Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - David Sloan Wilson interview on Group Selection, Memes, and Western Values

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3fG96gvgLUDavid Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. https://twitter.com/David_S_WilsonCurt Jaimungal is directing / writing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).* * *00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:54 Is "the West" losing its values? What are those values? 00:05:24 Multi-level selection vs. Group Selection 00:11:10 The political right vs left in terms of level of evolutionary selection 00:12:51 Identity Politics framed in terms of group selection (plus a definition of Identity Politics) 00:15:04 Why can't a propitious argument made FOR Identity Politics? 00:20:05 How can we adopt a "whole Earth ethic" as a country, when others don't adopt it? 00:23:47 What do humans need to behave "selflessly" when animals get along with doing so? 00:28:16 Link between evolutionary theory and Buddhism 00:30:00 Humans are built to cooperate in small groups (not large) 00:32:49 We've selected ourselves for timidity 00:38:03 A synoptic view of "This View of Life" and the need for encompassing values 00:38:32 Classical economics (and some contemporary) is wrong and unadaptive 00:40:44 If we've been selected for altruism, why is it difficult? 00:44:54 Carl Jung and selfish acts being unselfish (because they harm you in the long-run) 00:50:24 A $1000 suit isn't to look good, but to look BETTER than the guy with a $500 suit 00:53:00 How good is altruism as a motivational agent for behavior? 00:55:54 Tribalism is the answer, not the problem 00:57:05 Problems with Social Constructionism 00:59:18 Postmodernism and David Sloan Wilson's issues with it 01:03:28 Women's studies / LGBTQ studies / etc. utilizing "tribal circuitry" 01:06:53 The "Ultimatum Game" in evolutionary psychology 01:09:55 On this "tribal circuitry" again 01:17:40 On the Nordic countries and the "homogeneity" argument 01:23:58 Is communism more adaptive than capitalism? 01:28:31 "Tight and loose" compared to totalitarian systems (existential security) 01:31:38 Which memes are prius to liberalism? 01:36:28 Are the Inuit less adapted than the White Europeans who invented centralized heating? 01:42:37 Is virtue as "honesty / forthrightness / generosity" a human universal given most studies are done on Westerners? 01:45:10 Is David Sloan Wilson a moral relativist? 01:47:38 The effects of arcane disciplines in Universities spreading outward to the culture 01:49:47 Evolutionary theory as a unifying language for the disparate fields of science 01:54:05 "When does the left go too far?" 01:56:18 Memes that last so long they affect our evolution 01:57:26 Dawkin's concept of "gene" was problematic, and thus so is "meme" 02:00:06 Jordan Peterson vs Susan Blackmore on memes and Jung 02:02:10 Chomskyan grammar and Pinker's language instinct is wrong 02:04:06 On Victor Huang's "innovation oasis"

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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. So a group that functions well, basically can behave selfishly with respect to other groups. You haven't solved the problem of selfishness. You just elevated it to the level of the group where it can take place with more destructive force than ever. Professor David Sloan Wilson is one of the world's foremost cognoscentes in evolutionary theory.

He's almost single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the idea of group selection, at least he's responsible for the popularization of it, versus individual selection. Now, individual selection was the dominant paradigm of the 20th century. Although he's made some amendments to group selection and now calls it multi-level selection theory. he's made some amendments to group selection and now calls it multi-level selection theory. As usual, these are often technically dense, and I expect that there's a certain level of familiarity with the material or the terminology, such as existential security, Victor Huang's innovation oasis, as it relates to evolutionary theory. And then if for whatever reason you don't know the material, you don't know the terminology, then I expect that you'll look it up because

you're far brighter than most podcasts give you credit for. This conversation was filmed approximately a year and a half ago, way before COVID, for a documentary called Better Left Unsaid, which is all about when does the left go too far, politically speaking, because it seems like the right, it's fairly clear when the right goes too far. This documentary is slated for release in 2021, and if you want to follow it, the links are in the description. Generally speaking, if there's a product of mine, like I helped create it, and it's more than six months old, then I'm abjectly mortified by it because I can only see the flaws in it. I wasn't happy with the quality of it, so I took it down, but many of you have emailed me as well as reviewing some of the comments. It seems like

plenty of you enjoyed it a significant amount. Maybe it's one of the better conversations out there with David Sloan Wilson. So hopefully you enjoy it just as much now. There's a bit of extra footage that I've included. Enjoy. Hello, Professor. Thank you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate you inviting us into your home. No problem. My pleasure. All right, let's get straight to it. Do you think that we're losing values in the West? I Think we're in a crisis condition so that's a loss of something but whether we Call that loss of values. I think is

Probably too simplistic. We still have values, of course, and I think that those values appear to be threatened. And so that's why we're in crisis mode. But I think to go further than that, we need to probe questions such as the West. What is it? What does it represent? What values does it represent? Are we talking about democracy? Are we talking about enlightenment values? Are we talking about individuals, such concepts of freedom, and so on? What can be said, I think, is that the Western system is in some sense not working. And it's ceasing to become an exemplar for others.

And so that is very concerning. Can you explain what are some of the values that you see that are essential, that are going away? I'm just going to move this guy. This is a fly. Yeah, right. It's disrupting your flow of thought.

Right. It likes you. It likes you. It likes you. It's group selected. Let's see if we can try to terminate it if we need to. That's not very

group selected of you. Oh, yes it is. So that question was what again? Okay. What are these values? So you mentioned that we're losing

some values. Maybe it's democracy you posed. Maybe. Maybe it's enlightenment values. What do you see are the values that when we lose them, we're put in a crisis mode, as you put it? Well, at some point, I know we're going to get to multilevel selection, which has to

do with basically how do we envision society? Do we envision it expansively, such as the whole world? Are we nationalistic? Do we view it as our nation first? Or do we view it in a more factional sense, our party first, for example, or perhaps even smaller? And a lot of what we mean by the left and the right actually means their choice of unit. The right nowadays is restricting itself to some tribe basically and the so-called left is you might say more expansive, more global in its thinking, but even globalism itself is problematic because I think that there's types of globalism. And the type of globalism that's represented by capitalism, global capitalism, is one which is not working. It's global, but it's not working for the benefit of everyone. So I think that's part of the crisis, is that

capitalism, which is the system that we associate with the West, has become deeply problematic. When we talk about such things as socialism and capitalism, these are the modes of political philosophy in the past, there's a sense in which neither one works, and we need to come upon something that's new that does work. I believe that evolutionary theory provides the key to a form of governance which can work at the global scale and all smaller scales. That's part of what multilevel selection is about. Can you explain the difference between multilevel selection and group selection?

Is it just a rebranding? Let's talk about the difference between multilevel selection and group selection. In the process, let's define for viewers who are not already knowledgeable about this kind of stuff what some of the issues are at stake. So going all the way back to Darwin, Darwin thought that his theory could explain all aspects of design that had been attributed to a creator. Everything that works has a functional basis. He thought that had been attributed to creator. He thought he could explain this with his theory of natural selection. But upon further thought,

he came up against a dilemma, which is, if you think of anything that we associate with morality, if I asked you to define the morally perfect individual, you would use adjectives such as altruistic, loving, giving, honest, brave. All of these are things that benefit others and one society as a whole and often involve some cost to the moral individual. And so when Darwin contemplated the moral individual compared to his or her opposite, the immoral individual, well it's the immoral individual that has the advantage in the struggle for existence. There's something associated with all forms of goodness that's vulnerable to all forms of evil. And so Darwin could not explain everything associated with virtue as a product of natural

selection unless he added something. And that something was to think about natural selection at a slightly larger scale. So while altruism is vulnerable to selfishness within any given social group, it's also the case that a group of altruists, a group of virtuous people, will robustly outcompete a group of people who cannot cohere. And so now we do have a process of natural selection that can favor virtue, but it's a process that takes place at the level of groups, not at the level of competition among individuals within groups. And so there's group selection is two-level selection. It looks at what happens within groups, competition among individuals within groups, and then

what happens with competitions among groups in some kind of multi-group population, a group inhabited by many tribes, as Darwin talked about it. So you could call that two-level selection. Now, multi-level selection simply expands that. It goes up and down. Going down, we can talk about genes within individuals. So a gene can succeed at the expense of other genes within the same organism. We call that cancer. And there's many examples of that kind of selfish gene. Or genes can evolve by

cooperating with other genes in the organism, in which case natural selection is taking place at the level of organisms out-competing other organisms. So it's the same dynamic that I just described, except it's genes in organisms. Then we get to organisms in groups. And do you know there's groups of groups of groups? So we could talk about ecosystems, for example, or microbiomes. It turns out that you are not just a homogenous collection of genes. You are a planet inhabited by many thousands of microbial species

numbering in the trillions of individuals. And when you're selected, when you survive and reproduce better than others, in part it's due not to your genes but to your microbiome. And the good microbiomes are being selected along with the good genes, and they're interacting with each other. In other words, what we think of as individual selection is actually group selection when you think about the collection of cells.

