If we wish to make sense of recent political events in America, there’s no better analogy than looking at the microbiology of the Cambrian explosion. This may seem like an odd idea, but if you’ll give me a little leeway, I’ll explain why it’s a perfect analogy. The mechanisms of microbial evolution can help to explain the insanity of horned conspiracy Vikings, mass delusions about election fraud, cosplay insurrections, and the 25th amendment of the Constitution.
One of the most interesting scientific mysteries is the mystery of coadunation — how multicellular life sprang into being on our planet. The very first known single-celled organisms emerged over three and a half billion years ago, and it took a full three billion years of evolutionary processing to produce the very first complex forms of life. This extraordinary microbiological transition was the most pivotal moment in the history of evolution on Earth, and until recently, we had absolutely no idea how it happened. The gulf between unicellular and multicellular life seems quite vast and incomprehensible — there are massive genetic hurdles that must be overcome, in order to transition to multicellularity.
Unicellular life is simple. Like microscopic hermits, they need only be concerned with feeding themselves, and pretty much just sit there, happily filtering sea water. In contrast, multicellular organisms — from something as simple as four cells in algae to the 37 trillion cells that make a human being — somehow manage to get their constituent cells to yield their independence; take on specialized functions; curtail their own reproduction for the greater good; grow only as much as they need to fulfill their exact function; and develop the abilities to see, to move, to think.
So what does research in paleobiology tell us?
The answer to understanding multicellularity lies in understanding that cooperation is advantageous. Simply put, cells benefit more by working together than they would by trying to make it on their own. This is what powered the transition from unicellular life — which is essentially “looking out for number one” — to multicellular life, in which cells agree to look out for each other.
For example, multicellularity brings mobility for seeking more nutrient rich habitats, eluding predators, and chasing down prey. Plants can probe deeper into the soil for water and nutrients; they can also grow toward sunny spots to maximize photosynthesis. Fungi can build massive reproductive structures to spread their spores. There are lots of advantages that are possible once you go multicellular.
For this article, the point is that the paleobiology of multicellularity can be the basis for a new theory of societal coadunation for humans. Consider, for example, this experiment that showed that when certain microbes secreted useful molecules that all members of the group could benefit from, instead of sharing them in a “greedy” fashion, it provided glue for holding that organism together. We can use this bit of research to propose that the societal analogy of “useful molecules” could be money or love… but it needs to be equitably distributed to enable the survival of the multicellular organism. This addresses a key factor in governance models.
When an organism makes the leap to multicellularity, it is by developing gene regulatory capabilities that ensure its cells stop dividing at the appropriate time and function in step with their neighbors. In other words, they have to get along with other cells. Without those molecular constraints, cells will start growing out of control, become greedy and harm their neighbors, and release ancient genes that can resist drugs and treatment. What is really interesting is that the root cause of de-coadunation lies in cells behaving in a way that do not benefit all members of the group — ie, they benefit some, while harming others — these cells are also known as cancer cells.
This has lead to a radical theory of cancer: that cancer could be the process of multicellular organisms rewinding the evolutionary clock to revert into acting like unicellular life. A research group at the MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, run by David Goode, a computational cancer biologist, has found evidence to support this theory. They examined gene expression in seven types of solid tumors — including breast, stomach, and liver cancers — and traced the ancestry of the active genes they found. Goode’s team reported that genes that date all the way back to early single-celled eukaryotic organisms were activated, whereas, genes unique to many-celled animals had become dormant.
The Coadunation of Human Society
Within this idea is a powerful parallel for societal coadunation: processes that attempt to reverse evolution — ie, that devolve into less multicellular goals — could be thought of as a societal form of cancer. Everything we think of as bad for society — fascism, war, systemic racism, extreme income inequality, climate change denial, the violation of the rule of law by the ruling class — all of these societal issues can be considered to be types of societal cancer, which drive the de-coadunation at the collective level.
So how doe we promote societal coadunation? First must model biological processes of “fair and equitable secretion” to enable the growth and sustainability of the larger organism. Without these coadunating processes, a community would fall apart.
This theory could be tested effectively in eco-systems smaller than nation states. We might be able to test these theories in the design of incentive utility cryptotokens that drive decentralized business models. It might be possible to design emergent DeFi (decentralized finance) systems to mimic biological processes of “fair and equitable secretion” to enable the growth and sustainability of the larger organism.
So is coadunation communism? No. There’s a brilliant quote by Winston Churchill, “Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.” Coadunation seeks to optimize the function of the multicellular organism, and does this by both insuring equitable sharing of nutrients and other useful molecules, and rewards performance to enable the fair distribution of ever increasing wealth. Societal coadunation seeks to balance, but at the same time it must incent. Useful molecules must reward useful work. But systems that allow some cells to reap an inequitable level of benefits will clearly not optimize overall cellular function.
