Our strategy in this paper is to put old wines in new wineskins. New combinations of ideas from economics, political science, and biology may shed new light on an old and inscrutable social reality. The reality in question is the Philippine disease and its flip side, the Philippine investment puzzle. The Philippine disease (PD) is the label we use for the long-term retreat of the Philippine economy from close to the top down to the bottom of the East Asian League table over the second half of the last century.