Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

Had you moved in particular physics circles during the nineteenth century, you would have heard excited talk of electricity and magnetism as Michael Faraday and others delved ever more deeply into this increasingly intriguing realm.

History has revealed that the expectations described in each of these tales were misguided. With two centuries of hindsight, the near-mystical enigma that life once conjured has diminished. Although we still lack a complete understanding of life’s origin, there is nearly universal scientific consensus that no magical spark is required. Particles configured into a hierarchy of structures—atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, and so on—are all that’s necessary. The evidence strongly favors the existing framework of physics, chemistry, and biology as being fully sufficient for explaining life. The hard problem of life, while surely difficult, has been reclassified as easy. For electricity and magnetism, data collected from careful experiments demanded that scientists go beyond the features of physical reality that were on the books prior to the 1800s. The existing understanding gave way to a wholly new physical quality of matter (electric charge) responding to a wholly new type of influence (space-filling electric and magnetic fields) described by a wholly new set of equations (twenty such equations in the initial formulation) developed by James Clerk Maxwell. Although solved, the “easy” problem of electricity and magnetism turned out to be hard.25

Chalmers, convinced that conscious awareness cannot emerge from a swirl of mindless particles, encourages us to take the tale of electromagnetism to heart. Much as nineteenth-century physicists bravely faced the futility of cobbling together strained explanations of electromagnetic phenomena using the conventional science of the time, we need the same courage in recognizing that to demystify consciousness we must look beyond known physical qualities.

If you’re wondering what proto-consciousness really is or how it’s infused into a particle, your curiosity is laudable, but your questions are beyond what Chalmers or anyone else can answer. Despite that, it is helpful to see these questions in context. If you asked me similar questions about mass or electric charge, you would likely go away just as unsatisfied. I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness. For gravitational and electromagnetic influences, any concern that substituting action and response for an intrinsic definition amounts to an intellectual sleight of hand is, for most researchers, alleviated by the spectacularly accurate predictions we can extract from our mathematical theories of these two forces. Perhaps we will one day have a mathematical theory of proto-consciousness that can make similarly successful predictions. For now, we don’t.

what distinguishes the variety of information processing that results in conscious awareness? This is a question guiding psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, joined in the pursuit by neuroscientist Christof Koch. It has led to an approach called integrated information theory.27 To get a sense of the theory, imagine I present you with a brand-new red Ferrari. Regardless of whether you are a fan of high-end sports cars, the encounter stimulates your brain with a wealth of sensory data. Information expressing the car’s visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities, as well as more abstract connotations from the car’s power on the road to associations of luxury and wealth, immediately become entwined in a unified cognitive experience. It is an experience whose information content Tononi would characterize as highly integrated. Even focusing more narrowly on the car’s color, note that your experience is decidedly not one of a colorless Ferrari that your mind subsequently paints red. Nor is it of an abstract red environment that your mind subsequently shapes into a Ferrari. Although shape information and color information activate different parts of the visual cortex, your conscious experience of the Ferrari’s shape and color are inseparable. You experience them as one. This, according to Tononi, is an intrinsic quality of consciousness: the information threading through conscious experience is tightly stitched together.

as your brain constructs a mental representation, its information content rapidly becomes highly integrated and highly differentiated, but as the camera constructs a digital photograph, its information acquires neither of these features. That, according to Tononi, is why you have a conscious experience of the Ferrari but your digital camera does not.

Tononi’s theory has a panpsychist leaning. Nothing in the proposal is intrinsically tied to a particular physical structure. Your experience of conscious awareness resides in a biological brain, but according to Tononi and his math, a sufficiently high value of ф, whether contained in neural synapses or neutron stars, would be consciously aware. For some, like computer scientist Scott Aaronson, this leaves the proposal open to what he deems a devastating attack. Aaronson’s calculations have shown that by cleverly linking together simple logic gates (the most basic of electronic switches), the resulting network can have values of ф as large as you like—on par with that of the human brain or even larger.28 According to the theory, the network of switches should be conscious. And that’s a conclusion Aaronson—and most people’s intuition—considers absurd. Tononi’s response? However strange and unfamiliar the conclusion, the network will be conscious. Now, you might think, He can’t really believe that. But consider your incredulity in context. How can it be that a three-pound clump of brain, when appropriately connected to a blood supply and network of nerves, has familiar conscious experience? That is the claim, based on all that science has so far revealed, that stretches credulity. Yet, because of your own inner world, it is a claim that you readily accept. If I then hand you something else, lacking body and brain, and suggest that it too is conscious, the stretch to accept t...

