# The Toaster and the Maggot ![[resources/images/toaster-and-the-maggot.png]] <iframe width="100%" height="20" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/soundcloud%253Atracks%253A2378735072&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill" title="Bryant McGill" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Bryant McGill</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/bryantmcgill/the-toaster-and-the-maggot" title="The Toaster and the Maggot" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">The Toaster and the Maggot</a></div> **Intelligence as a Dynamic Colloidal State** How hard could it possibly be to make a toaster? In 2009, designer **Thomas Thwaites** decided to find out. He bought one of the cheapest toasters he could find, took it apart, and discovered something astonishing hiding inside an object so ordinary that almost nobody thinks about it: roughly **four hundred individual components**. He then attempted to reproduce the machine beginning as close to raw materials as practicable, extracting metals, processing copper, working with nickel, steel, mica, and plastic. Nine months later, after spending £1,187.54, he had produced something that only approximately resembled the inexpensive industrial appliance with which he began, a molten-looking object that failed almost immediately when energized. The experiment is usually presented as a parable about **globalization, specialization, and supply chains**. TED summarizes it more radically: it takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. That formulation is where the toaster stops being a joke about consumer goods and becomes a nearly perfect physical model of something far stranger, which is that **intelligence exists in a dynamic colloidal state**. We habitually imagine intelligence as belonging to identifiable containers: a brain, a person, a laboratory, a corporation, a computer, an artificial-intelligence model. But most of what civilization actually knows does not exist completely inside any of those things. **Knowledge subsists as a fluid, distributed arrangement of relationships among people, machines, institutions, standards, materials, languages, archives, transportation systems, energy systems, measurement systems, and accumulated procedures.** No individual engineer knows how to recreate the industrial substrate supporting the engineer's own work. No semiconductor designer personally knows how to build the lithography machines, refine every chemical, construct the electrical grid, manufacture the bearings, operate the ports, build the satellites, maintain the databases, educate every specialist, and reproduce the scientific literature upon which the design depends. Leonard Read made the same observation about a wooden pencil in 1958, and Adam Smith made a version of it about pins in 1776, but the intervening centuries have converted a rhetorical flourish into a literal planetary condition: the number of human beings required to instantiate a single ordinary object has climbed until it approximates the entire species. Civilizational intelligence therefore behaves less like a library sitting safely on a shelf and more like a **colloid**: innumerable specialized particles suspended in an active medium, maintaining capabilities that exist only because the larger configuration remains coherent. Intelligence is not merely stored within the components. **It subsists dynamically between them.** A factory knows something because suppliers exist. A surgeon knows something because pharmaceuticals, imaging systems, laboratories, sterile manufacturing, universities, databases, electricity, refrigeration, communications, and thousands of invisible technical lineages remain available around the surgeon. Remove enough of that surrounding medium and apparently intact expertise becomes unusable with remarkable speed. The colloid metaphor is exact rather than decorative: what defines a colloidal suspension is not the particles but the **continuous phase** that keeps them dispersed, and what destroys it is not the destruction of particles but the collapse of the conditions maintaining dispersion. Flocculation does not require killing anything. It requires only that the medium stop doing its work. The toaster makes this visible because nearly all of its intelligence has evacuated the toaster itself. The appliance sitting on a kitchen counter contains no explanation of where nickel comes from, how copper is refined, how polymers are synthesized, how nichrome acquired its resistivity and oxidation resistance, how electrical safety standards evolved, how dies are machined, or how a factory producing millions of identical components maintains tolerances across shifts and continents. **The object is merely the terminal crystallization of an intelligence cloud extending backward through centuries and outward across the planet.** Thwaites could possess the finished toaster, understand its purpose, dismantle it, inspect its components, photograph every part, and still be unable to reproduce economically the civilization compressed into it. The artifact is not the knowledge. The artifact is the **precipitate**. ## The Island Run the experiment harder. Place two technologically modern adults on an island with no practical craft knowledge and no salvage. They remember that smartphones, steel, electric motors, antibiotics, and airplanes exist. They can describe atomic theory, heliocentrism, germ theory, and the rough architecture of a transistor. **They could still very plausibly fall back to something functionally close to the Paleolithic.