It turns out that microbiomes is a game changer because before we were kind of on to that concept of microbiome, it seemed that we were a relatively uniform collection of genes. We start out as a single egg and then those cells divide and divide and divide, but they all have the same genes. Well, not really because actually mutations are occurring with every cell division. And by the time you get to my age, do you know, you know, I'm a very diverse entity at this point. Even my genes, thanks to mutations, have resulted in all sorts of, they're called neoplasms, but they're basically cell lines that have proliferated more than the normal cell lines. And that's what cancers are, basically.

But anyhow, for the most part, except for that, then all of our genes are identical in all of our cells. So that makes us a pretty potent unit of selection. That made individual level selection to be a very, very strong force. Well, it still is. I mean, nothing has changed except the realization that we're not such homogenous entities after all. We're some kind of ecosystem. And It's actually hard to know who's calling the shots. This is one of the very interesting developments that have taken place over the last 30 years, which have revolutionized the study of evolution. That's just one that we'll

be covering during this conversation. You mentioned that the difference between the right and the left is which level of group should we select for. Can you give me some examples? Something else about the right and the left. The standard definition of the right and the left is conservative, progressive, keeping the old ways, or doing something new. That's the standard definition. If you go back 30 years ago, then the debates would not be about levels. Everyone would be an American. The question

is, what should America do? Or what should the world do? Should we stick to the old ways or should we do something new? And so this fragmentation of social identities is something which I think is—you might even question whether it falls along left-right lines. I think to an extent it would, but when you look at the left, for example, and identity politics and so on, then what you find is also a fragmentation of social identities. It's along different lines, but it's still LGBT or all these various interest groups, or you might say social identities, in which you identity—we do have to do something about this fly down we can't get rid of it actually yeah yeah hold on just minute can I get up yeah yeah I have actually multiple ways of getting demonetized instantly

you are defining what identity politics is and then you were about to say what the problems were. Can we get back to defining what identity politics is to people who are unfamiliar? You said something interesting, which is that it doesn't seem like it's the left. I also want you to explain what you mean by it doesn't fall on the left-right spectrum, identity politics. Okay. Identity politics is when a person has a very strong social identity that trumps other identities. Actually, we all have many identities.

One thing you can say about our species, which stretches back to the very beginning, is that people have always functioned in multiple groupings. Back in the old days, it was called fission-fusion societies. I'm talking about the hunter-gatherer, our ancestral environments. We might be in family groups, we might be in hunting groups, we might be in gathering groups, we might gather in tribes. Always we do things in different groupings.

Do you know we're so good at that, that we can adopt the identity of that grouping? When I go to church, then I'm adopting a certain set of values and norms. If then I go bowling, there'll be another set. You go to church? No, no, I'm not religious at all. If I'm in the military, then that will be something else. And so we always have had multiple identities, and must, because we live in so many different contexts. But when we talk about identity politics, then a particular identity sort

of trumps the others. And when that identity is a relatively narrow identity, such as I identify myself as a white American or a LGBT or a Democrat or whatever, if that's my primary identity, then it's very easy to see other, well, that basically creates an us and separates the us from the them, and very little good can come of that. Okay. Here's something interesting. One, you said that it was a narrow identity. I want to know why some people who pride themselves as being gay or pride themselves as being black or pride themselves as being black or pride themselves as being white would say, that's not narrow at all. Why are you calling

it narrow? So I want to know why are you calling it narrow? And second, you said that it's us versus them. But as far as I know, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, in group selection, group selection works when the group pressures are higher than the individual pressures for selection. But this sounds like us versus them is good for group selection. Well, it is good for group selection at a small scale. But part of the dynamic of multilevel selection is that when I talked about selfishness within groups being bad for the group and the need for group selection for the group to function well,

that gets repeated up the multi-level hierarchy. So a group that functions well basically can behave selfishly with respect to other groups. You haven't solved the problem of selfishness. You've just elevated it to the level of the group where it can take place with more destructive force than ever. destructive force than ever. So that's the sense in which if your primary identity is X, and that's what you're most eager to preserve and to advance, then that can cause you to become opposed to other identities. And now you're back into a conflictual situation. The only solution to that is to have a primary identity which is global, ultimately global. That's why at the end of the day, this speaks to the need of creating a whole earth ethic, basically.

Our group, our primary group, should be the whole earth. And our smaller identities don't disappear, but they need to be coordinated for the benefit of the largest entity. but they need to be coordinated for the benefit of the largest entity. If our main entity, the thing we care most about, is anything smaller than that, and Trump is a great example, America first, he says. And of course, he'd have to add on any kind of world stage that if every nation tries to put themselves first, then that will work out well for the whole planet. He has to say that, or otherwise he'd just be immoral on the world stage.

But the fact is, is that if you have a smaller identity, no matter how large or small, if it's below the global planetary level, and that's the thing that you truly care about, then almost always that's going to be disruptive higher up the scale, disruptive for the planet. Almost always? Is there instances in which it's not? Theoretically, it is possible for you to do something which benefits you compared to everyone else in your group and benefits the group at the same time.

That can happen, but it's very seldom because of the basic nature of trade-offs. In order to benefit the group, it requires doing certain things. And those things are typically very different than what it takes to maximize your relative position within the group. And I often say this, one of my favorite ways of explaining this is with the game of Monopoly. We all know the game of Monopoly. So imagine playing that game. And of course, the goal there is to capture all the real estate and drive everyone else bankrupt. That's the goal of Monopoly, is to maximize your relative advantage within the group. So imagine playing that game.

And now imagine playing a monopoly tournament. So now many games are in play, and the trophy goes to the team that collectively develops their property the fastest. I've changed the rules of the game. And when I do this in front of an audience, I ask them, and I'll ask the viewers of this video, so imagine playing that tournament, and isn't it the case that almost every decision you make playing in a tournament would be different than the decisions you would make playing the single game of Monopoly? There's your trade-off right there.

That which is required for the group to function as a coordinated unit is different than that which is required for you to maximize your relative advantage within the group. So it's seldom the case that the same behavior would contribute to both goals. that the same behavior would contribute to both goals. That's the sense in which basically serving one identity is going to create problems for the still higher level good. So there's a very, very strong scientific argument for a whole earth ethic, and I think that all by itself is a profound insight that emerges from evolution. Would that work if only America adopted, or only one country or one continent adopted the whole earth ethic?

Would that still work if everybody else is acting selfishly? If only one did, no. And here's another insight that when we talk about these large, large scale things like global things, we can get a lot of insight by shrinking them down and seeing their similarity to the dynamics of individuals and small groups. So I'll put your question, I'm going to shrink your question. How do you?

In a smaller group, if there's only one cooperator and everyone else is a defector, can cooperation succeed under those conditions? No, it cannot. But how many cooperators do you need? And game theory tells us, there's a whole literature on this, that actually you don't need too many cooperators to swing things in the direction of cooperation. Why is that? Well, for one thing, the cooperators can cluster.

They can interact with each other and avoid the depredations of non-cooperators. They can establish norms. And very often people are willing to do something that's for the good of the group as long as they can establish norms that punish non-cooperative behavior. Here's a good example. Let's say that there's something dangerous that needs to be done by one person in order to save the group. Maybe someone will volunteer, but if they don't, let's draw straws. What's drawing straws? It randomizes the probability that you're going to be the one that has to do the dangerous task. It's fair. It's fair. So we'll probably agree to draw

straws, even if we might not agree just to volunteer to do something. And so there's all kinds of things that can be established, even at the level of small groups, that can cause everyone to cooperate, even if you're starting out with a relatively small fraction of cooperators. Now we can, having thought about this at the small scale, we can enlarge it back up to the global scale. And you ask the question, if only one nation does this, will it work? No, it won't.

