Human Ideas That Changed Everything

Our progress is a punctuated equilibrium that makes quantum leaps on rare occasion

In recently reading Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, I was struck by how often human progress (in this case, our understanding of gravity) is mostly long periods of stasis (i.e. no progress) punctuated by sudden quantum leaps (pun intended):

• Anaximander (~570 BCE): The world can be explained by natural causes instead of myth. The author, Rovelli, treats Anaximander as the start of science.

• Democritus (~400 BCE): Matter as discrete particles (“atomism”).

• Aristotle (~350 BCE): The four elements (earth, wind, fire, water) each have a “natural place” toward which they return. Not a correct theory, but one that dominated Western thinking for over a millennium.

• Copernicus (1543): The Sun, not Earth, is at the center of our then-comprehensible universe.

• Galileo (1632):

  • Things fall at the same speed (absent air resistance)

  • “Relativity of motion”: there’s no experiment which could tell you whether you’re moving or still within a smoothly-moving closed system. This, coming nearly 90 years after Copernicus, finally answered one objection of heliocentrism: why don’t things fly all over the place if we’re circling the Sun?

• Newton (1687):

  • Everything attracts everything else with calculable force (i.e. “universal gravitation”).

  • Things exist in an absolute space & time. Even if the world had only one object in it, you could state “where” that object is.

• Faraday and Maxwell (1800’s): “Fields” like electromagnetism govern forces and give structure even to “empty” space.

• Einstein (early 1900’s):

  • Special relativity makes absolute simultaneity nonsensical. Light is quantized as “photons.” There is no absolute space & time.

  • General relativity posits that gravity is not a force but a distortion in space and time.

What strikes me isn’t just how fundamentally mind-shifting each of these advances are, but that they’re separated so widely in time. Look at those gaps! What was happening all those years?

Humanity Beyond Physics

As important and life-changing as the above ideas are, physics is just a small slice of the total space of ideas impacting humanity. If we take a much broader view of key advancements in human thought, the picture is even more dramatic.

With a nod to books like Sapiens, here are some of the ideas that have fundamentally changed the arc of humanity:

• Fire (~400,000 years ago). Warmth is just one aspect. The other is the “cooking hypothesis”: the idea that fire not only eliminates pathogens, but also changes starches and proteins to make caloric absorption much more efficient. It’s unclear whether our brains would have ever developed their modern capabilities without this.

• Agriculture (~10,000 years ago). Towns and cities are impossible without agriculture because we otherwise could not control the proximity of food. Most subsequent major intellectual advancements required the density of cities in order for ideas to intermix sufficiently.

• Writing (~3200 BCE). We’re the only species capable of conveying complex knowledge across generations, allowing humanity to reach heights no single human could. Writing is superior to oral communication because it transports information error-free and survives even the death of all who knew its knowledge (as we’ve seen many times with ancient texts rediscovered by other civilizations hundreds of years later).

• Democracy (~500 BCE in Athens/Rome/India, then dead over 1000 years until it was retried in Europe). The unlock of human rights, self-governance, peaceful transition of power, and resistance to idea lock-in under authoritarian governments made many subsequent human advancements possible.

• Free speech (~400 BCE with Greek parrhesia, “frank speech”). Though sometimes linked with ideas around democracy, free speech as a concept isn’t constrained to a form of government. Free speech is a prerequisite for structural change to improve governance and science. Restrictions here have suppressed many intellectual advancements which humanity could arguably have made sooner.

• Free markets (1776). Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations might be an agreed starting point of systematic free market thinking, but various forms of free trade have existed all the way back to prehistoric bartering. It’s become trendy in some American circles to question capitalism, but there’s no doubt that price signals without central direction have unlocked tremendous social benefit in recent centuries.

