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The Gambling Animal: Humanity’s Evolutionary Winning Streak - and How We Risk It All
Evolution is a series of bets and no animal gambles the way humans do. This has led us to unprecedented ecological dominance, via the steepest odds and unlikeliest of outcomes. But our winning streak cuts both the secret to our success may yet be our downfall.
Ever since evolution accelerated our species away from all other living things on earth, we have existed outside our evolutionary comfort zone. This allowed us to continue moving into new ecological niches, and eventually take over the world. But it also bred a whole host of ills.
Join economists Don Ross and Glenn Harrison for a profoundly unsettling account of human exceptionalism, and a revelatory retelling of the human story. Drawing on their own research into the risk psychology of humans and other animals - including our most impressive rivals, elephants - they reveal the hidden logic of our rise. Even before the dawn of civilisation, we bet the Earth on our ability to keep doubling down. It is time we finally understood the odds.
Ever since evolution accelerated our species away from all other living things on earth, we have existed outside our evolutionary comfort zone. This allowed us to continue moving into new ecological niches, and eventually take over the world. But it also bred a whole host of ills.
Join economists Don Ross and Glenn Harrison for a profoundly unsettling account of human exceptionalism, and a revelatory retelling of the human story. Drawing on their own research into the risk psychology of humans and other animals - including our most impressive rivals, elephants - they reveal the hidden logic of our rise. Even before the dawn of civilisation, we bet the Earth on our ability to keep doubling down. It is time we finally understood the odds.
416 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 30, 2025
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February 26, 2025
What do humans, elephants and brains that work to minimize prediction error have in common? And how the hell is the economic analysis of risk relevant to this question? It turns out that we just need to try to make a serious, systematic interdisciplinary effort to see that the technical notion of risk, when treated as a biological concept, can end up being a thread that unites the natural history of life, humans and elephants included.
One of the most natural first reactions to what this book aims to achieve might be a sense of awkwardness. The fact that the authors chose elephants as a comparative case study of the evolution of hominins will also strike people as weird: why would elephants shed any more light in our evolution than the good old great apes that share much more genes with us? The answer is that elephants and hominins have had enough similarities both in the ecological pressures they faced (mainly high climate volatility in Africa) and in the solutions they've found to successfully deal with them - and thus we have a clear case of convergent evolution -, which make elephants a more interesting comparative case study for understanding our natural history. More specifically, by trying to understand what differences along the evolutionary path happened between elephants and hominins we can shed light on just how humans have managed to build civilization over time and then become the planet's ecologically dominant species - and at what cost (both to ourselves and to other species).
Both humans and elephants are hyper-social species with proportionally large, neurally dense brains. Ancestors of both were able to survive high climate volatility by being extremely intelligent and, more importantly, by managing ecological risks collectively. And for all we know, the authors argue, elephants might very well have some kind of syntactically structured proto-language. So what major difference-makers happened for humans that didn't happen for elephants? Well, our brains are neurally structured differently, for a start: humans have much more cortical neural density than elephants, which means that humans have more imaginative capacity than elephants, and so can better model alternative scenarios and courses of action (on the other hand, our memory is much less reliable than elephants'). However, that by itself doesn't take us to civilization; hominins could still have been easily wiped out of the Earth if they relied only on such an expensive brain in a volatile environment. And at this point comes another important difference-maker in human evolution: we've developed the capacity to work collectively with within-group role specialization, which improves efficiency in hunter-gatherer communities (and later in agriculture). That was one of the first big collective risk managements we've pulled off. Then we've stumbled upon fire and the development of agriculture; the former made it possible to improve our nutritional profile, while the latter has deepened role specialization and social interdependency. Both events were important to developing trade, a fundamental part of the story towards full blown civilization: by trading, groups with differing tribal moralities have had to focus more on normative commonalities that made relatively peaceful coexistence possible and to put their differences more to the background, thus entering a process of moral circle-expansion. During all of these developments, of course language itself was evolving, which was crucial for more complex coordination between agents in ever bigger and more complex groups. Not only that, but written language particularly was also fundamental for external storage of more reliable collective memory, which ultimately has made technological and scientific progress viable, until eventually we've achieved industrial revolution and exponential population growth. This convergence of factors along our evolution explains how we've managed to come this far, against all odds.
A crucial point in Ross and Harrison's story is that every major innovation in human evolutionary history can be viewed as risk management: every time humans have faced some pressing challenge, they've developed a collective solution that manages the challenge's risks. Another crucial point is that every time humans have collectively managed risks, the price paid was new sources of more complex risk. They very aptly call this recurrent pattern in human history the "risk management ratchet", and throughout the book they draw attention to factors of the newer risk management strategies which indeed show that in every step of the way humans have dodged then-pressing risks by embracing riskier solutions. And the fact that in bigger, more complex societies we can spread risk more widely makes it easier for us to collectively embark on riskier endeavors even when individually we'd never do such a thing (research shows that the average human being is moderately risk averse, a point also discussed in the book) - and that's why the book calls us the gambling animal (as a species). And so we come to present times, with the most threatening risk to human civilization being the very same kind of risk that have threatened our species survival in the beginning: climate volatility - this time, though, of our own making, and a consequence of our risk management ratchet. But as always, we have no choice but to use the ratchet yet again to deal with the problem, both for ourselves and for other species. Place your bets.
