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Evolution never bets on one horse. When the environment shifts, a population survives not because every member is optimally adapted, but because its members are different enough that some will make it through whatever comes next. Evolutionary biology calls this bet-hedging — a strategy observed across bacteria, plants, insects, and vertebrates. Diversity is not a byproduct of evolution. It is a strategy.
This reframes individuality. We experience autonomy as something personal. And it is. But from the perspective of the species, individuality is a statistical protection. My failure does not guarantee yours. The species survives because its members are not identical. Diversity is our collective immune system.
Here is where it gets interesting. As a species increases its capabilities, it controls more energy and reshapes its environment more powerfully — creating new possibilities and new risks. A more complex environment means more dimensions along which selection can act, more ways to fail, more ways to succeed. If diversity is what keeps a population resilient against unpredictable selection, then a more capable species needs more diversity to maintain the same level of resilience.
Any society which cannot accommodate its ever increasing diversity will go down. Not because diversity is the problem. Because diversity is the solution, and refusing it means facing the future without your immune system.
Further reading:
Cohen, Dan. “Optimizing Reproduction in a Randomly Varying Environment.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 12, no. 1 (1966): 119–129. — The foundational paper on bet-hedging theory in evolutionary biology.
When the evolutionary origin of autonomy is that natural selection never gets the whole species, then autonomy alone cannot do the job. It cannot be known in advance what we will be selected for. For this reason evolution would drive the genome of a species towards a suitable level of diversity. What diversity does is create the spread — so that the likelihood of a selection event eliminating all of us is minimised — while staying coherent enough that we can play on the advantage of fulfilling our needs together.
Evolutionary biology calls this bet-hedging: a risk-spreading strategy in which populations diversify their traits, accepting lower average fitness in stable times in exchange for survival when conditions shift. It has been observed across bacteria, plants, insects, and vertebrates. It may be one of the earliest evolutionary solutions to life in fluctuating environments. Diversity is not a byproduct of evolution. It is a strategy.
This reframes individuality. We tend to experience autonomy as something personal — my freedom, my boundaries, my survival. And it is. But from the perspective of the species, individuality is a statistical protection. My death does not cause your death. My failure does not guarantee yours. The species survives because its members are not identical. Diversity is our collective immune system.
Here is what makes me wonder. As a species increases its capabilities, it controls the flow of more and more energy. Alfred Lotka observed in 1922 that natural selection tends to maximise the energy flux through a system — organisms and populations that capture and use more energy than their competitors gain a selective advantage. This means that as a species advances, it does not merely occupy its environment more effectively. It reshapes its environment more powerfully, creating new possibilities and new risks in the process.
A species that controls more energy operates in a more complex environment — one with more dimensions along which selection can act. More niches open. More ways to fail emerge. More ways to succeed become available. If diversity is the strategy that keeps a species resilient against unpredictable selection, then a more capable species — one flowing more energy through more complex systems — would need more diversity to maintain the same level of resilience.
The relationship is unlikely to be linear. A population that doubles its energy throughput does not need double the diversity. But the direction seems clear: as capability increases, the required diversity increases with it. Joseph Tainter’s work on the collapse of complex societies points to a related dynamic from the other direction — societies invest in complexity to solve problems, and those investments eventually reach diminishing marginal returns. When the cost of maintaining complexity exceeds the benefit, collapse follows. Diversity is a component of that complexity. Accommodating diverse perspectives, lifestyles, and strategies requires institutional infrastructure, coordination mechanisms, and trust — all of which have energy costs.
This suggests a pattern. Advancing societies do not merely happen to become more diverse. They must become more diverse, because the selection pressures they face grow with their capabilities. And they face a tension: the very diversity that protects them also increases the complexity they must manage. A society that cannot accommodate its increasing diversity will eventually face selection pressures it cannot survive — not because diversity caused the collapse, but because the refusal to accommodate it left the society brittle in exactly the dimensions where flexibility was needed.