when the Ferrari grabs your attention, a collection of cognitive data processing wheels is set in motion. Red, fragrant, shiny, metallic, glass, wheels, engine, power, movement, velocity, and so on—a range of physical qualities and functional capacities are both conjured and bound by your brain into the version of the car you hold in your mind. So far, this sounds similar to integrated information theory, but Graziano’s proposal takes these realizations in a different direction. His central thesis is that however heedful of detail you might be, your mental representations are always vastly simplified. Even describing the car as “red” is a shorthand for the many similar but distinct frequencies of light—the many shades of red—that reflect off different parts of the car’s surface: electromagnetic waves, for instance, oscillating at 435, 172, 874, 363, 122 cycles per second from a spot on the driver’s side door, 447, 892, 629, 261, 106 cycles per second from a spot on the hood, and so on.31 Your mind would reel if it dealt with such an overabundance of detail. Instead, “red” is the mind’s welcome, albeit schematic, simplification. So too for the vast collection of similar simplifications the mind constantly makes. For just about everything you ever encounter in the environment, a schematic representation is not only adequate but also frees up mental resources for other life-supporting purposes. Long ago, brains that may have become distracted by the billowing details of the p...

Perhaps a hundred or a thousand years from now the physicalist program will look naïve. I doubt it. But in acknowledging this possibility, it is also important to counter the presumption that by delineating a physical basis for consciousness we devalue it. That the mind can do all it does is extraordinary. That the mind may accomplish all it does with nothing more than the kinds of ingredients and types of forces holding together my coffee cup makes it more extraordinary still. Consciousness would be demystified without being diminished.

the data force us to treat quantum mechanics with utmost respect, and so we scientists have worked tirelessly to make sense of this counterintuitive feature.36 The problem is, the more we’ve worked, the weirder things have become. There is nothing in the quantum equations that shows how reality transitions from the fuzzy mixture of many possibilities to the single definite outcome you witness upon undertaking a measurement. In fact, if we assume—as seems utterly sensible—that the same successful quantum equations apply not just to the electrons (and other particles) you may be studying but also to the electrons (and other particles) that make up your equipment, and those making up you, and those making up your brain, then according to the mathematics the transition shouldn’t happen at all. If an electron is hovering both here and there, then your equipment should find that it is both here and there, and upon reading the equipment’s display, your brain should think the electron is both here and there. That is, after you perform a measurement, the quantum fuzziness of the particles you are studying should infect your equipment, your brain, and presumably your conscious awareness, causing your thoughts to hover in a fuzzy mixture of multiple outcomes. And yet, after each and every measurement, you report nothing of the sort. You report that you witnessed a single, definite result. The challenge, known as the quantum measurement problem, is to resolve the puzzling disparity be...

You can see the appeal. Quantum mechanics is mysterious. Consciousness is mysterious. How fun to imagine that their mysteries are related, or are the same mystery, or that each mystery resolves that of the other. But in my decades of immersion in quantum physics, I have not encountered a mathematical argument or experimental data that have shifted my long-held assessment of the purported link: extraordinarily unlikely. Our experiments and observations support the view that when a quantum system is prodded—whether the prodder is a conscious being or a mindless probe—the system snaps out of the probabilistic quantum haze and assumes a definite reality. Interactions—not consciousness—coax the emergence of a definite reality. Of course, to verify this, or anything else for that matter, I need to bring my consciousness to bear; I can’t be aware of a result without my conscious mind participating in the process. So there is no foolproof argument that consciousness does not play a special quantum role. Still, even in the most refined approaches, which have gone well beyond a superficial identification of two apparently distinct mysteries, the proposed quantum-consciousness connections are tenuous.

