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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Cultural possibility space with deep basin attractors where patterns converge

Cultural Attractors: Why Certain Ideas Keep Emerging

Series: Gene-Culture Coevolution | Part: 4 of 9 Why do agricultural societies around the world independently develop moralizing gods? Why do healing traditions from Tibet to Brazil converge on trance states and plant medicines? Why do hierarchical societies repeatedly invent similar status markers, kinship systems, and power structures? Cultural evolution

Human brain surrounded by luminous cognitive tools for cultural transmission

Why Humans Are Cultural Apes: The Cognitive Equipment for Culture

Series: Gene-Culture Coevolution | Part: 3 of 9 Plenty of animals learn socially. Young chimpanzees watch their mothers crack nuts. Songbirds learn their songs from adults. Killer whales have distinct hunting techniques passed down through pods. Social learning is not uniquely human. But cumulative culture—the ability to build on

Parallel helical streams of genetic and cultural inheritance with feedback arcs between them

Dual Inheritance: How Genes and Culture Evolve Together

Series: Gene-Culture Coevolution | Part: 2 of 9 If you want to understand why humans are the way we are, you need to track two evolutionary processes simultaneously—one written in DNA, one written in behavior, artifacts, and social structures. This is dual inheritance theory, and it’s the formal

Two interweaving evolutionary streams of genetic and cultural inheritance spiraling together

The Missing Half of Evolution: Why Culture Changes Everything

Series: Gene-Culture Coevolution | Part: 1 of 9 There’s a profound asymmetry in how we think about human evolution. Ask someone what makes humans unique, and they’ll tell you about opposable thumbs, big brains, bipedalism. These are the biological answers—the genetic inheritance we carry in our DNA.

Complete secular cycle as grand coherence transformation across deep time

Synthesis: History as Coherence Dynamics at Civilization Scale

Series: Cliodynamics | Part: 10 of 10 History isn’t random. It isn’t cyclical in some mystical sense. And it isn’t linear progress toward inevitable improvement. History is coherence dynamics operating on variables that take centuries to evolve. This has been the core claim of this series: that Peter

Individual maintaining local coherence sphere within fragmenting macro system

Personal Orientation in Disintegrative Times: Building Local Coherence

Series: Cliodynamics | Part: 9 of 10 You can’t fix the macro-level cycle. You’re not in control of elite dynamics, state fiscal capacity, or civilization-scale coherence geometry. The forces driving the disintegrative phase operate at scales beyond individual agency. But you can choose how you orient within

Recovery from crisis as fragmented manifold reconstituting into new stable configuration

What History Teaches About Recovery: How Integrative Phases Begin

Series: Cliodynamics | Part: 8 of 10 Crisis doesn’t last forever. Societies that fragment eventually reconstitute. The disintegrative phase of the secular cycle gives way to depression, then to new integration. The question is how—and at what cost. History shows consistent patterns in how societies exit crisis and begin