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has strong patterns, and with the right tools historians can see what they are and even explain them.
    I will use three of these tools.
    The first is biology, * which tells us what humans truly are: clever chimps. We are part of the animal kingdom, which is itself part of the larger empire of life, stretching from the great apes all the way down to amoebas. This very obvious truth has three important consequences.
    First, like all life-forms, we survive because we extract energy from our environment and turn that energy into more of ourselves.
    Second, like all the more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures. We are constantly tinkering, wondering whether things are edible, whether we can have fun with them, whether we can improvethem. We are just much better at tinkering than other animals, because we have big, fast brains with lots of folds to think things through, endlessly supple vocal cords to talk things through, and opposable thumbs to work things through.
    That said, humans—like other animals—are obviously not all the same. Some extract more energy from the environment than others; some reproduce more than others; some are more curious, creative, clever, or practical than others. But the third consequence of our animalness is that large groups of humans, as opposed to individual humans, are all much the same. If you pluck two random people from a crowd, they may be as different as can be imagined, but if you round up two complete crowds they will tend to mirror each other rather closely. And if you compare groups millions strong, as I do in this book, they are likely to have very similar proportions of energetic, fertile, curious, creative, clever, talkative, and practical people.
    These three rather commonsensical observations explain much of the course of history. For millennia social development has generally been increasing, thanks to our tinkering, and has generally done so at an accelerating rate. Good ideas beget more good ideas, and having once had good ideas we tend not to forget them. But as we will see, biology does not explain the whole history of social development. Sometimes social development has stagnated for long periods without rising at all; sometimes it has even gone into reverse. Just knowing that we are clever chimps is not enough.
    This is where the second tool, sociology, comes in. * Sociology tells us simultaneously what causes social change and what social change causes. It is one thing for clever chimps to sit around tinkering, but it is another altogether for their ideas to catch on and change society. That, it seems, requires some sort of catalyst. The great science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once suggested that “ Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” We will see later in this book that this Heinlein Theorem is only partly true, because lazywomen are just as important as lazy men, sloth is not the only mother of invention, and “progress” is often a rather upbeat word for what happens. But if we flesh it out a little, I think Heinlein’s insight becomes about as good a one-sentence summary of the causes of social change as we are likely to find. In fact, as the book goes on I will start passing off a less pithy version of it as my own Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they’re doing.” History teaches us that when the pressure is on, change takes off.
    Greedy, lazy, frightened people seek their own preferred balance among being comfortable, working as little as possible, and being safe. But that is not the end of the story, because people’s success in reproducing themselves and capturing energy inevitably puts pressure on the resources (intellectual and social as well as material) available to them. Rising social development generates the very forces that undermine further social development. I call this the