Apes, Aliens, & Algorithms

Apes, Aliens, & Algorithms

Evolutionary Lessons for Peace

Humanity has spent decades scanning the cosmos for signs of intelligent life, yet the stories we tell about what we might encounter are remarkably uniform. In our films, literature, and collective imagination, extraterrestrials almost always arrive as threats—invaders bent on conquest, extraction, or annihilation. They are portrayed as cold, hyper-rational, and indifferent to life. This assumption feels intuitive not because it is likely, but because it mirrors us. Our alien myths are less predictions than projections, shaped by a history marked by fear, domination, and conflict. Hostility, in this sense, is not evidence of advanced intelligence; it is the residue of an earlier evolutionary stage governed by scarcity and survival anxiety.

Aggression once had adaptive value. In early human and pre-human environments, fear-driven behaviors such as territorial defense and in-group loyalty improved short-term survival. Evolution rarely deletes traits outright; instead, it carries them forward even after their original function has faded. In modern civilization, these ancient instincts have been amplified by technology, economics, and political systems. What once protected small groups now threatens entire ecosystems. War, ecological collapse, and systemic competition are not signs of intelligence reaching maturity, but of instincts that have not yet been consciously outgrown.

A striking illustration of how environment shapes social behavior can be found along the Congo River. Roughly a million years ago, the river divided a single ancestral primate population, giving rise to chimpanzees north of the river and bonobos to the south. Genetically, they are nearly identical; socially, they are profoundly different. Chimpanzees evolved in conditions of relative scarcity, leading to social systems organized around hierarchy, territorial aggression, and dominance. Their societies feature rigid power structures, male coalitions, competition over resources, and cycles of retaliation—patterns that echo uncomfortably in human political and economic systems. Scarcity reinforces fear, fear legitimizes violence, and violence reproduces scarcity in a self-reinforcing loop.

Bonobos, by contrast, evolved in environments of greater abundance. With more stable access to food and fewer competitive pressures, their social organization followed a different trajectory. Bonobo societies are more egalitarian, cooperative, emotionally expressive, and largely nonviolent. Conflict tends to be diffused rather than escalated, and social bonds play a stabilizing role. Their behavior reveals a crucial insight: cooperation is not naïve idealism but a viable evolutionary strategy under conditions of abundance. When survival is not constantly threatened, collaboration becomes adaptive.

Humans share nearly 99 percent of our DNA with both chimpanzees and bonobos, which means our social outcomes are not biologically predetermined. They are the result of the environments and systems we choose to construct. Through colonialism, industrialization, and competitive capitalism, humanity has largely scaled the chimpanzee strategy—treating accumulation as security, dominance as strength, and hierarchy as inevitable. In this light, capitalism is not a neutral economic arrangement but a cultural expression of scarcity-based survival logic extended to planetary scale.

This framing helps explain why we fear aliens. A species that has not learned to cooperate with itself struggles to imagine intelligence that has. We assume extraterrestrial life would behave as we have when endowed with power: extracting, expanding, and dominating. Our invasion narratives reveal more about our unresolved evolutionary condition than about the universe. It is plausible that many civilizations never reach interstellar maturity, not because of technological limits, but because they collapse under the weight of their own internal competition. The so-called “Great Filter” may be less a technical barrier than an ecological and psychological one—the inability to sustain cooperation long enough to endure.

A truly advanced civilization would not be defined by its weapons or its reach, but by its restraint. It would master internal cooperation before external expansion. It would generate abundance without extraction and stability without coercion. Such a civilization would have little reason to invade, because invasion is inefficient, unstable, and unnecessary once fear has been outgrown. In this sense, hostility is not a marker of advancement but a developmental failure.

Anthropolis is proposed as a deliberate response to this failure mode. It is an effort to create the “south bank” conditions for human civilization—environments structured around abundance rather than scarcity, where cooperation becomes the rational default. Organized as self-sustaining, human-scale poleis, Anthropolis removes competition from the domains that govern survival—food, housing, energy, and governance—while preserving it for play, creativity, and innovation. By meeting core needs locally and reliably, it dissolves the fear that fuels accumulation, hierarchy, and conflict. In such a system, security emerges from sufficiency, trust, and ecological balance rather than deterrence or force. A society that produces no offense has little need for defense.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is often framed as a question of probability or technology, but at its core it is an evolutionary question. Before asking whether we are alone in the universe, humanity must ask whether it has matured enough to be in company. Will we remain an adolescent species—armed, anxious, and competitive, projecting our fears outward? Or will we grow into a cooperative, ecologically intelligent civilization that could be recognized by others not as a threat, but as a peer? The answer will not be found in the stars, but in the systems we choose to build on Earth.

Our fascination with artificial intelligence further reveals this tension. While we fixate on synthetic cognition, we often overlook the vast, cooperative intelligence already operating throughout the living world. Long before silicon or algorithms, the biosphere evolved systems of extraordinary sophistication: forests that share nutrients through mycorrhizal networks, ecosystems that regulate climate through feedback loops, and organisms that continuously negotiate balance with their surroundings. This is intelligence expressed not through domination or optimization, but through relationship.

Industrial culture, however, has trained us to equate intelligence with control, speed, and abstraction. Distributed, non-hierarchical systems are dismissed as passive or accidental. Cooperation is mistaken for simplicity; resilience for randomness. Yet nature’s intelligence does not announce itself through centralized command. It reveals itself through coherence, reciprocity, and long-term stability.

At its foundation, nature is not mechanical but quantum. Reality emerges from probabilistic relationships, entanglement, and interdependence that precede linear cause and effect. From photosynthesis to neural signaling, life depends on quantum phenomena that enable sensitivity and efficiency beyond anything yet engineered. In this sense, nature is not inert matter animated by chance, but a continuously computing system—an intelligence expressed through matter, energy, and time.

Evolution itself functions as a learning process, refining strategies through feedback across billions of years. Ecosystems process information, organisms make context-sensitive decisions, and the biosphere maintains dynamic equilibrium under changing conditions. This intelligence is inherently cooperative, because systems that fail to integrate with their environment do not persist. At planetary scale, survival depends on balance.

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, reflects the values of the culture that creates it. Developed within competitive economic systems, it is optimized for extraction, prediction, and control. Constrained by narrow objectives, it risks amplifying existing pathologies rather than transcending them. Without ethical grounding and ecological context, AI mirrors our immaturity rather than correcting it.

The promise of advanced AI and quantum technologies lies not in surpassing nature, but in finally learning from it. These tools could help us perceive interdependence, model long-term consequences, and align decision-making with ecological reality. But this potential will remain unrealized unless humanity outgrows its competitive adolescence. True intelligence—natural or artificial—is not measured by speed or power, but by its capacity to sustain life. Until we recognize and respect the cooperative intelligence that already governs the living world, any intelligence we build will remain a reflection of our blindness rather than a solution to it.