Few of us take pride in how our pancreas produces chymotrypsin or the trigeminal nerve network facilitates a sneeze. We don’t feel a vested interest in our autonomic processes. If I’m asked who I am, I turn to the thoughts, sensations, and memories that I can access with my mind’s eye or interrogate with my inner voice. Everyone’s pancreas synthesizes chymotrypsin and everyone sneezes but, I like to imagine, there’s something deeply, fully, and intrinsically me in what I think, in what I feel, in what I do. Bound up in this intuition is a belief so common that many of us never give it a second thought, let alone a first: We have a will that’s free. We are autonomous. We call our own shots. We are the ultimate source of our actions. But are we?

classical physics is deterministic: provide the mathematics of classical physics—Newton’s equations—with the precise locations and speeds of all particles at any one moment and the equations will tell you their locations and speeds at any future moment. With such rigidity, with the future fully determined by the past, how can there be any room for free will? The state of your particles right now, reading these words and contemplating these ideas, was determined by their configuration long before you were even born and so, surely, could not have been selected by your will. But in quantum physics, as we have seen, the equations predict only the likelihood of how things will be at any future moment. By inserting an element of probability—chance—quantum mechanics seems to provide a modern and experimentally motivated version of the Epicurean swerve, slackening the deterministic reins. However, loose language can be deceptive. The mathematics of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s equation, is just as deterministic as the mathematics of classical Newtonian physics. The difference is that whereas Newton takes as input the state of the world now and produces a unique state for the world tomorrow, quantum mechanics takes as input the state of the world now and produces a unique table of probabilities for the state of the world tomorrow. The quantum equations lay out many possible futures, but they deterministically chisel the likelihood of each in mathematical stone. Much like Newton...

To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our a...

Imagine that you and a rock, each minding your own business, are idly sitting next to each other on a park bench. As I walk by, you suddenly see that a hefty tree limb has snapped and is hurtling toward me. You leap from the bench and tackle me with great force, thrusting us both out of harm’s way. What is the explanation for your heroic, lifesaving act? All the particles making up you and all of those making up the rock are subject to the very same laws, and so neither you nor the rock has free will. Yet it is you who jumped from the bench while the rock just sat there. How do we explain this? You saved me but the rock didn’t because your particles are so spectacularly ordered, so breathtakingly configured, that they can undertake exquisitely choreographed motions that are not possible for the particles constituting the rock.42 As I walk by, you can wave, or say hello, or tell me you’ve solved the equations of string theory, or do jumping jacks, or save me from a falling branch, or a gazillion other possibilities. Photons that bounce off my face and enter your eyes, sound waves vibrating from a cracking branch that enter your ears, tactile influences from a strong breeze that blows against your skin, as well as a vast array of other stimuli external and internal, set off particle cascades throughout your body carrying signals that generate a wealth of sensations, thoughts, and behaviors, which are themselves yet other particle cascades. Thankfully for me, the specific par...

Our freedom is not from physical laws that are beyond our ability to affect. Our freedom is to exhibit behaviors—leaping, thinking, imagining, observing, deliberating, explaining, and so on—that are not available to most other collections of particles. Human freedom is not about willed choice. Everything science has so far revealed has only strengthened the case that such volitional intercession in the unfolding of reality does not exist. Instead, human freedom is about being released from the bondage of an impoverished range of response that has long constrained the behavior of the inanimate world.

My use of the term “free” to describe behaviors that according to the laws of physics are not freely willed may seem like a linguistic bait and switch. But the point, as the compatibilist school of philosophy has long suggested, is that when it comes to freedom and physics, all is not lost; there is great benefit in considering alternative kinds of freedom that comport with physical law. There are various proposals for how to accomplish this, but it’s as if such theories gloomily deliver the bad news, “When it comes to the traditional sort of free will, you are no different from a rock,” but then, just as you turn away to sulk, they exclaim, “But cheer up! There’s this other variety of freedom, gratifying in its own right, that you have in abundance.”43 In the approach I am advocating, such freedom is found in liberation from a restricted range of behaviors. Personally, I take great comfort in this variety of freedom. As I sit here, typing out my thoughts, I am unfazed by the realization that at the level of fundamental particles everything I’m thinking and everything I’m doing constitutes the unfolding of physical laws that are beyond my control. What matters to me is that unlike my desk and unlike my chair and unlike my mug, my collection of particles is able to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviors. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m pleased they did. Sure, that reaction, too, is nothing but my particle army carrying out their quantum...