But if there's a critical mass, if there's only one corporation, will it work? No. But if there's a critical mass, if there's B Corps, we just learned now that the business council, this group of business CEOs from all of the global corporations has met and made a very important decision. They've decided that they'll no longer behave just to maximize short-term profits for their shareholders. They've decided that that actually maybe wasn't such a good idea. Maybe they should have some more sense of responsibility towards their stakeholders, not their shareholders, their employees, their supply chain, their customers. their supply chain, their customers, this fiction that by maximizing the profits for their shareholders, then that some invisible hand thing takes place and it works out for

the global good is just bullshit, which we've known scientifically for a long time. Finally, the business council has decided maybe that's right, maybe they should do that. Okay, so now we have some people that are willing to function, excuse me, some corporations that are willing to function in cooperation. Maybe something can come of that. And the same thing with nations. Is there something different about humans or different about our times that we need this whole earth ethic? Because looking outside right now maybe there's a cricket and

it's not thinking about the whole earth it's just thinking it might be thinking about how do I have sex and how do I selfishly I don't care about my neighbors I just want to I want to procreate. Is there something about us now in our times that we need a whole earth ethic? Because that guy doesn't have a whole earth ethic. So what's different about us just our power our nuclear power so there's a number of important things to say about that by the way is your questions going to be part of the video yeah okay hello hello testing great okay and that one's there, and that's great. Great, that's your phone?

No, that's Peter's. That's my phone, yeah. Oh, that's your phone, okay, okay. Okay, so the question was, what the heck is different about us compared to some animals? Because I'm sure animals aren't thinking, how do I benevolently help the earth? They don't even have a conception of the earth. But yet, you're advocating for a whole earth ethic for us. So there's, I think, two main things to say about that. There's a number of major ideas that are still quite prevalent, but are pre-Darwinian.

They're false ideas. One idea in economics is that there's some kind of natural order that if everyone just pursues their self-interest, then they're led as if by an invisible hand to benefit the common good. That implies that there's some kind of self-organized system that works well and that we unknowingly play our parts. So that's one idea. But there's a parallel idea in

biology which is sort of harmony in nature, that nature left by itself strikes some kind of balance. And so ecosystems, for example, have some sort of design or harmony to them. That's an idea in biology which is quite similar to ideas in economics, and they're both profoundly false, false. Evolution doesn't make everything nice. And so if you look out there at the great outdoors, what you find is ecosystems, collection of species, and those species are all pursuing their adaptive strategies.

All the crickets are trying to get laid, and the fish are trying to get laid, and. All the crickets are trying to get laid, and the fish are trying to get laid, and the birds and the bees are trying to get laid and survive, and so on and so forth. How does that settle out at the level of the whole collective, the ecosystem? Not necessarily harmonious. And nowadays, and so the balance of nature, that concept, is something which has been rejected. the balance of nature, that concept, is something which has been rejected. And what is more true is often called ecological regimes. And that, I think, is so evocative because if you look at what the word regime means in human social systems, when we call something a regime,

there has to be a bit of stability about it. A regime is something which is going to hang around a while. We wouldn't call it a regime if it was just transient. So it's stable. But is it a good regime? A bad regime? Is it a corrupt regime? A despotic regime? An enlightened regime? Its stability does not tell us about its quality as some kind of system that we might want to live in. And so what you find in nature are regimes. There's collections of species that are kind of stable. But are they good? Do they recycle nutrients well or poorly? And what you find is that many ecological regimes, many communities that are out there, are despotic in human terms.

There's one dominant species that's bullying the other species, poisoning its environment, let us say. And the same is true for single-species societies, many social species. If you look at their societies, they're horrible societies in human terms. They're just dominated by individuals trying to—they're like the single game of Monopoly. We'd never want to live in those societies. And so nature does not provide some kind of simplistic model of harmony and cooperation. Not single species social systems and not multi-species communities. There are in nature some ecosystems and some single species communities that work extraordinarily well as societies. We have our microbiomes.

We also have the social, and we also have the social insects that we've known about for a long time. Your ants, your bees, your termites, your wasps. Those function as colonies extremely well because they've been selected at the colony level. And so I think really if we search for a religious doctrine, it should be the Buddhist doctrine, the Four Noble Truths, which begins with life is suffering. If we look out there in human life and in the biological world, we see primarily suffering.

Why? Because of greed and striving. We're all striving to accomplish our lower level goals, and that's what's producing suffering higher up the scale. Is there a solution? Yes. Is there a path? Yes, there is. And what might that be? It is basically a recognition that if we want to benefit the whole system, then we have to lose our attachment to the self, and we have to work on behalf of the whole system. There's actually quite an impressive mapping of Buddhist thought onto evolutionary thought. That's a very interesting thing to think about. Got him. Wow. That on camera? Yeah. Okay, so let's get back to this. So you said that, if I'm hearing correctly,

there are regimes, in other words, stable groups. And just because they have lasted for a long time, it doesn't mean good. It doesn't mean they are good. And good is defined as the opposite of bad, and bad is defined as selfishly power hungry, something like that. If you look at human history, you find basically multi-level selection operating at various scales. What defines us as a species is our ability to cooperate at the scale of small groups. discoveries of recent evolutionary thought is that we are a eusocial species, in a sense, or an ultrasocial species. In some ways, we are like a beehive. That's how cooperative we are in small groups. So we achieved a degree of within-group harmony, always protected, always guarded, and vigilant. It's not as if we're noble savages. It's that we're able to hold each other in check. We have a very strong sense that we're moral equals, basically, and that therefore

you shouldn't beat up on me. That's a bad thing to do when we have the collective ability to gang up on would-be bullies. And so now that puts us into team mode. And the whole concept of morality, the whole concept of morality could be understood as a set of mechanisms that cause us to function cooperatively in relatively small groups. And so nevertheless, when it came to between-group interactions, anything goes. And anything means not just warfare, but trade and forms of cooperation, and the full range of ecological interactions that take place between species also took place among small human groups, including warfare, big time warfare. So competition between groups, violent or otherwise, is joined at the hip with cooperation

within groups. So suffering didn't go away, it just took place more at the level of between group interactions than within group interactions. Can you explain that suffering didn't go away, just took place at the level of between group interactions? So the individual wasn't suffering? What do you mean? Well, individuals… One person involved in this, Richard Wrangham, who is one of the anthropologists who studied

chimpanzees for a long, long time, has a new book out called The Goodness Paradox, a great book. Not as good as this view of life. Thank you, thank you. He talks, among other things, about self-domestication, which is a fascinating topic in its own right. When we domesticate species, we select them mostly for their tameness. But do you know a lot of other stuff comes along with it? There's a whole fascinating story about how selecting for the behavior of tameness

also selects for all sorts of physiological traits. And that's kind of another story. But in the same way that we've domesticated many species, we've also domesticated ourselves. Basically, we've selected ourselves for tameness. Another way to retell the story that I just told is that in a group where there's a relatively equal balance of power, people hold each other in check, then if you're a big bastard that's trying to get your way, ultimately we'll just kill you. And before that, we'll have other sanctions which are going to limit your reproductive success, and that's like selecting ourselves for tameness.

So now we are docile in a way that chimps aren't. Wrangham, who should know, says that if you look at the level of aggression within groups, the kind of interaction where I just fly into a rage and just beat the shit out of you, and we're a member of the same community, that happens in a chimp community a hundred or a thousand times more frequently than in a small-scale society. If you live within a small-scale human society, you'd never see that. You see people getting along pretty well. That means they're not imposing suffering on each other within groups very much. Very much. Yet they're still suffering when we go on a raid to another group and then we kill somebody and steal their women and we do all that kind of,

or maybe exterminate them entirely. So yes, there's suffering and it's self-imposed suffering, but it's being imposed at the level of groups. Now if you look at the last 10,000 years of human history, and here my colleague Peter Turchin takes over with his book Ultra Society, the last 10,000 years of… What's it called again? It's called Ultra Society, How 10,000 Years of Warfare Turned Us into the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. What you find is basically the same thing at ever increasing scales. With the advent of agriculture and the fact that we're a cultural species,

the whole genetic evolution of cultural evolution, and we actually need to be getting to that because it gets to such things as archetypes and memes and the whole fact that in our species there's a cultural stream of evolution in addition to a genetic stream of evolution. And all of that is a matter of cooperation also. So if we didn't evolve to be a cooperative species, we could not have evolved the ability to transmit large amounts of learned information across generations through symbolic systems, systems of symbolic thought. So everything distinctive about our species, including our capacity for symbolic thought and our ability to transmit large amounts of information across

cultures, all of that was only made possible thanks to the fact that we became highly cooperative. We cooperated in physical activities and we cooperated in mental activities. As a result, we began to generate our own resources, scale of human society increased, and now that's been a process that's taken us to the present moment of huge societies of hundreds of millions and even billions of individuals operating in a way that is amazingly cooperative. On an average day, if you go out, luckily for us, you won't see people imposing a lot of suffering.

