• Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

• 1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
• 2. The Way We Were
• 3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
• 4. The Invisible Brain
• 5. War: What Is It Good For? 
• 6. The Inevitability of Agriculture 
• 7. The Age of Chiefdoms
• 8. The Second Information Revolution
• 9. Civilization and So On
• 10. Our Friends the Barbarians 
• 11. Dark Ages
• 12. The Inscrutable Orient
• 13. Modern Times
• 14. And Here We Are
• 15. New World Order
• 16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

• 17. The Cosmic Context

• 18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness

• 19. Why Life Is So Complex

• 20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

• 21. Non-crazy Questions

• 22. You Call This a God?

• Appendix I: On Non-zero-sumness

• Appendix II: What Is Social Complexity?

To read an excerpt, click on a chapter in the table of contents to the left.