Two Worlds Learning to live in an entangled world

200,000 years of human history

We (Homo sapiens) emerged from our hominid predecessors in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

For the first 150,000 years, we lived as hunter-gatherers like our cousins, the apes. We lived day to day, and our behaviors changed only a little over time.

Then, around 70,000 years ago, a remarkable shift took place—speech and language significantly improved, sparking what is known as the cognitive revolution or cultural big bang.

With the cultural big bang came a great leap forward, allowing us to pass down our knowledge from generation to generation much faster through cumulative cultural evolution rather than the biologically slower process through our genes.

Some 40,000 years later, we made another enormous leap with the Neolithic Revolution when we transitioned from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming and settlement (circa 11,000 years ago).

A little later, early cities emerged around 7,500 BCE, and Sumer, the first known civilization, developed about 4,100 BCE.

Over the following centuries, society and technology co-evolved, biological evolution having stopped with the cognitive revolution.

Then, 500 years ago, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Scientific Revolution, which laid the foundation for the Enlightenment, drastically changed scientific thinking. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were massive leaps forward in the evolution of our knowledge and how we thought about the world and our place in it.

Two hundred years later, in the late 18th century, circa 1760, the pace of change picked up with the dawn of the first industrial revolution, followed closely by the second.

Then, a mere 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War, change accelerated dramatically with the birth of the information/digital revolution (the third industrial revolution), and is further accelerating today with Industry 4.0 (the fourth industrial revolution).

This cumulative socio-technical-economic change has created a modern world vastly different from the hunter-gatherer world in which we evolved and the world of our farming ancestors only a few hundred years ago.

Two Worlds

World #1 is the old world, the natural world in which humans lived and evolved for roughly 200,000 years.

World #2 is the new world, the socio-technical and economic world we have built. Although its roots stretch back 70,000 years, its full force is concentrated in recent history, especially since the first industrial revolution, 250 years ago, and, most dramatically, in the last 80 years since the start of the Anthropocene, marked by the Trinity test in 1945.

In World #1, cause and effect tend to be direct and observable. In World #2, relationships between cause and effect are often indirect, non-linear, and harder to predict.

In terms of the Cynefin domains, World #1 aligns more closely with the simple or complicated domains, while World #2 sits in the complex domain.

Both worlds co-exist, although most people now live largely within World #2. For example, over 55% of the global population lives in urban areas, a figure expected to rise to 68% by 2050.

The Age of Entanglement

The idea that we live in an entangled world is particularly relevant in World #2. Here, the intricate web of connections among technology, society, and the environment creates a landscape where traditional, reductionist problem-solving approaches are insufficient. In this complex world, everything is interconnected—every action ripples through the system in unforeseen ways, leading to outcomes that are difficult to predict or control.

Understanding the entanglement of systems within World #2 forces us to rethink how we approach challenges. Just as the Enlightenment brought a shift in thinking during its time, recognizing the entangled nature of our modern world suggests a need for an updated perspective—one that embraces complexity and integration over simplicity and separation.

This entanglement between World #1 and World #2 reflects the tension between our evolutionary predispositions and the demands of our constructed environment. While our brains are wired for the simpler dynamics of World #1, we now live predominantly in World #2, where those same dynamics no longer suffice. As such, navigating this entangled, complex landscape requires us to develop new ways of thinking and acting that are adaptive, integrative, and attuned to the interconnected realities of our time.

We still have old World #1 brains

In World #1, our top priority was survival, eating and not being eaten, winning in warfare, and mating.

Although life was difficult, it was simple. Straightforward cause-and-effect relationships dominated. We lived in the here and now from day to day.

Think of other members of the human family tree—apes—such as the chimpanzee or the bonobo. In World #1, our lives were not so different.

We lived in the natural world in small bands of about 25 people and tribes of 500 or more. Our lives were short, and we had few choices.

World #1 was the world in which our brains evolved. Evolution wired our brains for short-term tribal thinking—to think in the moment. Our brains have not changed significantly in the last 50,000 years since we started our journey into World #2.

Fifty thousand years is not long in evolutionary terms, and it is not surprising that our modern-day brains have not evolved to handle the dynamics and complexity of World #2.

In the entangled societies of World #2, tribal thinking no longer serves us well. We need to rethink our thinking.