Thermo-Institutional Selection Theory

People model themselves on the earth.
The earth models itself on Heaven.
Heaven models itself on the Way.
The Way models itself on what is natural.

  • Daodejing, ch. 251

A society exists by its surplus. The cantos of Dante, the sapient gaze of Mona Lisa and the rendering of life itself through the pen of Tolstoy could not have emerged but for a food supply stable and sufficient to sustain life. Each generation inherits customs, institutions, and energy strategies but also has the chance to do better. Natural experiments shaped by environmental variation, but also individual differences and human will, offer opportunities for new strategies. Innovations in agricultural practices, governance or economic policy that preserves incentives without loss of social cohesion tend to yield more abundant and sustained energy surpluses.

This essay proposes Thermo-Institutional Selection Theory (TIST):

A community, like any organism, functions as an open thermodynamic system in which total energy surplus is the ultimate variable that governs growth, trade and the behaviors of the community. Societal institutions - property rights, labor organization, taxation, governance - are strategies that influence the activities of individuals within the community. These institutions, via the process of selection and evolution, tend to mirror the form of the underlying local energy systems; institutions that best mirror tend to persist, whilst those that do not yield instability, stagnation and eventual collapse.

If a civilization must be aligned with its underlying energy systems, then perhaps it cannot help but mirror them. Conway once keenly observed2:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Replace communication structures with local energy systems and replace designs with institutions and you have a kind of Conway’s Law for society.

I will test this claim in four scenes: Uganda’s banana gardens (decentralized surplus), Yu’s hydraulic China (a centralized empire), Sub-Saharan Africa’s wheel and plow (the logic of absences), and post-2003 Iraq (the perils of institutional import).

Uganda’s Banana Gardens

Oh, Uganda! The land that feeds us,
By sun and fertile soil grown
- from the Ugandan National Anthem

Laid across the rolling Ugandan hills, drawing vitality from volcanic soil rich in minerals and porous in composition are planted Uganda’s banana gardens - the lifeblood of its people. The import and cultivation of bananas and plantains in Uganda during the first few centuries AD was a major driver behind the profound shift in human demographics and institutions in equatorial Africa during the thousand years reaching up to AD 15003. If we take John Reader’s lucid definition of agriculture as the “process of manipulating the distribution and growth of plants so that greater quantities of their edible parts are available for harvesting and consumption”4, then banana cultivation is a blessing of abundance incarnate. Plantain yield exceeds that of yams by a factor of ten, while absorbing only a fraction of the labor demanded by yam cultivation. Established institutions operating in low energy surplus environments will tend to accelerate in the direction of the exploitable energy gradient. That is, institutions will tend to co-evolve, through the process of selection, to indeed allow for the exploitation of this new source of energy.

The Ugandan highlands are so endowed with a surface of caloric potential. A family may resolve to clear the brush, dig pits and use manure from a neighbor’s cow to start a banana garden of their own, on their own land. Even today, almost half of Uganda’s population is involved in the banana agriculture industry. The appeal is one of a decentralized nature - permission is granted by themselves, to themselves; punishment for negligence affects only them. Thermodynamic Conway’s Law manifest.

Authority is in the hands of those that have command of the energy systems. In ancient Egypt, for instance, Joseph rose to become second only to Pharaoh by interpreting dreams of abundance and famine, then orchestrating the storage of grain surpluses during the years of plenty to avoid starvation5; effectively wielding control over the nation’s caloric lifeline and reshaping its agricultural institutions. In a similar way, family heads in control of banana gardens in Uganda became powerful leaders of their community. Over time, the power of pastoralists was exceeded by that of agriculturalists dwelling in the highlands. For example, Buganda - a Bantu kingdom within Uganda - incorporated into the British protectorate during the “Scramble for Africa”, had its economic and agricultural foundation in banana cultivation; the backbone of Buganda was the pseudostem of the banana tree. During the time of Buganda, one woman working the banana garden would sustain ten men6 engaged in the overridingly important amusement of politics and commerce.