Well, you won't see anything because there's nothing for miles out here. Another answer to your question is that the scale of society has become so big that basically we're now having a planetary impact that we didn't have before. There's no escape from that. That of course is something that cultural evolution has been building towards. But now, more than ever before, we are having a planetary impact that requires us to have a whole Earth ethic. Before that, there would be externalities, and they would not be quite as dominating

as they are now. But now we're really in a situation where if we don't act at the planetary scale, then we're toast. So that is what's in front of us. I'm just going to try and restate what you said. We grew up in small social groups, so we've been selected somewhat for cooperative behavior. Now our small groups became medium-sized groups and then large groups, and now we're so technologically powerful that our mistakes are causing the destruction of the entire planet, and therefore we need to adopt a new ethic.

Is that a good summation or is there something missing? It's not a bad summation. A new ethic is basically a more global ethic. I think that quite an important thing to say, because it's in contrast to orthodox economic thought. If you take someone like Friedrich Hayek, he would say that—who was actually very evolutionary for his day—that there was basically we have our tribal values, you know, we operate in small groups and we have that whole kind of system. But on a modern economic system has to be something very different. And that's what the market economy is. And

that's where the invisible hand comes from, the idea that we can all pursue our lower-level self-interest, and it'll magically benefit the common good. Now, although market economies are huge and very important and so on, although they have to be much better regulated, make no mistake, really what it seems is that we need to take those tribal values and we need to scale them up. They're not different. They just have to be operating at a larger scale, at the level of nations and global corporations within the global village, for example. So their interactions are a little different than interactions of individuals in a group. As I said earlier in this conversation,

let's take these big problems and shrink them down, see what they look like for individuals in a smaller group. Then we can expand them back up. And what you see, they're the same problem. And so we need to, we have to have a moral system. That moral system has to include all of us. It has to be a planetary moral system. We have to be solid citizens ourselves, and then we have to hold others in check. And we have to do that as nations and multinational corporations. And we use the genius of technology and the internet to give us a nervous system. We need it. It's essential for that. Yes, there has to be market processes, but they have to be much better regulated and oriented towards the common good. So it's the same way of thinking,

the same values. The great challenge is to expand their scale. This may sound foolish, but why is it a challenge if we were selected for it? Why is it natural to us? That is actually a deeper question than you might think. Maybe you thought I already thought it was a deep question. But I think all my questions are deep questions. Here's, I think, a fascinating question that might seem tangential but can relate. Do women have instincts for breastfeeding? Isn't it curious that when bottle feeding became available, so many women jumped to

say, well, that's a good idea. They didn't have any sort of instinct for breastfeeding, it seems. Well, that actually makes sense when you realize that there was never any alternative. So why do you need an instinct for something where there's no alternative? There's a sense where life in small groups, do we have instincts for living in small groups? In a sense, yes, but there's also a sense in which there was never any alternative until the last 10,000 years. So now, and this is what I spend most of my time doing scientifically, is studying groups of all sizes, including small groups. But do you know that if you look at small groups

in modern life and you ask how well do they function, they vary hugely. They don't all function well. If you put people in a small group, they don't always function. They don't just click like that as if we have instinct. As if we're naturally predisposed to it. What's that? As if we're naturally predisposed. As if we're naturally—no, we are, make no mistake. When we get to archetypes and evolutionary psychology, this is—I mean, it's not a black and white thing. Yes, we do have instincts that are brought into play.

We do have a strong sense of morality, for example, of egalitarianism. We don't like to be pushed around. When we see misbehavior, we tend to punish it, at least some of us do. And these things are, to some extent, sort of out of the box. So we have a very complicated, evolved psychology that includes the psychology of moral systems and so on and so forth. But for some reason, that is not enough for when you compose a group in modern life for it just to immediately click into place. One reason is, of course, is that we've always been playing the multi-level game. Our evolved psychology basically puts us in the position of functioning in cooperative mode or exploitation mode. There's more than one way to survive and reproduce,

by cooperating or by exploiting. So everyone to some extent has plan A and plan B. And when you see a group isn't functioning well, it's often because some individuals within the group are getting their way. Working for them is just not working for everyone else. And so that's the dynamic of multi-level selection, weighing in favor of the lower-level disruptive process. Basically, people are playing and winning the single game of Monopoly. They're not playing in a Monopoly tournament. But it's sufficiently unstated, unexamined, basically,

that you can go to any kind of group and you can examine it. You can look at the variation and then you can make it function better by basically cultivating a more explicit awareness about evolution, multi-level selection and so on and so forth to then get the group to function in monopoly tournament mode more than single game of Monopoly mode. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson

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you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything have a couple questions one is a slightly Jungian question Jung was asked I think it was Carl Jung why can't I just do what's good for me at the expense of others and then Carl Jung's like what give me an example he can't he said you can't do that he said that you have the more you realize that you're inextricably linked with the world well actually that's correct the more you realize that the better your life will be and the person said why why can't I just eat Cheetos and play video games and then he said that's not actually good for you. That's good for you,

maybe for one week, or maybe two weeks, or maybe a month. But the longer you look out in time, you have to take into account other people because you're going to interact with them. And then you also have to take into account your environment because you're going to interact with your environment. And so you have to act in what would traditionally be seen as noble or what you call virtuous, if you want to benefit yourself across time. So it just matters, like you were talking about, the corporations, if they prioritize short-term profits, that's not necessarily good. But you included a key word, short-term.

So what if you think about long-term? So then the question is, how long is long? But my question is, in this Jungian sense, what he was saying, you look out across time. Let's say your lifespan, let's say 60 years, maybe even 100, you incorporate your grandchildren into it, then is it not true that the more selfishly we act, the more it jives with what's good for the group, because I can't just screw you, that's actually not good for me, I'm going to have a bad reputation. not good for me, I'm going to have a bad reputation.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here. You're attributing to Jung something which actually gets replicated again and again and again, this idea that the most enlightened form of self-interest is cooperation. That if you're selfish in the pejorative sense of the word, benefiting yourself at the expense of others, well, that's not even going to work out for you over the long term, so really you should be a cooperator. And so that's a line of thought which has been replicated again and again and again. And of course, it's very normative. Most recently, I've encountered this in the writing of Alexei de Tocqueville, the French social theorist who visited America in the 1830s and commented, compared his nation of France with the new democratic experiment. His phrase was, self-interest greatly understood. It was quite fascinating because he actually

was noting a cultural trend. It was very prescient that in the old aristocratic days when people talked about virtue and sacrifice and things like that, they actually did not frame it in terms of enlightened self-interest. But now, Tocqueville said, with all of the democratic revolutions in America and France and so on, increasingly everything was being framed in terms of self-interest. We don't do anything unless we see it as a form of self-interest. We don't do anything unless we see it as a form of self-interest. And that being the case, we have to distinguish between self-interest rightly understood, which is cooperation, as opposed to self-interest wrongly understood, which leads to

all kind of shitty outcomes. So Tocqueville was saying exactly the same thing that you represented Jung as saying. And it's been said a thousand times before. So basically… Is there something wrong with it? Hold on. It's an argument for cooperation framed in terms of self-interest. And in order to do that, it must distinguish between different kinds of self-interest, the rightly understood

kind and the wrongly understood kind. Even Ayn Rand, the high priestess of selfishness, distinguished between rational and irrational forms of self-interest. You can't talk about self-interest on any kind of stage without actually making this distinction and talking about moral forms of self-interest as opposed to immoral forms of self-interest. So it's good advice, you might say, that if everyone took it, then they'd cooperate. But really, it does not describe... I mean, it fails in a number of ways.

Other than a good advice, a feel-good story, a nice aspirational narrative, it fails in a number of ways. Other than a good advice, a feel-good story, a nice aspirational narrative, it fails in a whole bunch of ways. Let me try to begin to list them. For one thing, it ignores the fact that evolution is based on relative fitness. that evolution is based on relative fitness. When it comes to evolution, it does not matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms. Only compared to others in your vicinity. And the whole appeal of enlightened self-interest,

as you described it through Jung, I described it through Tocqueville, is basically framed in terms of absolute self-interest. If your self-interest is rightly understood, this will work out better for you than if it's self-interest wrongly understood. You if you do this will do better than you if you don't do that. That's not relative fitness. The question is how well am I going to do compared to my competitors, others in my vicinity? That's the question we should be asking?