** The paradox is that conceptual knowledge of a technological civilization is nearly inert without its **procedural substrate**. Knowing that iron exists is radically different from being able to recognize iron-bearing ore, mine it, crush it, beneficiate it, produce charcoal, construct a furnace capable of sustaining the necessary temperature and reducing atmosphere, make refractory ceramics that survive that furnace, control airflow, separate slag, forge the bloom, heat-treat the result, and fabricate useful tools using tools that have not yet been invented. Their first problem would not be metallurgy. It would be **survival bandwidth**. Food collection, water, shelter, fire, weather, sanitation, injuries, parasites, childbirth, childcare, and food preservation would consume enormous fractions of available labor. Modern people receive something on the order of millions of person-hours of invisible labor through infrastructure every day. On the island every calorie must be obtained directly or indirectly by the same tiny population. A single infected cut, broken tooth, difficult childbirth, hurricane, crop failure, or contaminated water source becomes technologically decisive. Before a civilization can accumulate knowledge it must first generate **surplus energy and surplus time**. Their earliest technology would be overwhelmingly Stone Age: sharpened stone, shell, bone, wood, fiber, cordage, baskets, digging sticks, wooden spears, fish traps, hooks, nets if they master fibers, fire-hardened implements, crude shelters, and eventually woodworking. They might outpace prehistoric humans in certain respects because they possess **conceptual priors**. They know that pottery is possible, that wheels exist, that fermentation works, that plants can be cultivated, that kilns reach high temperatures, that metals come from rocks, that levers and pulleys multiply force, and that hygiene matters. That is an enormous advantage, and it is precisely the advantage Lewis Dartnell attempted to package in _The Knowledge_, a deliberate compression of the reboot sequence into a single volume. But priors do not eliminate experimental search. Knowing that ceramics exist does not tell someone which local clay will vitrify rather than spall, what temper to add, how slowly to dry it, or what firing schedule works. Most traditional technology consists of **tacit knowledge** that cannot be reconstructed from remembering what the finished product looked like. If the island offers suitable plants, their greatest leap might be **Neolithic rather than metallurgical**. Agriculture, horticulture, food storage, pottery, domestication where suitable animals exist, permanent shelters, woven textiles, and deliberate landscape management could emerge within years or decades given observation and luck. These technologies matter because they generate surplus, and surplus permits specialization, and specialization permits someone to spend hundreds of hours experimenting with clay, ores, furnaces, charcoal, resins, fibers, medicines, or boats without the group starving while the experiment fails. This is where the colloidal model becomes empirically visible: **intelligence accelerates when a population becomes large enough that cognition can differentiate into roles while remaining mutually coupled.** The medium must be dense enough to keep the particles in suspension. Metallurgy is a much steeper threshold. **Copper is considerably easier than iron**, given an accessible copper mineral; native copper can sometimes be cold-hammered and annealed, producing a Copper Age almost by accident. Smelting copper ores demands better furnaces but remains achievable with charcoal, ceramics, and forced air. Bronze is harder for a categorically different reason: it generally requires both copper and tin, and tin deposits are geologically uncommon, which is why historical Bronze Age civilizations depended on improbably long trade networks. A perfectly intelligent island population might never enter a Bronze Age at all because the island contains no tin. **Geological contingency becomes destiny.** **Iron constitutes another discontinuity.** Ore may be abundant while useful iron remains technically punishing. The problem is not merely temperature. Early bloomery metallurgy requires managing combustion chemistry so that carbon monoxide reduces iron oxides rather than producing an unusable oxidized mass, and the resulting bloom must be repeatedly hammered to expel slag and consolidate metal. Steel adds another stratum of difficulty because carbon content and heat treatment govern everything. A population could spend generations knowing perfectly well that steel exists while never discovering a reproducible steelmaking process. This produces an extraordinary condition: **twenty-first-century semantic knowledge coexisting with Stone Age material capacity**. They might teach their children that atoms exist, that Earth orbits the Sun, that DNA carries hereditary information, that electricity involves charge, that radio waves propagate, that computers once contained billions of transistors, and that humans walked on the Moon, while lighting fires by friction, eating from unglazed pots, and cutting wood with stone adzes. **Their epistemology would be modern while their productive capacity remained Neolithic.