This discussion highlights one of our central themes: the need for nested stories that explain distinct but interconnected layers of reality. Were you content with a story that describes the unfolding of reality solely at the level of particles, you would not be motivated to introduce concepts like learning and creativity (or, for that matter, entropy and evolution). All you would need to know is how collections of particles continually rearrange their configuration, and that information is delivered by the fundamental laws (and a specification of the state of the particles at some moment in the past). But most of us are not content with that sort of story. Most of us find it enlightening to tell additional stories, compatible with the reductionist account, but focused on larger and more familiar scales. It is in these stories, whose main characters are aggregates of particles like you and me and the Roomba, that concepts including learning and creativity (and entropy and evolution) provide an indispensable language. While the reductionist story describing the Roomba would catalog the motion of billions of billions of particles, the higher-level story might explain that the Roomba’s sensors recognized that it was on the edge of a flight of stairs, stored that dangerous location in memory, and reversed course to avoid a potentially catastrophic drop. The two stories are fully compatible even though one uses the language of particles and laws while the other uses the languag...

When I have dinner with my wife, I am just not that interested in listening to an account of the motion carried out by her hundred billion billion billion particles. However, when she tells me about the ideas she is developing, places she is going, and people she is meeting, I am all in.

In a world progressing via resolute physical law, do they? Yes. Of course they do. When my ten-year-old self struck a match within a gas-filled oven, that action had consequences. That action set off an explosion. The higher-level account that lays out a series of connected events—feeling hungry, putting pizza in the oven, turning on the gas, waiting, striking the match, being engulfed by flames—is accurate and insightful. Physics does not negate this story. Physics does not drain this story of relevance. Physics augments this story. Physics tells us that there is another account, underlying the human-level story, told in the language of laws and particles.

The human capacity to respond with great variety is testament to the core principles that have guided our exploration thus far: the entropic two-step and evolution by natural selection. The entropic two-step explains how orderly clumps can form in a world that is becoming ever more disordered, and how certain of these clumps, stars, can remain stable over billions of years as they produce a steady output of heat and light. Evolution explains how, in a favorable environment such as a planet bathed by a star’s steady warmth, collections of particles can coalesce in patterns that facilitate complex behaviors, from replication and repair, to energy extraction and metabolic processing, to locomotion and growth. Collections that acquire the further capacities to think and learn, to communicate and cooperate, to imagine and predict, are better equipped to survive and hence to produce similar collections with similar capacities. Evolution thus selects for these abilities and, generation upon generation, refines them. In time, some collections conclude that their cognitive powers are so remarkable that they transcend physical law. Some of the most thoughtful of these collections are then bewildered by the conflict between the freedom of will they experience and the unyielding control of physical law they recognize. But the fact is there is no conflict because there is no transcending of physical law. There can’t be. Instead, the collections of particles need to reassess their power...

From the standpoint of physics, I had merely introduced into my brain a small collection of foreign particles. But that change was enough to eliminate the familiar impression that I freely control the activities playing out in my mind. While the reductionist-level template remained in full force (particles governed by physical laws), the human-level template (a reliable mind endowed with free will navigating through a stable reality) was upended. Of course, I am not presenting a mind-altering moment as an argument for or against free will. But the experience made visceral an understanding that would otherwise have remained abstract. Our sense of who we are, the capacities we have, and the freedom of will we seemingly exert all emerge from the particles moving through our heads. Fiddle with the particles, and those familiar qualities can fall away. It’s an experience that helped align my rational grasp of the physics with my intuitive sense of the mind.