The homework, then, is not to tolerate diversity as a concession. It is to build the infrastructure that makes diversity coherent — that allows a population of deeply different individuals to coordinate without collapsing into sameness and without fragmenting into isolation. This is what empathic communication does. It does not ask us to agree. It asks us to understand what the other actually needs. That is a much lower bar — and a much more stable foundation.
Any society which cannot accommodate its ever increasing diversity will go down. Not because diversity is the problem. Because diversity is the solution, and refusing it means facing the future without your immune system.
Further reading:
Cohen, Dan. “Optimizing Reproduction in a Randomly Varying Environment.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 12, no. 1 (1966): 119–129. — The foundational paper on bet-hedging theory in evolutionary biology.
Lotka, Alfred J. “Natural Selection as a Physical Principle.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 8, no. 6 (1922): 151–154. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.8.6.151 — Proposes that natural selection tends to maximise the total energy flux through a system, linking evolutionary fitness to thermodynamic principles.
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. — Argues that societies collapse when investments in complexity reach diminishing marginal returns.
When the evolutionary origin of autonomy is that natural selection never gets the whole species, then autonomy alone cannot do the job. It cannot be known in advance what we will be selected for. For this reason evolution would drive the genome of a species towards a suitable level of diversity. What diversity does is create the spread — so that the likelihood of a selection event eliminating all of us is minimised — while staying coherent enough that we can play on the advantage of fulfilling our needs together.
Evolutionary biology calls this bet-hedging: a risk-spreading strategy in which populations diversify their traits, accepting lower average fitness in stable times in exchange for survival when conditions shift. It has been observed across bacteria, plants, insects, and vertebrates. It may be one of the earliest evolutionary solutions to life in fluctuating environments. Diversity is not a byproduct of evolution. It is a strategy.
The logic runs deep enough that it shaped the architecture of reproduction itself. Sexual reproduction is expensive — it requires finding mates, it halves the genetic contribution of each parent, and an asexual female can theoretically produce twice as many daughters. Yet sexual reproduction dominates complex life. The Red Queen hypothesis offers one explanation: in a world of co-evolving parasites, producing genetically unique offspring is the only way to stay ahead. Organisms that shuffle their genes create a moving target. Populations that don’t get locked into patterns their parasites can exploit. Sex is, in essence, diversity as survival infrastructure — a mechanism so fundamental that evolution will pay a steep cost to maintain it.
This reframes individuality. We tend to experience autonomy as something personal — my freedom, my boundaries, my survival. And it is. But from the perspective of the species, individuality is a statistical protection. My death does not cause your death. My failure does not guarantee yours. The species survives because its members are not identical. Diversity is our collective immune system.
Ecology formalised this intuition. Yachi and Loreau’s insurance hypothesis demonstrates mathematically that biodiversity insures ecosystems against declines in functioning — more species provide greater guarantees that some will maintain productivity when others fail. The mechanism is straightforward: in a fluctuating environment, different species respond differently to the same disturbance. When some decline, others compensate. The result is both a buffering effect — reduced variance in ecosystem performance — and a performance-enhancing effect — higher average productivity over time. The same logic that makes a diversified financial portfolio more resilient than a single stock makes a diverse ecosystem more resilient than a monoculture. And what holds for ecosystems holds, structurally, for societies.
Here is what makes me wonder. As a species increases its capabilities, it controls the flow of more and more energy. Alfred Lotka observed in 1922 that natural selection tends to maximise the energy flux through a system — organisms and populations that capture and use more energy than their competitors gain a selective advantage. Ludwig Boltzmann had already framed it as a struggle among organisms for available energy. Howard Odum later extended this into the maximum power principle and applied it across biological and economic systems. The implication is directional: as a species advances, it does not merely occupy its environment more effectively. It reshapes its environment more powerfully, creating new possibilities and new risks in the process.
A species that controls more energy operates in a more complex environment — one with more dimensions along which selection can act. More niches open. More ways to fail emerge. More ways to succeed become available. The environment becomes less like a landscape with a few peaks and valleys and more like a high-dimensional space where threats and opportunities multiply in directions that could not have been anticipated. If diversity is the strategy that keeps a species resilient against unpredictable selection, then a more capable species — one flowing more energy through more complex systems — would need more diversity to maintain the same level of resilience.