By the way, a humorous example of a “greedy cell” can be found at the TrumpGolfCount.com website, which tabulates a detailed ledger of how much it costs a nation of 350 million cells to let one cell play golf. According to the site, Donald Trump played 150 rounds of golf during his one and only term, costing roughly $144 million. According to Links Magazine, the average American golfer spends $3,965 a year to play golf, exclusive of equipment (fyi, more money was spent on golf than on any other sport). With roughly 20 million golfers in America, we can calculate that this one single Trump cell is sucking up more than 150,000 times its fair share of golf. This is a perfect example of a greedy cell.
The Evolution of Seeing
However, there’s an even better lesson in the Cambrian explosion for understanding societal coadunation: the evolution of sensory function. Fossil evidence suggests that paleozoic taxa had only a limited amount of sensory capacities relative to later forms, with the majority of more sophisticated types of sensing evolving during the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Before this point, organisms were either filter feeders or microbial mat grazers. Thus, it is during this period that we see the very first fossil evidence of eyes.
So why did these organisms develop sensory adaptations? It’s simple, there are two reasons: nutrient scarcity and predation. These adaptations made it possible for organisms to act as hunters or scavengers, to go to where the food is or to get away from becoming food. Arthropods took the lead in evolution of vision and domination in Cambrian communities, which supports the hypothesis that the origin and evolution of vision was a key trait that promoted diversification and formed the foundation of ecological communities in the early Cambrian ocean. Also, with sensation came nervous systems. Fossils suggest that animals evolved complex nervous systems after the advent of predation, 550 million years ago.
Again, we may ask, what does this have to do with societal coadunation? If we again draw an analogy between microbiological and societal coadunation, it become obvious that the key functionality that society must develop is the ability to see reality accurately. You can assume that some adaptations of vision during the Cambrian explosion were flawed. A sensory adaptation that sent you exactly in the opposite direction of richer nutrients, or right into the jaws of a predator, that mutation would not last very long in the Cambrian sea. Instead, the force of evolution always propels the development of more sensitive and accurate sensory function.
However, at the societal level, this ability to see or detect danger isn’t between countries or between classes. The best dangers are the ones that address all of humanity as a whole. And so, it may be that the COVID pandemic, which has killed nearly two million people, may actually be a way for humanity to develop better group sensory function, to help us collectively learn how to see reality more clearly. Just as predators forced microorganisms to develop better sensory function, and eventually awareness and memory, it may be that conspiracy theories are simple lessons meant to encourage our society to adapt methods for overcoming them, to create societal sensors that can detect emerging mind viruses, and to drive humanity to evolve and coadunate. In fact, it may be that overcoming a conspiracy theory is in itself, a mechanism that drives societal coadunation.
The R-naught of a Conspiracy Theory
And so, the evolutionary rationale of a conspiracy theory may be that it serves as a challenge for society to overcome. And in much the same way, these mind viruses have outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics. And they are addressed with early detection, interventions, and therapeutics. And the only vaccine is education. So what do these look like? The best place to learn is at UNICEF.
Several years ago, I was engaged as a strategic consultant by UNICEF’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative to help find ways to address a massive polio outbreak in the Middle East and Eastern Africa. One thing I learned was that eradication of polio was made much more difficult by the weaponization of conspiracy theories by Islamist extremists. I heard many conspiracy theories. One conspiracy theory was that the vaccine was not halal. UNICEF went to great lengths to set up a halal vaccine production facility in the Philippines, and had a number of clerics visit and bless the facility. The intervention was to show videos of trusted clerics attesting that the vaccine was halal. Another — my favorite — was one that was impossible to disprove, that “George Bush urinated in the vaccine culture”. How can you possibly disprove something like this?
But the most pernicious conspiracy theory was that the polio vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize children — this was intentionally weaponized by a group of Nigerian religious leaders. However, when they later tried to repudiate their own statements to restart the vaccination programs, in order to save their own children, they couldn’t. The true believers simply assumed that these leaders were corrupted by the West. Something similar is happening in the West. The conspiracy theories fostered by Donald Trump to control his most hardened followers will likely fail to be controllable, if Trump ever tries to repudiate them. Again, a conspiracy theory is essentially a virus of the mind, and use psychosocial triggers that act like the coronavirus’ spike protein that attaches to an ACE2 receptor on a cell surface. They spread virally, and there is no two drop vaccine for a conspiracy theory.