No, it's the question of the way the human mind is. And so when people actually operate, very often they're trying to get positional advantage. Okay, that's how we operate. And it's not wrong. I mean, basically, we do need to worry about our relative fitness. That means that what's enlightened is to make sure that we all do something that's cooperative. Okay, we're all working towards cooperative solutions. Make no mistake about that. But when you look at how the human mind actually operates, there's two things you can say about it. It privileges positional advantage and short-term gain as opposed to long-term gain.

We've all learned about discounting the future, that a benefit now is going to be more important than that same benefit delayed in time. Why is that? Because I might not live that long. And so especially when you put people in precarious situations, existentially insecure situations, their minds are going to privilege immediate gain. And if you tell them… Immediate immediate gain. And if you tell them— Immediate relative gain. Immediate relative gain.

And if you tell them they'll be better in the long term, it's bullshit as far as what they need to do and what their minds are telling them to do in order to survive another day. In order to survive another day. One of my colleagues, Robert Frank, an economist, a well-regarded economist, wrote a book called The Darwin Economy, in which he makes this very point. He says, a hundred years from now, I hope it doesn't take that long, Darwin, not Adam Smith, will be regarded as the father of economics. And the main difference is that economists, as I've just said, they posit the rational actor, homo economicus, the utility maximizer, only wants to maximize its absolute utility, not in reference to anyone else,

as if we only want to be wealthy in some absolute sense, not in comparison to anyone else. Well, no one works like that. The only reason you want to have a $1,000 suit is to look better than someone with a $500 suit. Life is about relative advantage, and yet economic theory is not framed that way. So that's the sense in which an appeal to enlightened self-interest, it's a nice aspirational message but really it misses all of the complications that we've just been talking about. Do you mean to say it's correct in that if we followed it, it would be great, it's just not motivating enough? You said it sounds nice in terms of aspirations or inspirations, but it's not,

it's not, it doesn't capture. Think of it in game theory terms. And this, this, this holds for all efforts to make people more cooperative, whether you frame it in terms of self-interest or not. If we encourage people to be altruistic or cooperative and we motivate it in any way that moves them, it might be an appeal to self-interest or it might be some other appeal to empathy or whatever. So then they go out in the world and they're nice. But it turns out that the people with whom they interact are not necessarily nice. So what happens then? What happens on the basis of the advice that you gave them? They're going to become losers because you release them into a social environment in which cooperation is not the most successful strategy.

And so we have to be smarter than that. It's actually unethical to counsel someone to be nice and then put them in a social environment where niceness doesn't pay. So this is why we have to be much more systemic. We have to create social environments that actually causes niceness to win the Darwinian contest. And if we don't do that, my colleagues and I call this

declawing the alley cat. You don't take an alley cat, remove its claws, and put it back in an alley. Why would you do something like that? And why would the cat actually take your advice? And yet if you create

a social environment that actually protects niceness, which is what a moral system does, then most people will take a look at that and they'll say, okay, it's safe to be nice now, and they'll be nice. Are you using nice as a synonym for virtue or using nice just let me give? Cooperative strategies. Nice means is that I'm going to do well by you. I'll be a cooperator. Because it could also mean courage,

standing up for what you think is right, not being a pushover. All of those things. Giving when you think you should. Nice is not like a patsy strategy. Nice can be, there's tough forms of niceness, but no, it's what's best for all of us. That's my wife coming. That's all right, That's all right.

Do you want to see if you can get that flying? Sure. Because you're an expert at that. I think that's your true calling. Actually, it's my wife who's the real expert. She studies birds, and she actually catches birds in nets like this. It's like Quidditch. It's just amazing.

I was wondering about the bucks. What's that? The bird bucks. Yeah. Why don't we take a little break and... Sure. You mentioned that we would need to take our tribalism and apply it to the globe. Now, when I hear people say what's wrong with us, it's tribalism.

That the left, the radical left and the alt-right are taking us to our tribal roots. But you're saying tribalism might be the answer. So are we using the same word to describe two different things, or do you have a different view? I mean, there's many ways to skin the somatic cat, but I think that tribalism is just fine. As long as we regard ourselves as part of a global tribe, then there we are. We do need a strong sense of us. as part of a global tribe, then there we are. We do need a strong sense of us. Let it be everyone and also nature as well. Let that be our tribe. I think that might be one of the most intuitive ways to describe it. We're so flexible about our social identities. That's

another thing that needs to be said. All of our social identities are socially constructed. We imagine our groups, and then we function within them. And so that means it's not so much of a stretch of the imagination to think of ourselves as part of a global tribe. Not hard. You mentioned that you had some problems with the social constructionists, and I want to know, first of all, if you could define what social constructivism is, and then what do you see as its problems?

Well I wrote an essay a while back called Evolutionary Social Constructivism, which said that social constructivism isn't wrong, it just has to be approached from an evolutionary perspective. Most social constructivists see themselves as opposed to evolutionary thinking. This goes back to the days of sociobiology when Ed Wilson wrote the book Sociobiology in 1975. He was branded as being a genetic determinist. The alternative to sociobiology was social constructivism. It was the idea that we are a cultural species, that we're very flexible. Basically, we're capable of coming up with any behavior, any social arrangement,

and this was thought to be in opposition to sociobiology. Now what we can say is, yes, we are a cultural species, and we do construct our social environments. We are very flexible, not infinitely flexible, but very flexible in what we can become as individuals and societies. But all of that is a matter of cultural evolution. And so we need to expand evolutionary thinking beyond genetic evolution to include cultural evolution. And it's at that point that social constructivism will be seen as an evolutionary topic.

And the term niche construction, which is a term that originated within evolutionary theory, is basically another word for social construction, at least in the human case. So yes, we are a cultural species. We do construct our societies, but please don't think that as something which is somehow outside the orbit of evolutionary thinking. What are the problems that you have with postmodernists, if any? I think that I actually look for the baby in the bathwater of most traditions. One phrase that I like from an evolutionist named A.J. Cain is that only the simplest mind can believe that in a great controversy, one side is mere

folly. When smart people disagree, then there's probably a baby somewhere in the bathwater. But then, of course, there's also the bathwater. And so postmodernism, social constructivism, all of these things, I think a part of the baby, what's legitimate, is what's called a thick description of a given culture, recognition that a culture is something which is very complicated and has to be understood in some kind of contextual way. All of that is great because it's true. I love that part. Also, in some ways often the bathwater is a denial of anything that can count as objective reality.

There's no such thing as objective facts, for example. The kind of body of facts that we associate with science has no more authority than any other cultural construction. I think that, when we talk about now in the post-truth society and fake news and a president that basically lies every day of his life, is in some sense attributed to the postmodern tradition which became anti-science. And you know, in the humanities and anthropology and linguistics and cultural studies, very much cleaves along lines of a branch that is more or less science-friendly

and a branch which is science-unfriendly. So what we've lost, not everywhere but in many contexts, is this idea that there's There are facts of the world that we have to discover and hold each other accountable to. I have another quote from the Dalai Lama that I love, which is that, �Anyone who defies the authority of empirical evidence is not worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.� If you're just making stuff up and if you're denying what's out there, you're not worth talking to, is what that means. And so we need to recover the

idea that there is a world out there. It's independent of our own meaning systems, our own symbolic systems, and that creates a challenge. If somehow our meaning systems, whatever they are, whether they're religious or not, everyone has one. And it is not a direct reflection of the real world, but nevertheless, there is a real world out there, and we can apprehend it using the tools that we typically associate with science. And so that has to be part of the operating rules for our discourse. It has to be science-based. But it also has to be smart about how difficult it is for us to apprehend the real world and how tempted we are at a deep psychological level in making stuff up that supports our

world views. There's a deep statement there about epistemology, basically the nature of knowledge from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution has transformative things to say about ethics and morality and epistemology, all of the major branches of philosophy. What do you think of the postmodern inspired fields like women's studies, gender studies, fat studies, sexual studies? What do you think of the idea that they're putting forth that separates us into different groups, and then therefore, our tribal circuitry,

quote unquote, tribal circuitry is being hijacked, and now it's us versus them in different groups and then therefore our tribal circuitry quote-unquote tribal circuitry is being hijacked and now it's us versus them in different groups i know we've talked about this earlier what do you think of that is that true what is this tribal circuitry that's being triggered can you first expand on the tribal circuitry that some evolutionary biologists talk about obviously you can't speak for them, but whatever you think that term means. What is this tribal circuitry and how are these other disciplines utilizing that for something that's not necessarily good for the whole? So again, let's talk about the baby before we talk about the bathwater. The baby of these identities is that they're pointing out that the mainstream

world view is in fact extremely provincial. It's the world view of a certain privileged culture, say white European male culture, is interpreting reality for everyone when in fact it's extremely provincial and ultimately self-serving. And you know, I think you know, that there's an acronym that's been coined, WEIRD, white, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic, which is the dominating culture. That's what I think you're referring to as Western culture. And it interprets itself as human nature and the human condition. And this term was coined by my colleague Joseph Henrich at Harvard University, and it's getting a lot of attention now because so much research that's done primarily in Western nations and with college students, or even when it's done internationally, it's done in those segments of the population that have thoroughly bought into Western market economies.

