Written by Ziyi He
Edited by Hazel Rose, with editorial input from Penguin Random House
From our earliest days, we are told of the story about our origins: the ape, the making of fire, civilization, and eventually the world as we now know it. But consider this: what if our true ancestry lies far beyond the rigid narrative of Darwinist theory? What if we serve as both the maker and carrier for multiple forms of life? What if the singular, biological life we consciously acknowledge is only part of the reality, and that the ultimate truth lies in a convergence of plural existences: the cultural and the biological lives.
This plurality of life stories is exactly what Dr. Jonanthan Loh has presented us with in his latest work, Life Story. With a rich academic background in both natural and social sciences, he flexibly draws on different schools of thought, eventually proposing an exciting new angle of understanding the world, where culture exists as a form of life in itself, growing and evolving alongside our biological selves. Recognizing them as separate yet equally crucial beings, Loh takes his readers on a journey from the ancient beginning of time, all the way to the end of life on Earth, carefully examining how multiple forces build the socio-biological complex that we are now.
Life Story opens with a nuanced exploration of the very definition of "life." Consciously maintaining a critical theoretical distance from traditional evolutionary theories, Loh constructs a highly interdisciplinary framework. By weaving together economics, biology, and archaeology perspectives, he conceptualizes life as an endlessly evolving and dynamic existence. Under this framework, life is fundamentally sustained and shaped by three interrelated forces: energy, information, and identity. Throughout Life Story, these three elements emerge as the fundamental drivers that dictate the trajectory of both cultural and biological evolution, reappearing time and time again in our long and turbulent history of development.
But Loh doesn’t just end the story there. Confronting our current age of rapid and endless technological innovations, Loh pushes his theory of life further to address the highly debated realm of artificial intelligence, introducing a new perspective to what seems to threaten the Anthropocene to its end. He argues that much like the development of culture, these agents possess the potential of exist as a life form of their own, experiencing evolutionary transitions parallel to ancient humans and preparing to venture on their own unique worlds. This understanding of life sheds new light on the contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence: rather than viewing them as disruptions, perhaps we should recognize them as inevitable continuation of the evolutionary scheme itself.
“Artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that it is possible, even likely, that information transmission and energy capture by machines will free themselves from human control. Life could begin to evolve in a third realm, entirely independently from either biology or human culture.” (Loh, 2026: 13)
To an extent, this plural vision of the Earth offers a liberating departure from the traditional human-centred approach to life history. Seeing how the world and its histories are not just shaped entirely by human developments, but rather by the life forms that humans embody, we are presented with a reality where world-making projects are not exclusive to Homo sapiens. Similar to Tsing’s argument of multispecies “assemblages” in Mushrooms at the End of the World, Loh introduces the idea of a “socio-biological complex”, where every component of the world, from microscopic cells to vast ecological systems, all collaborate to make the world that we inhabit today (Tsing, A. L. 2017).
That being said, there is scope to explore further how Loh’s theorisation of life applies across a wider range of cultural and societal contexts. While he recognises the appearance of different “branches” in the evolutionary tree of life, his analysis of societal development focuses primarily on dominant global powers. Expanding the discussion to engage more deeply with perspectives and trajectories beyond the West – particularly Indigenous histories and alternative paths through social and cultural development – could add further nuance to the book’s account of how culture evolves. These perspectives could offer illuminating “detours” from a singular narrative of development and open up further questions about the different ways societies understand and narrate the world. In this sense, Loh’s ambitious attempt to conceptualise culture provides an interesting starting point for an even broader exploration of cultural evolution.
Reference
Tsing, A. L. (2017). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton University Press.
Loh, J. (2026). Life Story: From Cells to Civilisations and Beyond. Penguin.