The energy affordances7 - perceived and actual possibilities for energy-influencing actions offered by the environment - can take many forms depending on the particulars of the environment. In Uganda the decentralized nature of banana gardens gave power to the agriculturalist family heads. Elsewhere the proclivity is to concentrate power into fewer hands.

Yu the Engineer

While Uganda’s banana gardens illustrate TIST through agriculture and decentralized family units, the birth of Chinese civilization demonstrates the same principle centralized and at scale. The Xia dynasty, the first dynasty in China established around 2205 BC, was founded by the legendary engineer Yu.

According to the legend8 China had long been plagued by periodic floods. Whenever towns began to grow, with populations rising and agricultural operations spreading, a flood would sweep in and destroy the harvest. To meet this perennial threat, Emperor Shun tasked Gun, father of Yu, with finding a solution. For years Gun labored, raising the embankments and building dams. But his effort was in vain and he paid with his life. Just four days after his marriage, Yu inherited his fathers task. He chose another course however. Yu built irrigation canals and dredged rivers instead of dams. For thirteen long years, Yu personally labored, ate and slept alongside his workers. As they cut deeper into China he faced hostility from regional tribal leaders who opposed his efforts. But the irrigation canals redirected the flood water into fields, simultaneously alleviating flooding and watering the fields. Like the Daoists would preach nearly three millennia later, he let the waters take their natural course, turning a destroyer into an ally, and floods into a servant of the fields. Ultimately, Yu’s dedication and work paid off and his reward was the throne. Shun appointed Yu as emperor instead of his own son.

Nascent China is an example of a Wittfogelian hydraulic empire9. Karl August Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power in which he defines a hydraulic empire as a social or government structure that maintains power through control of water, often due to the ecological vulnerability of flooding and irrigation. Wittfogel posited that many empires in the East - Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Yu’s China - were hydraulic empires and the nature of the centralized control needed to overcome these ecological challenges tended towards despotic government. Medieval Europe, in contrast, faced no such tyranny from the waters; its lands dispersed power in favor of the obligations of feudalism.

Viewed through the lens of TIST, Yu’s China, and more broadly Wittfogel’s hydraulic empire, was the form at last equal to the challenge of the waters. Were Locke and his libertarians to lament the loss of freedom in such an order, history would answer necessity, not philosophy, built its walls. TIST does not proclaim such institutions just or wise, only that they worked. For those people living at the mercy of the rivers, that judgement is enough. “But for Yu,” say the Chinese, “we should have been fishes.”

Wheel and Plow in Sub-Saharan Africa

As we have seen by examining Uganda and China, radically different institutions tend to be selected for, characterized by the energy affordances of the environment. To build a fuller understanding, we must study not just the positive examples but also the institutions that never came to be - chosen by the environment not to live on. As Abraham Wald learned from the distributions of bullet holes on returning WWII bombers, we mostly see the survivors10; likewise we also tend to observe societal institutions that have supplied surplus energy. The rest - like the bombers - took hits in parts too critical for survival and so vanished from history, often without record. Often the utility of something lies in what is not there.

By adding and removing clay we form a vessel.
But only by relying on what is not there do we have use of the vessel.
By carving out doors and windows we make a room.
But only by relying on what is not there do we have use of the room.

  • Daodejing, ch. 1111

The invention of the wheel and plow in Mesopotamia12 around 3500 BCE brought massive efficiency gains to farmers working the heavy clay-rich soils on the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain. It was adopted in Europe, India and China thousands of years ago. Why did Sub-Saharan Africa not adopt the same - did they lack inventfulness or did they not hear about the new technology? The absence can be explained by an analysis of the energy affordances of the land and ecology.

