The book carries four domains of the multiple integral. The other channels are here: language, warfare and sport, education, and science and technology.

Language is different. The evidence is that the biological capacity for language (in the specific sense of the compositional, recursive, symbolically referential system that upgrades f(·) and makes cumulative civilisational accumulation possible) evolved once. Or at least survives in a single line.

For most of human history, competition between groups of integrals was a live-or-die proposition, not a metaphor for rivalry or a pathway to improvement. The group whose settled parameter set produced better military organisation, better weapons technology, better logistical coordination, and better capacity to align the integrals of its members under extreme stress survived. The group that failed at any of these was absorbed, enslaved, or destroyed. For the overwhelming majority of the civilisational record, warfare was the most brutal and most efficient selector operating on the multiple integral.

Education is the exception. It specifies what enters the parameter sets of the next generation, under what conditions, in what sequence, with what institutions supporting the process. It is the multiple integral applying formative management to itself.

The chapter that follows is, at one level, a history of how science and technology developed. At another level it is the story of how the information environment changed (what was available to be stored, transmitted and accumulated) and how each change rebuilt what ended up in individual minds. The archive grew. The transmission channels multiplied. However, civilisation lives only in the parameter sets of the people who carry it. What technology does to minds is the question underneath the history.