believe would emerge in any system characterized by living things competing for locally scarce resources. I then consider the search for patterns and their explanation in the context of an intellectual climate dominated by anti-adaptationist rhetoric and doubts about the validity of scientific approaches to history. Notwithstanding this hostile environment, I present a summary of the economic principles that in my view not only account for historical patterns but also serve to predict future trends and postdict past ones not yet known. A positive feedback between consumers and resources—a historical conspiracy of sorts—implies the existence of inherent directions in the history of living things, including humans. 

Introduction

Alfred Fischer’s baritone filled the room when he lectured. I sat transfixed as he painted mental pictures of continents splitting and colliding, the world coming alive with animals at the dawn of the Cambrian period, and relatives of ancient squid swimming about with their long, clumsy, gas-filled shells in an Ordovician sea. He described massive bouts of extinction, subsiding coastal basins in California filling with sediments and leaving a record of stability and change as chronicled by tiny planktonic foraminifers, and the structure of ancient Paleozoic reefs. Here was history writ large, a grand story of life back to its beginnings as revealed by the geological record. Strange animals and plants from far-away places and remote times witnessed events of unimaginable scale. The narratives Fischer so evocatively brought to life were every bit as gripping as the more familiar accounts of human history. 

But unlike the written record of human events as interpreted by traditional historians, the chronology that Fischer sought to reconstruct was founded on science. Meticulous observations on ancient rocks and fossils were supplemented with insights from experimental and comparative biology to establish not only a temporal framework of life’s evolution, but also with hypotheses of the conditions under which ancient forms of life existed. The love of seashells I had had since childhood was rapidly expanding into a love of historical science during my time at Princeton, where Fischer and others helped shape my scientific orientation. I wanted not only to describe the phenomenology of present and past life, but also to look for and to explain patterns. Without ignoring the welter of fascinating descriptive details of living and ancient nature, I sought basic principles; I wanted to become a Bigstoryan. 

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