A healthy human adult subsistence farmer requires about 2,400 kcal /day of food energy, or up to 3,600 kcal in labor intensive periods. Traditional hoe cultivation of sorghum and millet in the savannah yields roughly 1 tonne grain per hectare (an area of 100m x 100m) per year (and lower pre-fertilizer) which translates to 3.4 million kcal of edible energy per hectare. Therefore a hectare can support 3 to 4 individuals. Though this sounds strained, it exceeds medieval Europe’s 1-2 individuals from wheat yields. Escaping the fierce African sun beneath the shade of a baobab tree after an afternoon of toil, an enterprising, or sluggish, Bantu farmer might imagine drawing on the strength of an ox to pull the plow. An ox of 500kg standing idle has a basal metabolic rate of about 17,000 kcal per day. Light to moderate work multiplies caloric requirements by 1.5-2x, upping maintenance to 20,000-33,000 kcal per day. Working an ox frees up a human, still eating 2,400 kcal a day, of about 500 kcal mechanical work per day. To pay for the 500 kcal freed up, an ox however requires 6-8x the annual food requirements of a human, coming from 9-12 kg of dry matter per day; an hectare of the best grassland must be set aside for the ox to graze. The humans are freed from the hard labor, but like the ouroboros of a snake eating its own tail, the work saved must be paid for with more land to feed the ox.

The crux lies in the particular conditions of the ecology and geography of Sub-Saharan Africa - particularly the disease ecology. Living in the tsetse fly belt exposes oxen to the risk of trypanosomiasis, also known as “sleeping sickness”13, reducing its capacity for labor and often life. Relying on draft animals is risky when a particularly bad bout of disease may wipe out the herd. Furthermore, many African soils are nutrient-poor and actually degrade with deep plowing. In contrast, annual flooding of the Nile in Egypt renewed the fertility of the fields. Plowing the European soil raises nutrients trapped deep within to the surface; there were increasing returns to plowing whereas in Sub-Saharan Africa they could be negative. Further shocks like dry seasons, warfare or the need to move territory once the soil had sufficiently degraded made a system reliant on oxen brittle.

Thus, arising from beneath the ancient baobab, the Bantu farmer summoning from her mind that modest spark of seventeen watts14, discerns the wiser path; to part with the ox, perhaps bartering it with a local chief, who ostensibly using fewer watts and economy of intellect, will devote his surplus, as we do in our own day, to parade his wealth.

Foreign Import Implications

An implication that arises is that because energy systems are localized, optimal strategies and institutions must therefore also be localized to match, or to mirror, the underlying energy systems. Attempting to import non-local institutions that are in conflict with the natural order of a specific environment will lead to disastrous outcomes. Institutions are like seeds: they will not grow if planted in the wrong climate, no matter how much you water them.

Consider Iraq, where the 2003 attempt to implement Western-style democracy failed and the country eventually reverted to older patterns of governance. While questions around the reason for this failure are necessarily overdetermined, a TIST reading would start by identifying Iraq’s underlying energy systems and institutional history. The two linchpins driving both energy systems and institutions are water and oil.

Iraq lies within the region of ancient Mesopotamia - literally “the land between the rivers”, Tigris and the Euphrates. With a quarter of the population involved in the agricultural industry and with almost all water in Iraq coming from these rivers, control over the water supply is critical. This arrangement is more akin to Wittfogel’s hydraulic empire than the decentralized high-energy surplus conditions which Western democracies evolved from. Strategies, implemented in the form of institutions, that do not provide effective control of the water systems will tend towards instability.

After the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule, an absence of functioning police gave way to widespread looting of government warehouses and infrastructure. Water pipes, treatment plants and electric cables were stripped and sold as scrap. The result was a water crisis and an outbreak of cholera. The U.S. allocated billions to water and sanitation projects15, however corruption, management and security issues caused budget overruns, deadline slippage and underdelivery. Engineers tasked to fix the infrastructure were kidnapped and held for ransom. Some looked back favorably with respect to Saddam’s leadership; at least under authoritarian rule they had predictable water and electricity.

The other linchpin is oil. Iraq is a rentier state - one that derives most of its income from economic rent paid from foreign sources - primarily for its oil. The incentives and marshalling of resources to provide oil as a rentier state will almost necessarily have a gravitational pull towards central control. At the outset then, liberal democracy faced insurmountable obstacles. If democracy is to come to Iraq, it must come, and be nurtured, from within - erected on the foundational energy systems, water and oil, that differentiate Iraqi ecology.

