Excerpt

Of the millions of species on the planet, humans seem fairly unique. We have produced flamenco dancing and skinny jeans, jet skis and cell phones, New York and Tokyo, and fabulous art and music by creative individuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Joni Mitchell.

While many aspects of human technology, culture, and society have no clear counterparts in other species, do they make us truly unique? Every species possesses traits that other species don’t, which is how we distinguish a ferret from a starfish. If every species is different, what, if anything, sets the human species uniquely apart from other species?

The Energetic Imperative

The science of complex systems, or complexity science, offers powerful tools for assessing human uniqueness. One way to compare all species, including humans, is energy consumption. Energy is the fundamental currency of life, as all species use energy to grow, survive, and reproduce. 

On a biological level, people are no different from other species. Joni Mitchell’s first energetic imperative is to take in a sufficient number of calories every day to maintain her metabolic function and to fuel her basic activity, and only with the excess is she able to compose and perform.

At larger scales, human technology, culture, and society all fundamentally depend on energy. Energy is required to produce jet skis and cell phones—jet skis have combustion engines that require energy-dense fuels and cell towers are energetically expensive to operate.

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