Why Look Beyond Human Societies?
Updated: 5 days ago
“The Holy Grail: A universal law of increasing complexity explaining why societies prosper or remain poor.”
Explanations
Whenever I asked why so many smallholder farmers remained poor, I found no shortage of answers. Experts cited limited financing, outdated technologies, weak institutions, and restricted access to markets, among other obstacles. Their explanations drew on evidence ranging from direct observation to rigorous studies, and many identified genuine constraints. Yet identifying an obstacle, or even demonstrating that an intervention had improved farmers' circumstances, did not necessarily tell us which changes, alone or together, would enable lasting prosperity.
Our work with mango farmers brought this distinction into focus. By controlling fruit flies, we helped farmers protect their harvests, improve fruit quality, and earn substantially more from mangoes that might otherwise have been damaged or rejected. The technology achieved its intended purpose, and the economic benefits were significant. Yet even substantial additional earnings could leave families far from prosperity. I began to wonder what else had to change for an improvement that succeeded in one part of the agricultural system to contribute to a lasting transformation of the whole.
The question brought to mind a familiar example from physics. In air, a feather usually falls more slowly than a stone, but that observation alone does not explain why. It might suggest that heavier objects naturally fall faster; in a vacuum, however, both accelerate equally under gravity. The difference arises from air resistance, not from separate laws governing the objects. Once we understand the forces involved, we can explain both observations and predict what will happen when conditions change. That was the distinction I was seeking in development: between knowing that an intervention had worked and understanding the relationships that would determine what it could achieve elsewhere.
Before committing resources to another intervention, I wanted to understand whether its expected benefits could contribute to the larger transformation we sought. Looking at farmers’ resources, knowledge, and technologies separately could show where improvements were possible, but not necessarily what those improvements would achieve together. I began to suspect that we were overlooking something in the relationships among the parts of the agricultural system, including how their activities were coordinated and what capabilities their connections made possible. Could differences in how the components are organized explain why successful improvements do not always produce the broader prosperity we seek?
Organization
That question brought me back to the Kibbutz, where I had spent much of my life. Many of the smallholder farmers I encountered ran relatively independent farms, whereas the Kibbutz pooled resources, coordinated responsibilities, and sustained shared economic activities that individual families would have struggled to manage alone. This difference was not simply a matter of working harder or having better technology. The way members organized their efforts enabled collective capabilities that no one could easily develop or sustain alone, though those capabilities did not, by themselves, guarantee prosperity. What was it about the relationships among people and their activities that made such achievements possible?
Dr. Ichak Adizes's Success Formula helped me frame this question more precisely. It holds that organizational success increases with External Integration, reflecting how effectively an organization connects with its environment, and decreases with Internal Disintegration, representing the conflicts and friction that consume resources and undermine collective performance. This relationship shifted my focus from what members possessed individually to how the organization functioned, both internally and in relation to its surroundings. Adizes's broader work also recognizes the importance of mutual trust and respect, but my experience in the Kibbutz raised another question: could the positive bonds of belonging and commitment contribute something beyond reducing internal friction, and should they have their own explicit place in understanding prosperity?
During a Bar Mitzvah celebration for my nephew and his classmates at the Kibbutz, I watched members who had not been formally invited arrive to congratulate the families before continuing on their way. They were not fulfilling an assigned responsibility; their gesture expressed a sense of belonging and commitment to the community. The experience helped me recognize that people could experience little internal conflict without necessarily feeling connected, while members of a closely knit community could disagree and still remain committed to one another. The absence of conflict was not equivalent to the presence of positive social bonds. I came to call this additional dimension Social Integration and gave it an explicit place in my Prosperity Formula, proposing that prosperity becomes more attainable when External and Social Integration strengthen relative to Internal Disintegration.
What surprised me was how much the expanded formula seemed to illuminate, from the Kibbutz and struggling agricultural communities to companies, institutions, and entire societies. Their purposes, structures, and circumstances differed, yet their connections to the outside world, bonds among members, and internal friction all appeared to matter for what they could achieve. If similar relationships were important across such diverse human organizations, could they reflect more general patterns found in nature long before human societies emerged?
Continuity
That possibility gradually drew my attention beyond the organizations I had known, toward the much longer history that made human societies possible. Human organizations are relatively recent developments, dependent on people whose capabilities emerged through biological evolution and on physical and chemical processes that preceded life. This continuity did not mean that atoms, living cells, and human societies acquired new capabilities through identical mechanisms. It offered a different reason to investigate earlier Levels of organization: long before people could plan, cooperate through institutions, or pursue prosperity, new forms of organization had already become possible. Studying how those capabilities emerged might help me distinguish conditions specific to human societies from relationships that could have broader significance.