Perhaps the lesson we should take away from the failed import of Western democracy into Iraq was already provided to us four thousand years ago in the first literary work produced by any civilization: the Epic of Gilgamesh.16

Gilgamesh begins as a tyrant and his “arrogance has no bounds by day or night”. After hearing the outcry of the people, the gods restrain him by sending Enkidu, a personification of nature. Initially Gilgamesh wrestles with Enkidu but at last they develop an inseparable friendship. Enkidu teaches him “do not abuse this power, deal justly with your servants”. Later, in his torment after Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh embarks on a quest for immortality. As forewarned by the gods, he inevitably fails and learns that operating against the current of nature is futile. True permanence lies not in conquering death but in building the walls of Uruk and dealing justly with others.

In the same way, Iraq need not remain under centralized despotism forever. But the path forward lay not in a struggle against the thermodynamic realities of nature: a hydraulic ecology rooted in water and a rentier economy with surplus of oil. To impose foreign frameworks without regard for these realities is to repeat Gilgamesh’s mistakes. Transformation must be nurtured from within, taking heed of the energy systems that form the foundation of civilization.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Thermo-Institutional Selection Theory reveals that societies thrive not through arbitrary design but by institutions that have been evolved and tested against physical reality. Yet within this framework lies reason for optimism: genius, foresight, and will can reshape institutions to better align with energy systems, allowing civilization to rise to new heights. From Uganda’s self-sustaining banana gardens fostering decentralization of power, to Yu’s hydraulic mastery in China birthing centralized empires, and from Sub-Saharan Africa’s unpredictable disease ecology forging resilience to Iraq struggling to wield her endowed riches against the backdrop of foreign interests, history underscores this inexorable argument: misalignment invites collapse, while harmony gives occasion to surplus.

If we put our ear to Uruk’s ancient walls we might discern the faint voice of Gilgamesh from distant antiquity pleading with us to bring humility before nature’s thermodynamic truths lest we become footnotes in the annals of vanished civilizations.

Footnotes

  1. Van Norden, Bryan W., and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Hackett Publishing Company, 2023. ↩

  2. Conway’s Law: Melvin E. Conway, "How Do Committees Invent?" (paper presented at the IEEE Computer Group Conference, Los Angeles, CA, 1968), 1-3, https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf. ↩

  3. John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Vintage, 1999), 293–94. ↩

  4. Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent, 145. ↩

  5. Genesis 41-47 ↩

  6. Stephens, Rhiannon. 2013. A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900. N.p.: Cambridge University Press. ↩

  7. The term affordance here is borrowed from Gibson’s article: Gibson, James J. 1977. “The Theory of Affordances.” In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford, 67–82. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ↩

  8. The story is engagingly retold in Andrew Marr, A History of the World (Macmillan, 2013). Primary source is: Sima Qian. The Grand Scribe’s Records, Volume I: The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China. Edited by William H. Nienhauser Jr. Translated by William H. Nienhauser Jr. et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ↩

  9. Wittfogel’s monumental work has been criticized as a generalization. “Karl August Wittfogel - Oriental Despotism : Karl August Wittfogel : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive,” Internet Archive, October 29, 2012, https://archive.org/details/KarlAugustWittfogel-OrientalDespotism/page/150/mode/2up. ↩

  10. Survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship\_bias ↩

  11. Van Norden and Ivanhoe, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 177. ↩

  12. Mesopotamia has been described as the “Cradle of Civilization” because the first known civilizations were born there including Sumer and Uruk from which we get Gilgamesh. ↩

  13. In humans it reduces capacity to work by about 40%. Collins, K.J., 1982, ‘Energy expenditure, productivity and endemic disease’, in Harrison, G.A., (ed.), 1982, pp 65-84 ↩

  14. Human brains consume roughly around 20% of the body’s resting metabolic energy, despite making up only ~2% of body mass. ↩

  15. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Rebuilding Iraq: Resource, Security, Governance, Essential Services, and Oversight Issues. GAO‑04‑902R. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Accountability Office, June 28, 2004. ↩

  16. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 2003). ↩