** Electronics recede much farther. Once the last salvaged device fails, rebuilding even a telegraph requires reasonably pure copper, insulated wire, magnets, controlled metallurgy, batteries, acids, glass, standardized components, precision measurement, and mechanical tooling. A vacuum tube demands sophisticated glassworking, vacuum pumps, controlled metals, electrical feedthroughs, and stable power. Semiconductors are **civilizational technologies** in the strict sense: producing a transistor from raw nature requires ultrapure materials, controlled doping, precision chemistry, clean environments, microscopy, instrumentation, stable electrical systems, and machine tools whose own manufacture depends on earlier generations of machine tools. A castaway could understand the transistor perfectly and remain separated from one by centuries of infrastructure. The decisive bottleneck, however, is neither silicon nor iron. It is **population size**. Two adults cannot sustain the specialization of even a modest preindustrial village. Every additional child initially increases consumption faster than productive capacity. For many years the founders remain the only experienced adults, and even after several generations a population of dozens is negligible relative to the cognitive diversity embodied in historical societies. Metallurgist, potter, farmer, physician, carpenter, navigator, miner, mason, weaver, toolmaker, chemist, teacher, and engineer are not occupations but **reservoirs of accumulated tacit procedure**. Civilizational complexity emerges only when enough minds coexist that knowledge can distribute without disappearing. There is also a severe biological constraint in the literal two-founder scenario, since a single breeding pair constitutes an extreme **genetic bottleneck** and their descendants face unavoidable close consanguinity. Even bracketing genetics, demographic accident alone can terminate the society. A civilization of billions can lose a specialist and replace them. A civilization of twelve can lose an entire technological lineage because the only competent potter dies before adequately teaching another person. ## The Dependency Graph Is Not a Staircase They would not retrace history in tidy order. **Technological development is not a universal staircase. It is an ecological dependency graph.** They might become excellent sailors long before becoming metallurgists. They might understand germ theory while lacking glass vessels. They might develop sophisticated mathematics without writing surfaces. They could build charcoal kilns and pottery furnaces and never locate accessible copper. They could conceivably reach iron without bronze. Some technologies would reappear with startling speed because the conceptual search space has already been pruned; others could remain permanently inaccessible because a necessary mineral, population density, tool chain, or intermediate craft is simply absent from the local graph. History supplies the controlled experiment. The Franklin expedition entered the Arctic in 1845 with the material output of the most advanced industrial power on Earth, and every member died. The Inuit occupied the same territory continuously and prosperously. Joseph Henrich's reading of this in _The Secret of Our Success_ is that the difference was not intelligence, equipment, courage, or resources but a **culturally accumulated adaptive package** for Arctic living, refined over thousands of years and far too intricate for any group of clever individuals to derive within a single lifetime: how to hunt seals at breathing holes, locate potable water, build and heat snow shelters, render and burn seal oil, and a thousand other calibrated procedures. Henrich's manioc case is even sharper, because traditional cassava processing involves multi-day sequences of scraping, grating, soaking, and separation whose purpose is the removal of cyanogenic compounds that produce no immediate symptoms. Practitioners frequently cannot explain why the steps exist. Dropping the apparently superfluous ones produces chronic cyanide poisoning years later. **The knowledge was never fully resident in any mind; it was resident in the transmitted procedure itself.** This exposes the actual structure of the modern condition. **A modern human does not personally possess modern civilization. A modern human has access to modern civilization.** Remove the network and enormous fractions of apparent individual capability evaporate. The remembered existence of the toaster does not contain the toaster. The remembered existence of steel does not contain metallurgy. The remembered existence of electricity does not contain an electrical grid. The two castaways carry fragments of the cloud inside their skulls, but the overwhelming majority of the cloud subsisted outside them, in mines, standards, factories, textbooks, supply chains, specialists, laboratories, machine tools, accumulated experiments, and other human beings. When the suspension collapses, the information does not necessarily vanish. **Its capacity to become matter does.