into Western market economies. So much psychological research and research of all kinds has been done on this narrow slice of humanity, and it's not general. It's not general at all. So it's a major initiative now, which is gaining steam, is that if you want to say something about human nature, you cannot confine it to weird people, weird societies. Just now on Twitter you get, for example, a result that came out of research is that in any population, X percent are cooperators, Y percent are defectors, whatever. Did you get it? Oh, I thought I did. defectors, whatever. Did you get it?

Oh, I thought I did. Man, I should have. That's all right. So you're saying that there's research on Twitter? Not on Twitter. It's being reported on Twitter. This was thought to be very, very general. Many, many studies show that there's the same kind of breakdown

of cooperators and defectors. Hold on a minute. And this is too terribly distracting, isn't it? No, it's okay. You can do it. Come on, little guy. I'll just move a little bit. And I'll get you. Come on, come on.

Got him. So there is some research that's popularized on Twitter as being representative. Also the ultimatum game, the famous ultimatum game. I give you $10 and you can share a portion with a second person. And that second person, their only choice is to accept your offer or to reject it, in which case nobody gets anything. And economic wisdom held that the first person should share as little as possible, knowing that the second person would take anything

over nothing at all. That's the economic wisdom. The result of the actual experiment is, is that no, people have a sense of fairness. And unless the offer is fair, the person would rather have nothing than to accept an unfair offer. And so this was the new normal, was that that's the way Homo sapiens is. Well, come to find out, and this is actually the work of Joseph Henrich,

is that when he played that same ultimatum game in societies around the world, including small-scale societies, he found tons of variation, all kinds of variation that was unexplained. And so that was what it meant to go beyond weird societies to sample the richness of human cultural diversity. So if we get back to identity politics, what you have is basically members of the population which are marginalized. They might come from cultural traditions historically that are not part of Western culture, or they might come from Western cultural traditions but marginalized people such as women or gays or anyone who's being shamed or whatever. Their experience is very different and they want you to know that.

So basically they are claiming authentically that the world as seen through the eyes of privileged people is not actually the world that they experience. And they're also claiming justice, that they need to be more fully participants in a moral society. And both of those things can be correct. So that's a pretty big baby in the bathwater of identity politics. If it becomes highly divisive, there has to be some sense in which there's a we that we can become a part of. And if you lose sight of that, then it becomes only conflictual. There must be some working towards a larger scale of cooperation. Can you describe this tribal circuitry? What is it when certain biologists say, there's

a tribal part of our brain and when we're divided up into groups, we are hijacking that, or we're turning it on, and now we're against them. What is that? What do they mean? Well, I think that I would be more or less in agreement with what many people would say to that, that we're such a group living species that we're always looking for who's us, who's the, what is the group that I'm in in and that I'm supposed to be a member of and supposed to be cooperating? And we all need that just in order to function in any particular context. context, the salience of the tribe grows with the stakes, basically, for survival and reproduction. So if you're in a really existentially insecure situation where your own life is threatened, for example, or the life of your people is threatened, then that psychology of being a member of a group and that group being threatened

becomes more and more and more salient. And my colleague, Michelle Gelfand, wrote a book called Rulemakers, Rulebreakers. She does research on a continuum of cultural variation from tight to loose. A tight culture is one that has very strong norms that are enforced by punishment. If you're a member of that culture, then you are expected to do certain things. If you don't, then there will be big consequences. A loose culture is much more flexibility in what you can do, a lot more elbow room in what you want to do to explore your own options, and so on. And that continuum from tight to loose more or less is adapted to an environmental continuum of existential security. So if life is safe and secure, life is good, nobody's threatening us, then why shouldn't we explore our options?

The optimal social arrangement for a safe and secure environment is a loose culture. But if it's really life or death, then we have to have extreme solidarity. And what you do, you've got to do this. You have to be part of us and so on and so forth. You also have to be prepared to sacrifice your life if necessary. And so you're not free to do this or that. And so that cultural continuum and its underlying environmental basis explains a lot. It also explains that the more things go wrong in modern law, in fact essentially insecure things are, the more we become tight in our psychological orientation.

We find it very difficult to be flexible, accepting of other positions and so on and so forth. So paradoxically, if we want to cultivate a safe and secure environment and a loose culture, which in some ways I think you could say a loose culture is better than a tight culture because of the environmental condition that a safe and secure environment is better than a dangerous environment. So one reason why things have become worse culturally and more divisive culturally is because they've become more existentially insecure.

I think this explains, for example, when we talk about the right and nationalistic movements and so on and so forth. The reasons are plain enough. Members of many societies feel that they're not sharing the benefits of the society. If you're in France or England or whatever and you're just an average bloke and then you see immigrants coming in and taking jobs and you don't have a very good job, it's not working for you. The European Union is not working for you. Why shouldn't you stand up for something that's more recognizable as your people? So I think in many ways—and this is not original—a lot of the problems associated

with this fragmentation is based on such things as extreme inequality. The global order, including the European Union and all of that, it's not working well for the average. Why should they be invested in it? What's in it for them? And so there's some sense in which the solution has to be a result in some of these global problems of income inequality, of unregulated capitalism. If we don't solve that problem, then we shouldn't expect these solutions to these other problems. You mentioned existential security, and you're saying that the higher the level of inequality,

the less existential security we have? Yes. That's in part because, back to relative fitness, it doesn't really matter that we're affluent. We compare ourselves with others. There's a lot of research knowing that how good you feel about your life. It depends on your lot compared to others. A lot of ills are attributed to... So how do we get over that if that's so ingrained in us? And also, why was that selected for

if we were selected in these small groups where cooperation was the norm? Well, in those groups, there wasn't the kind of unfair inequality that exists today. In the first place, there's a strong sense of egalitarianism. We're all equal. I'm not better than you. Also, there wasn't a lot of difference in material wealth at that time. And if someone was given a leadership role, it was based on their contribution to the group. Yes, you'll be your leader, and that might make you wealthier, and so on and so forth. But unless you're

actually serving us in some sense, then we won't follow you anymore. Much more bottom-up control of those societies than you might think. And even big man societies and societies that look hierarchical, actually it was almost like a banking system in which the wealth of the society was accumulated in certain families, for example, or temples or something like that. But it was shared out. It was almost like a distribution system. And that worked in the small-scale? That worked for those times and places. If you look at modern nations, the ones that

work best in the Nordic countries come up again and again as the nations that function best in modern life. And whenever this gets discussed, then Americans insist that there's no way that you can compare those countries with America. They're too homogenous, all this kind of stuff. Why is that not a good critique, that they're too homogenous? Why is that not a good critique, that they're too homogenous? Homogeneity might play some role, but it's small compared to the equality that's built into those countries.

In the first place, they're not culturally that homogenous. I studied Norway quite extensively. Norway is a mountainous country, and mountainous countries always have the effect of cultural diversity, right? Look at New Guinea, every valley. And so if you look at Norway, two or three hundred years ago, there were so many little dialects in each one of those little mountains, they weren't even speaking the same language. Someone from southern Norway couldn't understand someone in northern. How is that culturally homogenous? You had the Vikings and all these things, they're all warring with each other. It makes little sense to say that there's some mysterious kind of cultural homogeneity.