When my team interviewed people the slums of Rawalpindi, and in train stations in small Pakistani towns — with a police escort — we heard many of these conspiracy theories, cataloging them like a rare species. These conspiracy theories are similar to the rumor that opals are unlucky or that a girl in high school was sexually liberal — virtually impossible to stop. For the polio eradication project, these rumors presented “perceptional challenges” that could only be addressed through an intensive advocacy strategy.
What do I mean by intensive advocacy? Let me explain with a story. When I interviewed a grandmother shepherding her grandchildren through a bustling train station in central Pakistan, I asked her about whether her grandchildren had received the vaccine, and when she said no, I told her I wouldn’t harangue her, and pleaded to understand her thinking process. She was happy to have someone listen to her burdens, and explained to me that her husband — the patriarch of the family — was swayed by radicalized clerics, and demanded that all the children refuse the vaccine. But at the same time, her son was a doctor in Karachi, and begged her to have all the grandchildren quietly inoculated anyway. She explained that she was in a difficult situation. On one hand, her husband was clearly too angry at the West to think rationally, but she couldn’t defy her husband. On the other hand, her son was a doctor and she knew he could be trusted to have the family’s best interest at heart.
“So what did you do?” I asked? She answered blithely, “I let half my children get the vaccine.” Wow, a decision worthy of Solomon! I did have to respect her ingenuity in threading the needle.
What I realized from this ethnographic interview was that the deciding factor wasn’t the billion dollars UNICEF was spending on advertising. The difference was her son. Her son advocated the use of the vaccine, and she trusted her son. You can’t advertise or market a conspiracy theory away. Passing laws and fining people who spread conspiracy theories won’t work either. No AI chatbot can ever open a closed mind. So what will work?
I believe that what is required is an intensive global advocacy program, powered by tens of thousands of trained advocates ideally with medical training, to counter the weaponization of anti-vax conspiracy theory. This army of advocates would first address COVID conspiracy theories, but you know, they could eventually be tapped to address other critical challenges facing humanity, like racism, ignorance, war, poverty, and climate change.
And just in case you’re in the “big pharma isn’t telling the full story about vaccines” camp, let state this as clearly as I can. Vaccines work. It is impossible to know exactly how many people would have died of smallpox if scientists had not developed that vaccine. Reasonable estimates are in the range of around 5 million lives per year, which implies that between 1980 and 2018 around 150 to 200 million lives have been saved. Compare this to the estimated probability of death directly caused by vaccines…. it’s 1 in a billion.
So you may ask, if the new mRNA vaccines are more risky because they haven’t been tested… why not wait? The answer is because if too many vaccine hesitant people wait, viral variants will take hold and potentially “escape” the vaccines, multiplying the global death rate. This is like the prisoners dilemma in game theory: if anyone acts in self-interest everyone loses, but if everyone complies, everyone wins. Since we don’t want to force vaccination, what the powers that be need to do is admit that it’s more risky… and promote the idea that early vaccination is an act of courage and service to humanity. Finally, think about the estimated probability of death caused by COVID…. in the United States, it’s roughly 1 in a thousand.
If you want to build a better world… roll up your sleeve.
Therefore, what we need is early detection, interventions, and therapeutics — but not just for COVID, we need them to address vaccine resistance. We need to be cognizant of how conspiracy theories spread and germinate. We need to apply interventions. And for therapeutics, advocates need to be armed with debunking content that is emotionally ecovative. This is known as “prebunking”.
What has happened is that the R0 of conspiracy theories has grown dramatically over the last ten years, and three factors drive the infectivity of propaganda: (1) the reach of spreader, which has increased exponentially due to social networking, (2) the psychosocial triggers that the rumor leverages that are embedded in psychometric techniques[1] such as the OCEAN model[2], and (3) accessing deep primal emotions that extremism requires for bonding and control.
Challenges are Really Opportunities
If we hope for this multicellular organism called humanity to survive, there is something each and everyone of us must do… we must all strive to see reality together. A multicellular organism can survive if a small percentage of its cells refuse to cooperate. But if 20% of them refuse to see reality, the organism will fall apart like an eukaryotic slime mold disintegrating.
Therefore, one mammoth goal for humanity should be to create solutions for enabling what I call “trust-instrinsic community perception”. For example, research in how people are radicalized via conspiracy theories has shown that in 80% of time, it’s because Facebook recommended these extremist views to them. Facebooks algorithms are tuned to make them money, so they are relatively easy to leverage. Just ask Cambridge Analytica how easy. Fixing Facebook would be an intervention, but by no means the only one. We need to establish verifiable news that weight credibility reputations. We need to remove social graph limitations for trusted and trained advocates, in the first case, for vaccine promotion. Make it easier to get a million followers if you’ve committed to say things that aren’t lies.
