Bingham and Souza speak on the development of the social coercion theory, which they developed together as part of a decade-long collaboration that resulted in the publication of their book “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe.” Their theory suggests that the ultimate origins of all cooperative organic units, such as human groups, ant colonies, or genomes, lies in the capacity for individual components making up those units to individually, adaptively project coercive threat.