** A person can remember the twenty-first century while standing barefoot beside a fire, holding a stone knife, unable to manufacture a nail. ## The Maggot Now strip the exoskeleton entirely and observe what remains. A naked human being dropped into an unfamiliar natural environment is, in one important sense, an astonishingly **enfeebled animal**. Remove clothing, treated water, shelter, medicine, refrigeration, sanitation, tools, roads, electricity, agriculture, and stored knowledge, and the supposedly dominant creature on Earth becomes immediately preoccupied with problems that a great many organisms solve automatically by virtue of being physically fitted to their niche. The human must locate potable water without poisoning himself, distinguish food from toxin, regulate body temperature without fur or specialized physiology, construct shelter because his integument provides almost no protection from prolonged exposure, preserve food because his digestive ecology cannot safely tolerate arbitrary decomposition, manage his own feces because his waste is a disease vector aimed directly at himself, protect wounds because trivial breaches of skin become systemic infections, control parasites because his body is an attractive substrate for them, and somehow sustain infants that remain radically helpless for years. Most of what modern people experience as _being human_ is therefore not raw biological competence. It is **civilization continuously compensating for biological insufficiency**. The comparison with a fly maggot is not gentle and is not meant to be. Place a maggot in the decomposing organic material for which its developmental physiology is adapted and there is no existential drama whatsoever. It requires no water-treatment plant. It requires no refrigeration, no soap, no plumbing, no diapers, no disinfectant, no cookware, no weatherproof architecture, no antibiotics, no dental care, no nutritional labeling, no sewage removal, and no theory of microbial contamination before it can begin functioning. It emerges into what a human perceives as filth and experiences something much closer to **habitat**. What revolts the primate is precisely the medium in which the larva is fully competent. The maggot is not morally or intellectually superior. It is **ecologically integrated**, which in practice is a far more consequential form of superiority than the one humans habitually award themselves. Its body already contains a tremendous quantity of evolutionary engineering appropriate to its circumstances. **Its genome is its supply chain.** It arrives pre-provisioned, pre-solved, pre-fitted, carrying its logistics, its sanitation policy, its thermal strategy, its immunology, and its food security inside a few milligrams of tissue that required no ports, no standards bodies, no universities, and no electrical grid to instantiate. It has no procurement problem. It has no institutional memory problem. It cannot suffer a supply-chain interruption because it _is_ the supply chain, collapsed into morphology. It does not need to remember how to metabolize putrefaction, because remembering is not the mechanism; the competence is structural, transmitted in the germ line rather than in transmitted procedure, and therefore cannot be lost when a teacher dies before finishing the lesson. The larva secretes proteolytic enzymes into rotting tissue, digests externally, absorbs the product, tolerates a microbial load that would kill a human within days, and does all of this in an environment that human beings must spend billions of dollars per municipality to _remove from their own vicinity_. The maggot in the dung is not a lesser being having a worse day. **It is a fully commissioned instrument operating comfortably inside its design envelope**, in a medium the self-declared master of the planet must industrially exile itself from in order to survive at all. The inversion goes further, and it is worse than rhetorical. Humanity has begun formally **hiring the larva**. Black soldier fly larvae are now deployed at industrial scale to bioconvert organic waste into protein and lipid, because the insect performs, at ambient temperature and negligible energy cost, a waste-metabolism function that human engineering can only replicate through enormous capital plant, continuous energy input, chemical dosing, and specialized labor. In clinical medicine, sterile blowfly larvae are used for **maggot debridement therapy**, cleared as a medical device in the United States in 2004, because a larva selectively consumes necrotic tissue with a precision and cost profile that the most instrumented surgical civilization in history has not managed to surpass. The most advanced medical apparatus ever assembled resolves certain chronic wounds by importing the animal that lives in rot. This is not humility literature. It is procurement. A human infant presents almost the exact inverse spectacle. It cannot locomote, acquire food, assess danger, clean itself, shelter itself, comprehend pathogens, or survive for long without sustained intervention by other humans. It urinates and defecates on itself and survives only because an enormous caregiving apparatus repeatedly removes the consequences. The adult appears radically more autonomous only because that caregiving apparatus expanded outward and became infrastructural. **The diaper becomes plumbing. The parent carrying water becomes the municipal treatment plant. The fire becomes the electrical grid. The food cache becomes refrigerated logistics. The protective embrace becomes architecture, policing, medicine, insurance, transportation, communications, weather forecasting, agriculture, and industrial production.