Again, it's not as if there's nothing to that, but for the most part, it has to do with the fact that they've managed to scale up the equality. And, well, there's much to say, but we can leave it there for the moment. Earlier, we were doing a thought experiment where we're trying to solve the large scale problems by imagining it in a small scale. Well, if we were to imagine some of our problems with regard to income inequality on the global scale, then we shrink it down to the small scale. And we think about how did this work when it was with tribes?

But then we said, we just established, actually that doesn't work because there are no examples of it working. There are no examples of extreme inequality within a group of 200 people. What you find in very small scale societies is that they don't allow that kind of income disparity. If somebody has a windfall, especially like they kill a large game or something like that, it's scrupulously shared. But it was with the advent of agriculture that that began to change.

And as a result, societies became more despotic. This is something that Peter Turchin chronicles in his book, Ultra Society. So that whenever you do have a large imbalance of power, then it does tend to corrupt the ability to cooperate within that society. And that will happen. It happens all the time. There's an inevitable tendency for it to happen. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the main preventative for that is between-group competition. A despotic society can work to a degree, but there's a point at which you cannot just bully people into cooperating with you.

If there's some other society over here that offers a better deal to its members, then they will collectively beat the more despotic society. That's true to this day if you measure modern societies for their degree of equality. There's books like The Spirit Level. These are famous books in political science Why nations fail? These are books that show that nations vary in their degree of inclusiveness and

the inclusive ones work better than the What about the water countries as far as I know their laws when it comes to immigration is tighter than America's countries, as far as I know, their laws when it comes to immigration is tighter than America's. So first we have to look at the societies as they exist as societies before we talk about the very recent problem of immigration. And I'm not romanticizing those countries. In fact, there's a very close affinity between the Nordic countries and Germany. And there's a strong thread of racial superiority and the Aryan mentality that exists in those countries. And so there's a whole modern set of problems about immigration and also how much a country can accommodate immigrants.

These are real issues that have to be taken very seriously. The point I want to make about Norway or the Scandinavian countries, and not just them, but you can count Switzerland. And Switzerland is not culturally homogenous. They speak four languages within the same nation. The Netherlands, Japan, pick any country that works well, often with histories which were highly unequal. Take Japan as a feudal.

Take England as a feudal society before it became democratic. But if you understand why they're working well, it's because they have actually managed to have a lot of power and work cooperatively, collaboratively for the common good. That's what you see. A strong labor sector, strong capital sector, strong government sector, and a cooperative spirit for what are we going to do as a nation. Those are the ingredients, and they're the same shrinking back down as a group whose members have a relatively equal balance of power and are trying to do well for the whole

group. That's what's needed, and that's what actually describes the best periods of American history. The New Deal, the so-called era of good feelings in the 1980s. I mean, there really is a formula that's not hard to understand about the need for equality for cooperation to work at any scale. Is there a connection between a whole-earth ethic or this cooperation idea that you're putting forward, cooperation essentially, is there a connection between that and communism,

as some people might say? I know that, now I don't know too much about this, but I know that some people were suggesting that group selection, group favorite selection, is evidence towards communism being the correct political mode, versus capitalism, which sounds to be more individual selection.

Yeah, so I think that that's actually not the right way to think about it. Why is that not correct? Because every system, whether it's a socialist system or a capitalist system, is or should be designed to work well as a system. And so capitalism claims to be better as a system for the benefit of all. Capitalism does not say, who cares about the benefit of all? I'm just going to get rich. Right? And so in that sense, everyone's a socialist in the sense that if they argue for some kind of political philosophy, it has to work well at the society level.

Otherwise you couldn't even discuss it if you weren't presenting something that worked well at the societal level. So what we have to do is we have to compare the societies that have been guided by capitalism and societies that have been guided by communism, and we have to ask how well do they work as societies. What you discover there is that the socialist experiments actually work very poorly, very poorly, all the way up to Venezuela in the current time. So why do they work so badly? For two main reasons. Here I'm relying on a great scholar of economics and political theory named Geoffrey Hodgson in the UK. So one reason they work poorly is centralized planning. They rejected the idea of market economies, which Hayek got some things right, basically.

The market economy is a great way for adjusting prices to accommodate values to a degree. If you actually try to plan everything centrally, it will never work because the society is too complex. So here complexity comes in as an important body of theory in addition to evolution. Centralized planning doesn't work because the systems are too complex for any group of experts to work out and implement a grand plan. Centralized planning doesn't work. It doesn't even work at the level of a small company, not to speak of a nation. And the other problem with socialism is that power gets concentrated in the hands of an

elite, a small group of elites, and whenever you get an imbalance of power, then basically you get that kind of corruption where they run the country for their benefit, not for the benefit of the whole country. So between power being concentrated and centralized planning, all experiments that are called socialist have failed miserably. So now let's look at capitalism. They also fail. Do they fail as badly? Well, I don't care. They fail in ways that we need to correct.

And they fail basically by buying into the invisible hand metaphor, by thinking that the pursuit of lower-level self-interest In an unregulated economy, if we just try to maximize our wealth and corporations just try to maximize their profits, that's their only responsibility. As Friedman said, the only social responsibility of a company is to earn profits for its shareholders. That's a recipe for disaster. So both of those don't work. And then we can discuss what can work. When we were talking about existential security, you were saying that there's tight and loose, which I associate with totalitarianism and liberalism.

Is that a wrong association? No, that would be a pretty good one. Okay. Is strong existential security needed for liberalism, or does liberalism produce existential security? I would like to think that what we associate with liberalism and democratic governance and so on can function in very harsh environments.

In some ways, it's needed more than ever. Actually, there's great stories to be told there. I mentioned the book Why Nations Fail by Asimoglu and Robinson. They begin with a story of the colonization of the New World. Let's see, how much detail do I want to tell the story? When the Spaniards and the Portuguese colonized Central and South America, they encountered very hierarchical societies, societies that were already despotic, you might say. And so they could succeed just by lopping off the head of these hierarchical societies

and becoming the rulers. They didn't have to bring any women. They didn't have to bring any farmers. They could just become the rulers of these hierarchical societies. become the rulers of these hierarchical societies. And the British, when they colonized North America, they wanted to do the same thing. And so the Jamestown colony came without any farmers, without any women. They were going to conquer the Indians and get gold and do the same thing. Well, that wasn't going to work for a whole bunch of reasons. So the next thought was to import British laborers and recreate a feudal

society. They were housed in barracks. They couldn't run away on pain of death. So that didn't work either because actually they could run away and there was nothing to do about it. So then this little colony was forced by circumstances, by adverse circumstances, so this was very existentially insecure, they were forced to become more fair in order to survive. Only when they instituted rules that gave a better deal to everyone in the colony could it survive as a colony? So there's a sense in which democratic governance and equality and so on actually was necessary for survival in harsh environments.

What was this better deal? Well, if you were to become part of it, you'd be given your own land, for example. You wouldn't be just a serf working on the estate of a rich people. You were given your own plot of land and so on. You were given a voice in decision making. I wanted to know what are the preconditions for liberalism. I was thinking about this.

I was thinking, was it what you mentioned, which was existential security? Well, no, because you just flipped that. You said actually liberalism can thrive and then produce some security, even in harsh environments. And then I was wondering, well, are there memetic preconditions? Are there memes that need to be dispersed in the society and adopted before liberalism can come about? And if so, what would those memes be? Do you have any ideas? Other people can do a better job recounting the history of this, but I'll do the best that I can.

For one thing, the cultural evolution of European society can definitely be seen as a process of multi-level selection. Basically competition between polities resulting in larger and larger polities. Ultimately the scale of European nations. You go back far enough and you find all these little city-states, hundreds and hundreds of them. Why don't they exist anymore? It's because they had to amalgamate in order to fight each other. That's what resulted in nations the size of European nations. That's when it comes to nation-building and things like that, and we go to other parts of the world such as Africa, the Middle East Afghanistan which never actually ever achieved that scale of

Governance and then we expect them to adopt a European model that typically doesn't work because they never achieved that scale of That scale of governance so what you ended up with were very large societies that ultimately became autocratic and once again ceased to work for the common good. And then democratic forms of governance emerged from there. Liberalism, the Enlightenment values emerged from there. And then that then asserted greater equality and ultimately resulted in more powerful nations. If you look, for example, at the

competition between England and France, England is a quarter the size of France, but managed to punch above its weight in part because of such things as the Industrial Revolution. Why did that take place in England and not France? It was because actually if you're an inventor, some kind of craftsman or watchmaker or something like that in England and you came up with an investment,

you had a way to develop that investment in a way that you would share the benefits of. It was enough equality so that the merchant class, for example, had enough so that they could actually benefit from this sort of thing than in a more aristocratic society. You didn't have to have many decades of that before you would have technological advances and so on and so forth in which you could punch above your weight. If you look at the actual origin of these democratic movements, the Freemasons become a very interesting story here. I don't know if we want to go into it, but Freemason societies started out as actually societies of architects, basically the people that built the great cathedrals and so on. So it was building and architects. But then it morphed into a

kind of a philosophical society that could accommodate more sectors of the society than normal aristocratic society. So you could become a Freemason and mingle with people that you couldn't do otherwise out of your station. They were the first ones to form an actually written constitution. That's a long story, but it's really quite fascinating that once again in small groups this became incubated and then expanded and led to the democratic revolutions in France and America and all through Europe. In some ways it was a scaling up of a form of governance that originated in these little tiny societies.

