civilisations diverging
an evolutionary biological lens on the evolving global order
[This has been in my drafts since June 2025, and I’ve finally decided to update it; it’s a speculative view of how civilisations might be selected for, and shaped by, larger geopolitical pressures, using evolution as a lens to think through recent geopolitical changes.]
In the decades following the Second World War, there was an assumption shared by many that the world might converge toward a single, liberal, modernity: one in which there would be shared international frameworks of economic openness, democratic governance, institutional cooperation, and international convergence and integration - leading a more peaceful world - what is called a ‘rules-based order’. After all, no country with a MacDonald’s had ever invaded another country with a MacDonald’s - something that was true until suddenly it wasn’t true any longer.
But that idea of multiple convergences around a nice, happy set of outcomes was unrealistic, ignored geopolitical reality, disregarded the increasingly distinct cognitive ecologies arising in differing parts of the world, and the convergences idea has withered, is dying, for all the reasons we can see around us.
distinct civilisational styles
Instead, I think we are seeing the emergence of three distinct civilisational styles:- American, pan-European, and Chinese - each diverging from each other because they have started from different places, and each are slowly adapting differently to complexity, risk, and global interdependence.
This is not the totality of what is emerging, of course: demographic changes, and India’s emergence onto the worldstage means this picture will inevitably change over the coming decades (and don’t forget Africa, or South America - these are huge places with many countries of variable economic development, and which are surely finding their way in the coming decades as well).
These major geopolitical alignments result from long-term selection pressures acting on institutional memory, technological capability, and political culture. Just as species diverge when faced with different ecological constraints, so too are these formations evolving along separate civilisational paths.
american mode: the apex improviser
The American mode combines technological dominance with national myth-making. Yet the USA overstates its ability to shape the world and often underestimates system-level feedback. But its strengths remain formidable: cultural soft power, deep entrepreneurial capacity, and a vast innovation ecosystem. However, its governance is fragmented, incomplete, and contradictory, but it can compensate through agility and influence.
America behaves much like a generalist species, one that is agile, fast-moving, and capable of dominating unstable environments for periods of time. The risk it plays with lies in overextension and internal breakdown: the very conditions that once selected for adaptability also create structural volatility.
pan-european mode: the legal pluralist
The pan-European model, anchored by the EU and extended through multilateral allies like Canada, Japan, and Australia, has evolved through cautious, process-heavy cooperation. It trades narrative clarity for procedural legitimacy, and centralised power for distributed trust. It is slow, but robust; internally diverse, but normatively coherent.
Europe resembles a ring species:- a connected network of gradually evolving populations that all remain part of the same overall system. Its evolutionary path prizes long-term stability and institutional depth over short-term dominance.
chinese mode: the coherent strategist
The Chinese mode is hierarchical, developmental, and state-integrated. It prioritises coherence over dissent and takes a long-term view of infrastructural and technological transformation. Its evolution is less chaotic, more controlled—designed for regime continuity and strategic adaptation.
This model mirrors a keystone species:- shaping the structure of its environment through scale and coherence. Its success depends on maintaining internal legitimacy while projecting influence without provoking systemic backlash.
speciation in slow motion: cognitive ecologies in divergence
These civilisational formations share economic interdependence and historical entanglement, yet are now shaped by increasingly distinct cognitive ecologies—environments of thought, narrative, institutional memory, and information architecture selectively reinforcing certain ways of reasoning, sensing, and acting.
Each operates within a semi-enclosed but porous environment: exposed to external stimuli, filtering inputs through inherited norms, institutional biases, and historical priors.
American cognitive ecology rewards speed, disruption, individual agency, and competitive innovation. Problems are framed as solvable through intervention and heroic scale.
pan-European ecology prizes deliberation, process integrity, and legal constraint. Problems are viewed as complex, requiring managed responses embedded in negotiated consensus.
Chinese ecology filters knowledge through state-driven continuity, collective purpose, and instrumental rationality. Problems are approached with a view to long-term stability and regime coherence.