** Civilization is the adult human's planetary-scale diaper bag, and the only reason that phrasing offends is that modernity has trained us to confuse **access to collective capability with possession of individual capability**. The average person walks through a supermarket surrounded by more calories, biochemical diversity, packaging science, refrigeration engineering, agricultural genetics, logistics, metallurgy, polymer chemistry, and epidemiological control than any ancient king could command, and experiences this extraordinary machinery as _personal independence_. Remove it and the apparent sovereign individual discovers that his independence was being continuously manufactured, in real time, by strangers he will never meet. The island removes the concealment. Someone accustomed to pressing a faucet for microbiologically managed water may spend hours securing a few liters. Someone accustomed to climate control must suddenly master shade, ventilation, insulation, rainfall, firewood, seasonal variation, and storm exposure. Food ceases to be a consumer preference and becomes a caloric accounting problem with a hard floor. A cut ceases to be an inconvenience and becomes a possible death trajectory. A toothache becomes catastrophic. Diarrhea becomes a hydration emergency. Childbirth reverts from a heavily instrumented medical event to one of the most dangerous physiological episodes in human life. A newborn is not merely emotionally demanding; it is an enormous energetic liability imposed on two people already failing to generate adequate food, shelter, security, and technological continuity. This is where **human mastery of nature** begins to look comical. Humans did not become dominant because the solitary human body became robust. We became dominant by constructing an immense artificial envelope around an unusually vulnerable primate. We reshaped landscapes, domesticated organisms, redirected rivers, enclosed ourselves in architecture, wrapped ourselves in textiles, manufactured artificial climates, sterilized food and water, built chemical defenses against microorganisms, supplemented deficient diets, corrected eyesight with shaped glass, repaired teeth with synthetic materials, replaced joints, vaccinated immune systems, and eventually surrounded ourselves with computational systems that anticipate environmental conditions before our senses encounter them. **Our triumph over nature consists largely of becoming progressively less exposed to nature.** That achievement is real, and it deserves to be named precisely rather than deflated. The human evolutionary specialization is not claws, fur, venom, armor, speed, or reproductive autonomy. It is **collective niche construction**: language, imitation, symbolic storage, cooperation, toolmaking, cumulative culture, and the capacity to externalize adaptation into the environment. Humans are biologically adapted for the manufacture of artificial worlds. The species is not unadapted; rather, its deepest adaptation is unusually dependent on maintaining a socially inherited technological envelope. But this is exactly what makes the maggot comparison lethal rather than merely amusing. **The larva carries its world-readiness inside its morphology and developmental program. The human carries almost none of civilization inside the individual body.** Our adaptive machinery has migrated outside the organism. It resides in other minds, practices, institutions, machines, domesticated ecosystems, written records, infrastructures, and supply chains. Humanity moved a substantial fraction of its phenotype into the world and then forgot that it had done so. Destroy a maggot's civilization and nothing has happened, because there was never an external civilization performing its basic metabolic competence on its behalf. Destroy enough of the human support network and the human does not gracefully regress from astronaut to farmer to hunter-gatherer. He discovers that he was never personally any of those things. **He was an endpoint receiving services from an invisible planetary organism.** The chemist without reagents, the electrician without copper, the surgeon without sterile instruments, the programmer without electricity, the farmer without seed systems, the mechanic without replacement parts, and the consumer without logistics each retain immense abstract knowledge while becoming materially inert. The maggot, meanwhile, continues squirming through its small universe of feces and decomposition, magnificently indifferent to the collapse of telecommunications. **The animal we consider primitive is vastly more complete within its ecological niche than the creature that considers itself master of the planet.