This chapter will take us on a whirlwind tour of the first five worlds—episodes of biological and social history in which the organization of life made a jump in scale and the predation–production dichotomy was transcended. The first four worlds cover the historical rise of (1) prokaryotic cells, (2) eukaryotic cells, (3) brainy multicellular organisms, and (4) centralized states. The fifth world will be speculative, although the first phase of its development is already well underway.

As described in Chapter 1 (see Figure 1.1), these instances of dialectical transcendence begin with a period of predation and appropriation (phase 1.1). This then provokes an intense competition for remaining resources (phase 1.2) and a process of radical inclusion (internalizing the resources within a wider community) to protect and nurture them (phase 1.3). Such internalization is followed by the rapid development of capacity for coordination to harmonize and support the functions of the newly integrated systems. These coordination systems may eventually, given sufficient incentives for memory or planning, result in centralization of information processing (phase 2.0). Such centralization redefines the unit of analysis, effectively changing the scalar level to which the predation–production dialectic operates.

Put otherwise, competition among small “individuals” for dwindling resources drives the formation of collectives that protect and nurture those resources. Those collectives are then centralized into new, larger “individuals” who can again compete against one another. This process necessarily implies that individuals from prior “worlds” will outnumber those from later ones by orders of magnitude: prokaryotes vastly outnumber eukaryotes, eukaryotes vastly outnumber brainy multicellular organisms, etc.