We speak of making choices and coming to decisions. We speak of actions that depend on those decisions. We speak of the implications that these actions have on our lives and the lives of those we touch. Again, our discussion of free will does not imply that these descriptions are meaningless or need to be eliminated. These descriptions are told in the language appropriate to the human-level story. We do make choices. We do come to decisions. We do undertake actions. And those actions do have implications. All of this is real. But because the human-level story must be compatible with the reductionist account, we need to refine our language and assumptions. We need to set aside the notion that our choices and decisions and actions have their ultimate origin within each of us, that they are brought into being by our independent agencies, that they emerge from deliberations that stand beyond the reach of physical law. We need to recognize that although the sensation of free will is real, the capacity to exert free will—the capacity for the human mind to transcend the laws that control physical progression—is not. If we reinterpret “free will” to mean this sensation, then our human-level stories become compatible with the reductionist account. And together with the shift in emphasis from ultimate origin to liberated behavior, we can embrace an unassailable and far-reaching variety of human freedom.

Mathematics is the articulation of pattern. Using a handful of symbols we can encapsulate pattern with economy and precision. Galileo summed it up by declaring that the book of nature, which he believed revealed God just as surely as the Bible, is written in the language of mathematics. During the centuries that followed, thinkers have debated a secular version of the sentiment. Is mathematics a language humankind developed to describe patterns we encounter? Or is mathematics the source of reality, rendering the world’s patterns the expression of mathematical truth? My romantic sensibilities lean toward the latter. How wonderful to imagine that our mathematical manipulations touch the very foundation of reality. But my less sentimental assessment allows for mathematics to be a language of our own making, developed in part by overindulging our predilection for pattern.

Einstein’s capacities set an unmatched standard for tapping into nature’s rhythms. And yet, although his legacy can be summarized by a handful of mathematical sentences—terse, precise, and sweeping—Einstein’s forays into the far recesses of reality did not always begin with equations. Or even with language. “I often think in music,”1 is how he described it. “I very rarely think in words at all.”2 Perhaps your process mirrors Einstein’s. Mine doesn’t. On occasion, when struggling with a difficult problem, I have had a sudden flash of insight reflecting some or other brain process beneath conscious awareness. But when I’m cognizant, even when using mental imagery to see my way toward a solution, it would be a stretch to say words are absent or to draw an association with music. More often than not, I make progress in physics by fiddling with equations and collecting conclusions in ordinary sentences I write out longhand in notebooks that fill one shelf after another. When I concentrate, I often talk to myself, usually silently, occasionally audibly. Words are essential to the process. Although I find Wittgenstein’s summary, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”3 too broad in its scope—I have no doubt that there are vital qualities of thought and experience that stand outside language, a point we will return to later—without language my capacity for certain kinds of mental maneuvers would diminish. Words not only express reasoning, they vitalize it. Or, as s...

Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s lesser-feted codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, saw things differently. He was convinced that natural selection could not shed light on the human capacities for music, art, and, in particular, language. In the competitive arena of survival, our singing, painting, and chattering ancestors were, in Wallace’s view, no better off than their less flamboyant cousins. Wallace could see only one way forward: “We must therefore admit the possibility,” he wrote in the widely read Quarterly Review, “that in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends.”6 The otherwise blind laws of evolution must have been harnessed by a divine power and directed toward the development of communication and culture. When Darwin read Wallace’s article, he was aghast, responding with a heavily emphasized “no”7 in the margin and noting to Wallace: “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child.”8

There is far greater consensus on the early development of the universe. Odd as it may sound, this makes sense. The birth of the universe left a treasure trove of fossils. The birth of language didn’t. The pervasive microwave background radiation, the particular abundances of simple atoms like hydrogen and helium, and the motion of distant galaxies provide direct imprints of processes that took place during the universe’s earliest epoch. Sound waves, the earliest manifestation of language, rapidly disperse to oblivion.