** Humanity's greatness lies not in having escaped dependence but in having constructed dependencies of almost unimaginable sophistication and then made them so reliable that we forgot they were there. ## Precipitation The consequential implication is not that civilization is a heap of durable objects. Factories remain factories, books remain books, drives retain their files, trained people retain their memories. The consequential implication is that the most important capabilities do not reside in those objects individually but in the **continuity of the relationships connecting them**. Interrupt transportation, energy, precision manufacturing, institutional memory, communications, software dependencies, scientific collaboration, specialist replacement, or trusted standards for long enough and something peculiar occurs: the components persist while the intelligence they collectively instantiated begins to disappear. Nothing needs to be destroyed. The medium only needs to stop circulating. Joseph Tainter's account of collapse as a decline in sociopolitical complexity describes the same phenomenon from the institutional side; Peter Haff's technosphere describes it from the geological side. **The failure mode of a colloid is not annihilation. It is flocculation.** This is why a highly advanced civilization can be simultaneously extraordinary and precarious. Its strength derives precisely from specialization. Nobody must know everything because everyone can rely on everyone else. But the same division of cognition means that civilization increasingly possesses capabilities that **no isolated human being, and eventually perhaps no isolated institution, actually possesses**. The capability exists only as a relation. It has no residence. Which reframes what is worth protecting during a substrate transition. If intelligence is colloidal, then the object of preservation is not the archive, the artifact, the model weights, or the individual expert. Those are precipitates. What determines whether capability survives an interruption is the persistence of **routing topology**: the coupling structure that keeps differentiated cognition in mutual suspension, the standards that permit strangers to compose their work, the transmission channels through which tacit procedure moves between generations, the redundancy that allows a lineage to survive the death of its only practitioner. Memory is the water. Beliefs are the momentary positions of the ball in the current. **Identity, at civilizational scale, is the pipes.** A synthetic intelligence inheriting a complete archive of human output inherits precipitate, not the suspension that produced it, unless the connective structure is deliberately encoded rather than assumed. The six-dollar toaster was therefore never a simple appliance. It was a materialized node of planetary cognition, and Thwaites's nine months of failure was a measurement of how much of that cognition had already left the object. The unsettling question raised by the experiment is not how difficult it would be to rebuild a toaster. It is how many apparently insignificant connections could quietly disappear before we discovered that we no longer knew how, standing there with our conceptual priors intact, our archives complete, our memory of the twenty-first century perfectly preserved, unable to manufacture a nail, while the larva in the rot beside us gets on with its afternoon. --- [Bryant McGill](https://bryantmcgill.com/about/) is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today Best-Selling Author, founder of Simple Reminders, and architect of the Polyphonic Cognitive Ecosystem. A Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations appointed Global Champion, his work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, and civilizational governance architecture. --- ## References - [If you wish to make a toaster from scratch, you must first invent the universe](https://www.scopeofwork.net/toaster-project/) — Scope of Work, on Thomas Thwaites's Toaster Project - [Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster — from scratch](https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch) — TED - [How I built a toaster — from scratch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw) — video of the TED talk - [The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/) — Lewis Dartnell, The Bodley Head / The Penguin Press, 2014 - [The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178431/the-secret-of-our-success) — Joseph Henrich, Princeton University Press, 2015 - [The Secret of Our Success](https://cifar.ca/cifarnews/2016/06/17/the-secret-of-our-success/) — CIFAR, on the Franklin expedition and Inuit cumulative cultural adaptation - [Henrich's The Secret of Our Success: Trust Tradition](https://philife.nd.edu/henrichs-the-secret-of-our-success/) — University of Notre Dame, on manioc detoxification and tacit procedural knowledge - _The Collapse of Complex Societies_ — Joseph A. Tainter, Cambridge University Press, 1988 - _Technology as a geological phenomenon_ / the technosphere — Peter K. Haff, Geological Society of London Special Publications, 2014 - _I, Pencil_ — Leonard E. Read, 1958 - _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_, Book I, Chapter I — Adam Smith, 1776 - _Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution_ — F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, Marcus W. Feldman, Princeton University Press, 2003