• Corporate legal personhood (1500’s). Even the Romans had universitas, the idea of legal entities distinct from their members. But I’m specifically interested in the idea of corporations being able to fail without bankrupting their owners. This sparked ventures like the Dutch East India Company: for the first time in history, people could attempt brave products and endeavors without fearing personal bankruptcy. The import of this on human flourishing is grossly underestimated.

• The Enlightenment (1700’s). These ideas didn’t all debut only during this period, but gathering them together under one moniker further emphasizes the heavily-quantized nature of human advancement:

  • Reason. Not authority, tradition, or religion.

  • Empiricism. Things should be measured and testable.

  • Universalism and natural rights. People deserve things beyond whatever their current government happens to give them. These things are shared across all humanity.

I’ll here make a few observations:

1. Each of these ideas probably seems natural and obvious to you… but all of them, other than fire, are new — brand new — in the long-arc history of humanity.

2. Remember that at some point in the past, every one of these ideas was considered not only novel, but something which had never been thought of before. Ideas go from never-having-existed to permanently-world-changing.

3. See, again, how far these advancements are separated from each other. Ideas don’t require a minimum bake time before subsequent ideas can be had. The gaps of hundreds (or thousands) of years between these ideas implies people were stuck with the same notions all those centuries whilst knowing full well all the ideas prerequisite to the next innovation. Those ideas just didn’t occur to them.

4. And I’ve not even covered domains like philosophy — which impacts human thought itself — or medicine, which alone has also revolutionized the human experience. You’ll find the theme is the same in those domains: a few key ideas punctuate hundreds of otherwise eventless generations.

You (Or, “The Individual”)

Every human being experiences the same types of quantum leaps in the lifelong development of their own mindset. Common changes include:

• Object permanence (4-8 months). What? That box doesn’t cease to exist when it goes behind the curtain?

• Self-recognition via mirror test (15-24 months). Hey, that’s me! Not just some random, amazingly cute baby.

• Theory of mind (3-5 years). I bet she wouldn’t know I ate her candy when she left the room.

• Death is permanent (4-6 years). Spot’s never coming back, even if I bury him in a pet sematary? (sic)

• Personal & parental mortality (5-9 years). You’re telling me my parents won’t be here forever? I’ll one day die too?

• Moral reasoning shift (7-10 years). What’s right and wrong might not be fixed, but instead dependent on social and personal context.

• Risk estimation maturation (20+ years). Maybe my homemade bungee cord isn’t the best idea.

• Religious & philosophical shifts (anytime after childhood, if at all). I’m not sure Xenu, the galactic ruler who killed billions of people near volcanoes with hydrogen bombs, is a real thing.

Many of these shifts can only happen once the brain has developed certain capabilities, but there are a host of other life-changing ideas people only discover decades into adulthood which, in theory, can be discovered earlier. The point is that our own lives, much like human history, might mostly consist long periods of stasis punctuated by rare, revolutionary epiphanies which we were never, after all, blocked from experiencing earlier.

The question is how to spark these quantum leaps, to deliberately advance ourselves and our societies as soon as we possess the requisite insights instead of decades (or even millennia) later.

Frustratingly, good ideas don’t just arrive and stay forever. The British first discovered the cure for scurvy in 1617 (via ship’s surgeon John Woodall), then promptly forgot the cure for 130 years before James Lind of the Royal Navy rediscovered it in 1747. Shockingly, the Brits forgot it again in the transition to West Indian limes (1860’s) only to re-rediscover scurvy’s cure 70 years later in the form of vitamin C.

And this, at last, is why I wrote this article — not just to ask how we can surface these insights sooner in our societies and our selves, but also to remind us of some key ideas which have fundamentally improved the human condition.

The good news, if you look back at these lists, is that it only takes a handful of ideas to completely change how we and our societies work. Across Warren Buffett’s 60+ years of investing, he says Berkshire Hathaway’s phenomenal success has “been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years.”

It’s not about having a ton of ideas. It’s about having:

• … the highest impact ideas

• … sooner

• … and keeping from regressing back to the way things were.

Godspeed!