These are not absolute separations—cross-pollination remains active—but the internal selection mechanisms of each system differ markedly. Over time, these divergences produce distinct institutional cognition: different assumptions about time, causality, authority, and what constitutes a successful policy response.
The result is not mere cultural difference, but deepening epistemic divergence:- a growing gap in how these blocs experience and interpret the world.
porous boundaries, divergent minds
We have a fragmentation of global power, and a new diversification of ways of knowing, because civilisational divergence extends well beyond geopolitics into the architecture of institutional and collective intelligence.
Each bloc adapts within a selective cognitive environment of its own making, arising because of part historical legacy, part strategic design. Though porous, these environments reinforce distinct cognitive styles.
American systems favour acceleration; European ones favour regulation; Chinese systems favour direction and coherence.
The danger lies not only in overt conflict, but in mutual illegibility, or a breakdown in the capacity to understand each other’s reasoning. Divergence may mean no longer merely disagreeing over interests or values, but struggling to comprehend the basic frames within which others operate.
The challenge ahead is to preserve and cultivate cognitive translation across civilisational systems—to make porousness a strength rather than a vulnerability, and to resist the seduction of sealed worldviews.
wildcard predictions: emergent paths and evolutionary gambits
Hybrid governance zones: Emerging regions—especially in Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Latin America—may develop synthetic governance models, combining Chinese infrastructural pragmatism, European normativity, and American entrepreneurial dynamism. These hybrid polities could become the true laboratories of future statecraft.
Narrative collapse events: A major ecological or AI-related disruption may trigger a rapid institutional reformatting in one or more blocs—a cognitive bottleneck that forces elite and public imagination into radically new frames in real time.
Post-human strategy layers: As advanced AI systems become embedded in state apparatuses, we may witness the emergence of non-human agents as cognitive scaffolds for civilisational strategy, producing new forms of decision-making, neither fully human, nor entirely synthetic, but something new and co-evolved.
learning across divergence: porousness as opportunity
Despite their growing distance, these systems can still learn from each other’s adaptive strengths:
Europe would benefit from absorbing more of the American tolerance for experimental failure, without sacrificing its institutional discipline.
The U.S. could learn from European pluralism and Chinese long-term planning, integrating distributed legitimacy with infrastructural patience.
China would gain by opening spaces for dissent-driven innovation, adopting more feedback-rich design within its developmental apparatus.
Such learning is neither easy nor guaranteed, requiring institutional humility, platforms for deep translation, and a willingness to treat others not just as competitors or threats, but as co-experimenters in the problem of civilisation itself.
conclusion: no endpoint, only adaptive variation
Civilisational divergence is adaptation under selective pressure. These formations are not stable endpoints, but evolving responses to a complex world. Some will find new equilibria; others may fragment, hybridise, or mutate under stress.
What matters is not ideological triumph, but adaptive capacity, institutional learning, and legitimacy retention. There is no one path forward, only diverse experiments in collective intelligence navigating shared challenges with divergent minds.
postscript - the limits of the analogy: biology is not destiny
Evolutionary language provides a helpful lens to see the world anew, for it illuminates divergence, trade-offs, selective environments, and adaptive forms.
We shouldn’t push evolutionary language too far:
Civilisations are not gene-encoded species. They are cognitive-cultural formations, capable of reflective change, intentional learning, and radical reorientation.
Unlike species, they can observe their own evolution and choose to adapt—or not. They can hybridise deliberately, not only accidentally. They can even change their selection environments, rather than being wholly subject to them.
To push the analogy too far risks fatalism: the assumption that divergence must mean conflict, or that difference implies incompatibility. Civilisations are not destined to war because they are distinct; nor must they collapse because they diverge.
The better metaphor is not of fixed types, but of co-evolving intelligences—linked by trade, entangled in risk, and faced with shared constraints that none can solve alone.
My book: Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds
Fascinating. Thanks for publishing it Shane.
Shane, where would you slot in India? Its over a billion people