Consider a carbon atom, which obeys the same physical laws whether it is found in a laboratory, a distant star, or a human cell. Scientists can study how carbon behaves outside the human body and use that knowledge to help understand processes within it, provided they account for the conditions under which it interacts with other substances. Yet a living cell can accomplish things that its isolated atoms and molecules cannot, such as regulating its activities and maintaining the processes that sustain life. These capabilities depend on how its components are organized and interact, introducing biological mechanisms that require further explanation. Earlier scientific knowledge remains valid and useful, even as new Levels of organization develop capabilities that cannot be fully understood from that knowledge alone.
The history of the universe reveals another important pattern: subsequent developments depended on conditions created by earlier developments. The universe first had to expand and cool sufficiently for stable atoms to form, and later astrophysical processes produced and distributed elements that enabled increasingly diverse chemistry. Life eventually emerged under suitable conditions, though its precise origins remain unresolved, and human societies required further biological and organizational developments. These transitions neither occurred everywhere nor replaced the systems on which later Levels continued to depend. Their sequence mattered because new capabilities could not emerge before their necessary conditions existed, even though the presence of those conditions did not guarantee their emergence. Understanding these prerequisites could help us recognize which capabilities are attainable, which remain beyond reach, and what must change before new developments become possible.
This raised a question that extends beyond the continuity of matter and physical laws. Could relationships among the conditions a system requires, the way its components become organized, and the capabilities that emerge recur across evolutionary Levels, even when their mechanisms differ? Their shared physical foundations and dependence on earlier developments gave me a reason to investigate, but neither established a universal developmental law. To determine whether such a common thread existed, we would need to identify what remained consistent across very different systems, establish the conditions under which it applied, and test whether it could explain or anticipate outcomes rather than merely describe similarities after the fact.
Discovery
Darwin's work showed how observations from very different settings could lead to an explanation that extends beyond any single species. His investigation drew on specimens collected during the Beagle's voyage, fossils, geographical differences, and the breeding of domesticated animals. From this varied evidence, he developed the theory of natural selection: when inherited characteristics allow some organisms to leave more offspring under particular conditions, those characteristics can become more common over generations. Natural selection does not explain every evolutionary change, but it gave scientists a mechanism whose consequences could be investigated across many species, rather than requiring a separate explanation for the history of each one.
Research on the small roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans demonstrated a related but distinct possibility: discoveries in one organism can illuminate biological processes in another. Scientists identified genes involved in development and programmed cell death, the regulated elimination of specific cells during development. This work was recognized with the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The worm's relative simplicity made these processes easier to investigate, and the identification of corresponding genes and related processes in humans provided evidence for extending particular findings. It was this evolutionary conservation, rather than superficial resemblance, that justified applying discoveries from the worm to understanding human biology.
Yet extending this approach beyond biology posed a different challenge. Darwin and researchers studying C. elegans examined organisms linked by evolutionary ancestry, whereas comparing a living cell with a company, or chemical processes with social organization, spans fundamentally different domains. Cells and companies may both coordinate specialized activities, but they do so through very different mechanisms. Their resemblance cannot establish a shared developmental law, though those differences do not rule out broader relationships in how collective capabilities emerge. If such relationships existed, their scientific value would depend on whether they could explain or anticipate developments across these domains more consistently or broadly than existing explanations applied separately.
Explanations of poverty and prosperity are often shaped by political commitments, professional interests, and attachment to familiar institutions. Atoms and cells, by contrast, have no stake in the explanations we favor. That does not free the scientists who study them from assumptions or bias, nor does it make research on human societies any less rigorous. It does, however, offer another setting in which to examine how new capabilities emerge, beyond the interests and expectations that surround social debates. I began to wonder whether examining such systems could reveal relationships I had overlooked while searching for the conditions that allow human societies to prosper.
Direction
Throughout natural history, some systems developed new capabilities that endured and supported further developments, while many others remained stable or disintegrated. The capabilities that persisted could become conditions for what emerged later, gradually expanding the range of what nature made possible. I could recognize that pattern in hindsight, but I wanted to understand whether Direction helped shape development as it unfolded, without implying a predetermined destination or a goal nature pursued. Could we identify the general conditions that allow new capabilities to emerge, endure, and contribute to further development?
Out of this investigation emerged the Universal Law of Increasing Complexity (ULIC), which proposes that Energy, Structure, and Direction must work in alignment for new, integrated capabilities to emerge and accumulate. Energy enables activity and transformation, while Structure coordinates the relationships through which parts can function together. Direction channels activity along particular pathways over time, whether through physical constraints, biological regulation, or human commitments and shared goals, influencing which capabilities endure and can support further development. In human organizations, Energy is used more broadly for enabling resources such as labor, knowledge, and finance, without equating them with physical energy or with one another. For this alignment to remain viable, systems must sustain the exchanges on which they depend and avoid disintegration that erodes their established capabilities. These are proposed necessary conditions, not guarantees that complexity will increase.