This is not an easy thing to develop and will require a “Manhattan project” of computer and social scientists, epidemiologists, celebrities, governmental stakeholders, and lots of venture capital. This is vital for America to consider, because according to a recent survey, one in three Republicans (33%) say they believe the QAnon theory about a conspiracy among deep-state elites is “mostly true,” and another 23% say “some parts” are true. These outlandish theories claim that Trump is secretly defending the planet from a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are running a secret child sex-trafficking ring. The FBI has identified QAnon conspiracy theorists as “extremists” who pose a potential domestic terror threat. Trump has consistently declined to denounce QAnon, and unless treated, threatens the stability of the country.
The Greatest Challenges are Still Ahead
The Trump era has taught us that, as a society, we need to learn how to choose a leader who will seek help the country unify in both vision and action. If an early multicellular organism consistently moved toward danger and away from more plentiful nutrients, that organism would fail. Countries don’t have time for natural selection, they need to develop faster approaches to more accurately perceive and deal with danger, whether from without or within.
The next great public health challenge for humanity is Disease X. According to virologists, there are anywhere between 631,000 and 827,000 viruses that have the ability to infect people. Scientists currently know of only 263 viruses that can infect people, which means that we know almost nothing about 99.96 percent of potential pandemic threats — because there are roughly 1.67 million unknown viruses out there. There is definitely another pandemic coming — which the WHO has called Disease X — that will make COVID look like a picnic. Instead of 2 million dead, it’ll be more like 20 or 200 million.
After this, humanity faces anthropogenic global warming. Climate change has already begun to kill. It is proposed that the carbon budget for 2°C anthropogenic global warming (roughly 1012 tonnes carbon) will indirectly cause roughly one billion premature deaths, spread over a century or two. Because this is slow moving, humanity has acted like frogs in slowly heating water.
Therefore, it is vital that we all look back at 2020 with 20/20 vision, and learn from what we did wrong. And we did plenty wrong! And then we need expeditiously work together to invent our future. Like unicellular organisms crossing the threshold to multicellularity, we need to find more sophisticated and effective ways to coordinate our activities. And this begins with the simple yet difficult act for a community to learn how to see reality together.
There’s a professor at the University of Maryland, Dr. Arie Kruglanski[3], who runs the Motivated Cognition Laboratory at the Department of Psychology, that studies violent extremism, political radicalization, and closed-mindedness. He serves as a co-principal investigator at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, and has conducted extensive research on the psychology and motivations of terrorists. His theory is that one factor that drives radicalization is what he calls “the quest for significance” — the human need for dignity, respect, and purpose. He and his students studied captive Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after the defeat of that south Asian terror group, finding that de-radicalization is possible with a systematic process involving the three N’s, “The Need, the Narrative and the Network.”[4]
Kruglanski believes that just as persons can be radicalized they can be deradicalized. The three N’s are the key. The Need part expresses the fact that our beliefs are based on our motives. We do not necessarily see what is out there. Often we see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. The need to hold radical attitudes is typically based on the need to feel significant, that one matters, that one is deserving of respect. The deradicalization Narrative has to acknowledge that need and provide a non-violent means to address it.
Deradicalization programs in Muslim countries need to provide more than just theological arguments against violence. Elaborate programs in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Iraq address the need for significance by providing those seeking to deradicalize with vocational education — and in some cases wives! — to provide an alternative means to personal significance instead of via violent extremism. These programs have opened extremists’ minds to the message that the “sacred values” of Islam are actually desecrated by terrorism.
The final change agent is the Network in which the radicalized are embedded. Radicalization occurs in a social context; it is shaped by the group dynamics of social interaction, the impact of family and friends and the charisma of influential leaders. And so, deradicalization cannot take place in a social vacuum or in solitary confinement. It depends on their insertion into social milieus that promote moderation.
Deradicalization and overcoming conspiracy theories are quintessential challenges for the Internet age. We must therefore find new models, processes, technologies and governance to actively promote the ability to see reality more clearly together. This is because SARS-CoV-2 is only a practice drill for greater emerging disasters.
References
[1] Psychometric profiling is the process by which your actions are used to infer your personality. The technique was developed by academics and used by advertisers and political strategists to assess psychological characteristics that provide insights into users’ beliefs, behaviors and motivations. Psychometrically-targeted advertisements have the potential to be deeply persuasive.
[2] The most common model used for psychometric profiling is the OCEAN model, also called the “Big Five” or the “Five Factor Model,” named for the five main personality traits it measures: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The OCEAN model claims to reveal “the basic structure underlying the variations in human behaviour and preferences.”