So as one can see from this quick overview, the book covers a lot of ground, but never does so in a lazy way: every subject is approached carefully, and is scientifically discussed and analyzed with a lot of high quality references, while at the same time presenting a fresh way of thinking that helps us expand our intellectual horizons. So yeah, this is not one of those shallow, simplistic and over-reaching pop-sci books. Though I've found some points of disagreement and even skepticism while reading, this fact didn't quite subtract much from the reading experience overall. The book is a fascinating journey from our deep history to present days, with a very interesting unifying framework that ties together many accounts of human history (and so their account is not to be regarded as a substitute for more common and well established accounts of human evolution, a point they emphasize themselves) - and along this joy ride come with us these impossible-to-dislike, trunked fellow creatures. How not to read a book like that?!
One of the most natural first reactions to what this book aims to achieve might be a sense of awkwardness. The fact that the authors chose elephants as a comparative case study of the evolution of hominins will also strike people as weird: why would elephants shed any more light in our evolution than the good old great apes that share much more genes with us? The answer is that elephants and hominins have had enough similarities both in the ecological pressures they faced (mainly high climate volatility in Africa) and in the solutions they've found to successfully deal with them - and thus we have a clear case of convergent evolution -, which make elephants a more interesting comparative case study for understanding our natural history. More specifically, by trying to understand what differences along the evolutionary path happened between elephants and hominins we can shed light on just how humans have managed to build civilization over time and then become the planet's ecologically dominant species - and at what cost (both to ourselves and to other species).
Both humans and elephants are hyper-social species with proportionally large, neurally dense brains. Ancestors of both were able to survive high climate volatility by being extremely intelligent and, more importantly, by managing ecological risks collectively. And for all we know, the authors argue, elephants might very well have some kind of syntactically structured proto-language. So what major difference-makers happened for humans that didn't happen for elephants? Well, our brains are neurally structured differently, for a start: humans have much more cortical neural density than elephants, which means that humans have more imaginative capacity than elephants, and so can better model alternative scenarios and courses of action (on the other hand, our memory is much less reliable than elephants'). However, that by itself doesn't take us to civilization; hominins could still have been easily wiped out of the Earth if they relied only on such an expensive brain in a volatile environment. And at this point comes another important difference-maker in human evolution: we've developed the capacity to work collectively with within-group role specialization, which improves efficiency in hunter-gatherer communities (and later in agriculture). That was one of the first big collective risk managements we've pulled off. Then we've stumbled upon fire and the development of agriculture; the former made it possible to improve our nutritional profile, while the latter has deepened role specialization and social interdependency. Both events were important to developing trade, a fundamental part of the story towards full blown civilization: by trading, groups with differing tribal moralities have had to focus more on normative commonalities that made relatively peaceful coexistence possible and to put their differences more to the background, thus entering a process of moral circle-expansion. During all of these developments, of course language itself was evolving, which was crucial for more complex coordination between agents in ever bigger and more complex groups. Not only that, but written language particularly was also fundamental for external storage of more reliable collective memory, which ultimately has made technological and scientific progress viable, until eventually we've achieved industrial revolution and exponential population growth. This convergence of factors along our evolution explains how we've managed to come this far, against all odds.
A crucial point in Ross and Harrison's story is that every major innovation in human evolutionary history can be viewed as risk management: every time humans have faced some pressing challenge, they've developed a collective solution that manages the challenge's risks. Another crucial point is that every time humans have collectively managed risks, the price paid was new sources of more complex risk. They very aptly call this recurrent pattern in human history the "risk management ratchet", and throughout the book they draw attention to factors of the newer risk management strategies which indeed show that in every step of the way humans have dodged then-pressing risks by embracing riskier solutions. And the fact that in bigger, more complex societies we can spread risk more widely makes it easier for us to collectively embark on riskier endeavors even when individually we'd never do such a thing (research shows that the average human being is moderately risk averse, a point also discussed in the book) - and that's why the book calls us the gambling animal (as a species). And so we come to present times, with the most threatening risk to human civilization being the very same kind of risk that have threatened our species survival in the beginning: climate volatility - this time, though, of our own making, and a consequence of our risk management ratchet. But as always, we have no choice but to use the ratchet yet again to deal with the problem, both for ourselves and for other species. Place your bets.
So as one can see from this quick overview, the book covers a lot of ground, but never does so in a lazy way: every subject is approached carefully, and is scientifically discussed and analyzed with a lot of high quality references, while at the same time presenting a fresh way of thinking that helps us expand our intellectual horizons. So yeah, this is not one of those shallow, simplistic and over-reaching pop-sci books. Though I've found some points of disagreement and even skepticism while reading, this fact didn't quite subtract much from the reading experience overall. The book is a fascinating journey from our deep history to present days, with a very interesting unifying framework that ties together many accounts of human history (and so their account is not to be regarded as a substitute for more common and well established accounts of human evolution, a point they emphasize themselves) - and along this joy ride come with us these impossible-to-dislike, trunked fellow creatures. How not to read a book like that?!
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