Chemistry provides a concrete example of how scientists can identify conditions that enable a new collective capability. In water, soap-like molecules remain largely dispersed individually at low concentrations. Around a characteristic threshold, called the critical micelle concentration, they begin assembling into clusters known as micelles. Their water-avoiding parts gather inward, allowing these clusters to incorporate oily substances more effectively than the dispersed molecules can. Scientists can measure how concentration, temperature, and the composition of the solution affect this process and use that knowledge to anticipate when micelles will form. Established physical chemistry already explains this behavior, so micelle formation does not establish ULIC. The example offers something more useful than a resemblance to other systems: a measurable relationship among conditions, organization, and collective function.
Micelle formation raised a question I could also ask about multicellular organisms and agricultural exports: when do separate components become capable of achieving something together? Cells gathered in one place do not necessarily form a functioning organism; their interactions must enable coordination and, in more complex organisms, specialized functions. Similarly, mango growers may produce excellent fruit without a value chain capable of reliably supplying premium markets. Quality management, traceability, financing, logistics, and commercial relationships must work together, while forming an association does not, by itself, establish those capabilities. The mechanisms differ, from molecular interactions and biological regulation to human decisions and institutions, although physical laws remain relevant throughout. I was not looking for identical mechanisms, but for relationships between organization and collective capability that might recur across these different systems.
ULIC therefore faced a more demanding test: could its proposed relationships reveal missing conditions in advance and improve predictions? For an export program, increasing mango production alone would not secure reliable premium-market access if the commercial coordination linking growers to buyers was missing. Recognizing that gap in advance could redirect investment toward building the capabilities the value chain requires. Agricultural economics and business analysis can already identify such constraints, while ULIC's proposed additional value would be to identify and test relationships among enabling conditions across different kinds of systems, complementing rather than replacing established explanations. Even a reliable export system does not automatically create prosperity; who participates, how benefits are shared, and whether those gains endure remain essential. Such understanding would not tell us which future will occur, but it might reveal what must change before a desired future becomes possible.
Possibilities
Imagine visiting some of our ancestors more than a million years ago and finding a way to explain forms of organization that people would later be able to build. We could describe cities where thousands of strangers coordinate their activities, companies connecting specialized work across continents, and institutions preserving knowledge for generations. Even if our ancestors could understand what these arrangements might accomplish, that knowledge would not provide the technologies, relationships, and organizational capabilities required to establish and sustain them, because those prerequisites had yet to develop.
Over time, new capabilities enabled people to establish forms of organization that their distant ancestors could not have sustained. Language and symbolic communication expanded their ability to share knowledge about things beyond immediate experience, preserve what they learned across generations, and coordinate activities around shared meanings. Yet communication alone did not establish the relationships needed for large-scale cooperation. Shared rules, specialized roles, and institutions enabled people who might never meet to coordinate decisions, resources, and responsibilities. States, monetary systems, and companies drew on these capabilities in different ways, emerging through varied historical pathways rather than a single inevitable sequence.
The same thought experiment reshapes how I view our own time. Future generations may develop forms of organization we cannot yet imagine, just as modern institutions were beyond the reach of our distant ancestors. Yet even without knowing what those future organizations might be, we can examine what prevents us from achieving some of the goals we already recognize. We possess extraordinary knowledge, technologies, and resources, but these do not automatically create the relationships and coordination required for collective achievements. Understanding where those capabilities are missing could help us recognize when additional investment in existing activities would accomplish little and when developing new forms of cooperation should come first. That understanding would not guarantee success or reveal the institutions future generations will build, but it could help us deliberately create conditions for possibilities we cannot yet realize.
I began by asking why successful improvements could leave farmers far from prosperity. Looking beyond human societies has reshaped how I approach that question. Sometimes the missing element is a collective capability that existing forms of organization cannot develop or sustain. Across natural and human history, new relationships have enabled achievements that earlier arrangements could not support, changing what was possible. Understanding the conditions behind such transformations would not decide which futures to choose or how their benefits should be shared; those remain our responsibilities. It could, however, help us recognize when prosperity requires new forms of organization rather than further improvement of familiar ones. If earlier generations could not have imagined the organizations we inhabit today, what reason do we have to believe that our present forms of organization represent the limits of what humanity can become?
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See you soon,
Nimrod
Dr. Nimrod Israely writes on the structural foundations of prosperity and human systems, and is the CEO and Founder of Dream Valley and Biofeed.
P.S. If your organization has the people, resources, and motivation but still struggles to move forward, message me and we can set up an introductory call.
P.P.S. Previous column: “Can Systems Learn to Change?”
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