“A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.”10 Human language is completely different. Human language is open. Rather than using fixed and limited phrases, we combine and recombine a finite collection of phonemes to yield intricate, hierarchical, and virtually unlimited sequences of sounds conveying a virtually unlimited spectrum of ideas. We can just as easily talk about yesterday’s snake or tomorrow’s nest as we can describe a delightful dream of flying unicorns or our deepening disquiet as night spills across the horizon.

in 2001 researchers identified what may be an essential genetic basis for such abilities. Studying a British family with a speech disorder spanning three generations—difficulty with grammar and with coordinating the complex movements of mouth, face, and throat necessary for normal speech—researchers homed in on a genetic mishap, a change to a single letter in a gene called FOXP2 sitting on human chromosome 7.14 The instructional misprint is shared by the afflicted family members and has thus been strongly implicated in the disruption of both language and speech. Early press coverage of the discovery dubbed FOXP2 the “grammar gene” or the “language gene,” headline-grabbing descriptions that irked informed researchers, but oversimplified hyperbole aside, the FOXP2 gene does appear to be one essential component for normal speech and language. Intriguingly, close variations of the FOXP2 gene have been identified in many species, from chimps to birds to fish, allowing researchers to trace how the gene has changed over evolutionary history. For chimps, the protein encoded by their FOXP2 gene differs from ours by only two amino acids (out of more than seven hundred), while that of Neanderthals is identical to ours.15 Did our Neanderthal cousins speak? No one knows. But this line of sleuthing suggests that a genetic basis for speech and language may have been set sometime after we split from chimps, a handful of millions of years ago, but before we separated from Neanderthals, abo...

our ancestors may have substituted verbal exchange for manual grooming, allowing them to quickly share information—who’s doing what to whom, who’s being deceitful, who’s engaged in subversive plotting, and so on—off-loading hours of picking nits in favor of minutes of dishing dirt. Recent studies have shown that as much as 60 percent of our conversation today is devoted to gossip, a staggering number (especially to those of us who’ve hardly mastered small talk) that some researchers argue reflects the primary purpose of language at its inception.20

In the perhaps five thousand years since Gilgamesh was set down, history has witnessed transformation upon transformation of how we eat and shelter, how we live and communicate, how we medicate and procreate, and yet we immediately recognize ourselves in the unfolding narrative. Gilgamesh and his brother-in-arms Enkidu set out on a quest that would test their courage, their morality, and ultimately their sense of who they were—a Neolithic Thelma and Louise. Late in the journey, as Gilgamesh hovers over the lifeless Enkidu, he laments in wrenching but all too familiar terms: “He covered, like a bride, the face of his friend, like an eagle he circled around him. Like a lioness deprived of her cubs, he paced to and fro, this way and that. His curly [hair] he tore out in clumps, he ripped off his finery, [like] something taboo he cast it away.”25 Like many, I have known this place. Decades ago, charging from room to room in my tiny walk-up apartment, not knowing where to turn, I frantically sought to escape the news that my father had suddenly died. Even at a remove of hundreds if not thousands of generations, there is much we share with our forebears.

Why would we eschew hunting additional bison and boar or gathering extra roots and fruit to spend time imagining escapades with petulant gods or journeys to fanciful worlds? You might answer, because we like story. Yes. Of course. Why else would we steal off to the movies even though that report is due tomorrow? Why else would it feel like a guilty pleasure to set aside “real work” and carry on with that novel we’ve been reading or series we’ve been watching? Yet that’s the beginning of an explanation, not the end. Why do we eat ice cream? Because we like ice cream? Yes, sure. But, as evolutionary psychologists have convincingly argued, the analysis can go deeper.26

The general directive, emphasized colorfully in a famous paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, is that you can’t cherry-pick evolution.27 Evolution sometimes offers only package deals. Big brains of the grey-white human variety, chock-full of densely connected neurons, are really good for survival, but perhaps something intrinsic to their design ensures that they revel in story. Consider, for instance, that our success as social beings relies in part on having good intel—who’s up, who’s down, who’s strong, who’s vulnerable, who’s trustworthy. Because of the adaptive utility of such information, we are inclined to pay attention when it is available. And when in possession of such information, it is not uncommon to share it in exchange for burnishing our social status. As fiction is rife with information of this sort, our adaptively molded minds may be primed to perk up, listen, and repeat, even though the narrative is fanciful. Natural selection would thus smile on brains as they grew more adept at social living while rolling its eyes when listening to their obsessive storytelling.