The relationship is unlikely to be linear. A population that doubles its energy throughput does not need double the diversity. But the direction seems clear: as capability increases, the required diversity increases with it. And here is where the biological argument meets the historical one.
Joseph Tainter’s work on the collapse of complex societies provides the view from the other direction. Societies invest in complexity to solve problems — more specialised roles, more institutional layers, more coordination mechanisms. These investments initially yield high returns, but over time the marginal returns diminish. When the cost of maintaining complexity exceeds its benefit, the system becomes vulnerable. Collapse, in Tainter’s framework, is not caused by any single stressor — not invasion, not resource depletion, not environmental degradation alone. It is caused by a society’s inability to sustain the complexity it has built.
Diversity is a component of that complexity. Accommodating diverse perspectives, lifestyles, strategies, and ways of being requires institutional infrastructure, coordination mechanisms, and trust — all of which have energy costs. A society with high internal diversity needs sophisticated systems to manage disagreement, distribute resources across different needs, and maintain coherence without enforcing uniformity. These are real costs. But here is the critical distinction: the alternative is not lower cost. The alternative is brittleness.
Agricultural monocultures illustrate this at the most literal level. They are efficient in stable conditions — maximum yield per unit of input. But they are catastrophically fragile when conditions shift, because every plant fails in the same way at the same time. There is no compensating response, no buffering, no insurance. The efficiency of sameness is purchased at the price of resilience. What Yachi and Loreau demonstrated for ecosystems, and what the Red Queen hypothesis demonstrates for genomes, and what Tainter’s framework reveals for civilisations, all point in the same direction: systems that reduce their internal diversity in exchange for short-term efficiency are borrowing against their capacity to survive what comes next.
This suggests a pattern. Advancing societies do not merely happen to become more diverse. They must become more diverse, because the selection pressures they face grow with their capabilities. And they face a tension: the very diversity that protects them also increases the complexity they must manage. A society that cannot accommodate its increasing diversity will eventually face selection pressures it cannot survive — not because diversity caused the collapse, but because the refusal to accommodate it left the society brittle in exactly the dimensions where flexibility was needed.
The homework, then, is not to tolerate diversity as a concession. It is to build the infrastructure that makes diversity coherent — that allows a population of deeply different individuals to coordinate without collapsing into sameness and without fragmenting into isolation. This is what empathic communication does. It does not ask us to agree. It asks us to understand what the other actually needs. That is a much lower bar — and a much more stable foundation.
Any society which cannot accommodate its ever increasing diversity will go down. Not because diversity is the problem. Because diversity is the solution, and refusing it means facing the future without your immune system.
Further reading:
Cohen, Dan. “Optimizing Reproduction in a Randomly Varying Environment.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 12, no. 1 (1966): 119–129. — The foundational paper on bet-hedging theory in evolutionary biology.
Van Valen, Leigh. “A New Evolutionary Law.” Evolutionary Theory 1 (1973): 1–30. — Introduces the Red Queen hypothesis: species must continually adapt to survive against co-evolving organisms, providing one of the leading explanations for the persistence of sexual reproduction. Popularised in Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993).
Yachi, Shigeo, and Michel Loreau. “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Productivity in a Fluctuating Environment: The Insurance Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, no. 4 (1999): 1463–1468. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.96.4.1463 — Formalises the insurance hypothesis: biodiversity buffers ecosystems against functional decline by ensuring that some species compensate when others fail.
Lotka, Alfred J. “Natural Selection as a Physical Principle.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 8, no. 6 (1922): 151–154. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.8.6.151 — Proposes that natural selection tends to maximise the total energy flux through a system, linking evolutionary fitness to thermodynamic principles. Extended by Howard Odum into the maximum power principle.
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. — Argues that societies collapse when investments in complexity reach diminishing marginal returns. The framework connects energy costs, institutional overhead, and the limits of problem-solving capacity.