I remember in this view of life, you were talking about how the Europeans used to go and study other cultures and rate them essentially on a scale of civilized to savage. And that was the wrong way of, obviously, the wrong way of going about it. A better way would be something akin to looking at the Inuit and seeing how they're accustomed to the cold and

they have their own practices to deal with it. And then we can say, oh, they're not savage, they're adapted to that environment. Okay, so then my question was, they're adapted because they survive well in that environment. Then the Europeans came along and invented cities and technology and now they can survive in Alaska and the coldest parts of the world maybe better but that's a question I want to ask you is what does it mean to be adapted and if and if these white Europeans let's just call them white Europeans came and settled and now made brick houses with fire and electricity that goes right through are they not more adapted than the Inuit then?

Because they're able to survive better in these colder environments. Oh, there's a whole bunch of things you raised there. So let's try to unpack them one by one. I'm lucky to be trained as an evolutionary biologist. A lot of people that are playing this game were trained in some of the human related disciplines and they picked up their evolutionary theory. Playing what game? Well, the whole thinking of all aspects of humanity from an evolutionary perspective. Basically this view of life, extending evolutionary thinking to explain all aspects of humanity. That's the game that I'm...

Sorry, you mean to say that you have the advantage in that you were ensconced in evolutionary thinking first, then started to apply it outwards? Yeah, yeah. And actually, yeah, and I'm a bit unusual that way. The reason I mention it is that sophisticated evolutionary thinking includes, basically showcases adaptation, but there's a lot of other stuff as well. When we look at things that are out there, sometimes they're adaptive, sometimes they're not. Even when they're adaptive, then what counts as adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word doesn't necessarily correspond to the normative sense of the word.

So back to the way we should be looking at cultures. During the Victorian era, it was very difficult for Darwin, along with his colleagues, not to think of European culture as superior in some sense to all other cultures. Yet a more true evolutionary approach, as you just said, would be that most cultures are at least to some degree well adapted to their circumstances. And so that's a more respectful way to approach cultures and one which is truer to evolutionary theories. So in that sense, the Inuits are better adapted to an Arctic climate

than our Europeans, at least at first. Now you're saying that such modern conveniences as housing and heating and so on is well adapted. And of course, those have been adopted by Inuits. They don't live in igloos. But if they did, let's imagine that there are some that still do. Well, I mean, that's not imaginary. There's all kinds of indigenous people that actually want to stick to their indigenous ways, and to a greater or lesser degree.

And one point to make, I think, is that that should be their choice. You see very interesting regions such as Ecuador, which have still a large indigenous and diverse many tribes in Ecuador that are now being represented in the government. It's like our choice. What do we want to do? Do we want to modernize or not? Often they might. I mean, such things as medicine.

Who wants to do without modern medicine? Not many people. So it's a very complex situation, but one which needs to be handled in an egalitarian fashion that accords respect to all of the different stakeholders.

There's a sense in which, and this is once again the egalitarian impulse, no matter who I am, what culture I represent, there's some sense in which I need to be a moral equal and that my existence counts. I have some kind of say in the decision-making process based on my values. And so that's the concept of moral equality, which I think is pretty much culturally universal, not restricted to weird societies, is that however the us gets defined, then there's some feeling of equality. And that has an insistent dimension, basically. Not only am I a moral equal, but I

will resist you if you infringe upon that. So if we're going to do something together, it has to be in some sense with my acquiescence. I have to be able to say yes to that. Speaking on that, you mentioned most of the time when we're doing studies, it's on weird quote-unquote people. And we can't necessarily generalize and say that that's a human universal. When we talked about moralistic behavior being virtuous and courageous, or virtue being courage, virtue being courage and honesty and forthrightness and so on and so forth. Is that a human universal?

Close. I think it would be part of the human repertoire. I'm just wondering, because I don't know, and I'm curious, I don't know if certain tribes or certain other places in the world would say, well actually to be a moral person is to cut the head off your enemy and put it on your fence. Well yeah, that too. As soon as you talk about how we behave towards them, then anything can go, as we've already said. The world is full of situations in which we, the group, are threatened by them.

And the moral thing for us to do is to cut off their heads and put it on a stick. It could also be moral to take... That line is just going to get cut up. What's that? So I'm just going to cut off their heads and put it on a stake. It could also be moral to take the deviant within the society and cut off their head and put it on a stake. These things are... The way we think these are immoral... Get this little padding feet out there. That's okay. Just continue. I don't know if you know who Janice Fiamengo is.

She's a professor of English. When I was interviewing her, her cat just came right upon her. You can sit up here if you want. I don't think that's going to, that'll keep you silent and I can take a leap. Boom. Now your viewership will go way up if you include the dog in the picture.

Okay, okay. So these things appear immoral to us because we're taking a third person stance. We're not thinking of us as being in that group. And so therefore we're looking at these between-group behaviors and also the policing behaviors which cause us to be cruel to members of our own group. And we're seeing this in some kind of third-person vantage, which makes it appear immoral. So much depends upon the perspective.

Are you a moral relativist? Would you consider yourself to be that? How would you define moral relativism? That there are no objective moral standards. Pretty much what every culture has is good for them. No, I'm not at all a moral relativist. I think that morality axiomatically is about the welfare of others and society as a whole, as defined by the community. And there's nothing arbitrary about what counts as moral or immoral from the perspective

of members of the moral community. You said, as defined as by the community. If they define it any way they want, is that okay? Or are there some limits, boundaries? Well, typically, one of my favorite novelists is Joseph Conrad, who wrote many books about the sea. He once said that he likes writing books about the sea because they're so morally simple. Very simply, if you're on a ship, then what you need to do is to stay afloat. You know who the group is, and you know what they need to do. They need to stay afloat. And so that provides a clarity, a moral clarity, which does not exist in other situations where we don't really know who the

group is, and we don't really know what we need to do to stay afloat. That makes things complex. But if you take a ship, then that moral clarity, I think, argues against relativism. At least on a ship, there's nothing relative about what counts as moral, or who's in or who's out, or anything like that. That's why space fantasy is so compelling, for the same reason. Whenever we think of ourselves as in the same boat, and when we think about survival as being really salient, then things become morally clear. There's an important insight. Let's acknowledge progress where it exists. To be able to say that, I think,

is then helpful when we now consider more ambiguous situations. I wanted to know if you think that what happens in the universities is isolated from society or not isolated, and I'll explain what I mean. Someone like Stephen Hicks, a philosopher, says, well, you shouldn't, you should be, people who are a part of the general public, should be concerned about the quote-unquote corruption of the humanities by the post-modernists. Now, I'm not having you take a stance on that, but he would say, you should be concerned, even though it seems like it's a

relatively obscure, isolated part of the whole country. It's just one part of a university. You should be concerned because what happens in the university spreads outwards to the rest of society. And I wanted to know, what are your thoughts on that? Is it true that what happens in the universities spread out to the rest of society? So we better be careful as to... I certainly hope so. I certainly hope so. These intellectual... Sorry, I mean to say, even in fields that one might not think have anything to do with society. So for example, English. Well, English probably does have something to do with society given that we speak it, but English, linguistics, women's studies, gender studies. I think that higher education, universities and colleges are a fascinating study of cultural

evolution in their own right. All things considered, of course, colleges and universities would not exist, and also the branches of academic knowledge wouldn't exist if they didn't have some impact on the rest of life. Often that's quite indirect. I think it was Keynes, the economist, who said that even someone who doesn't think that they're influenced by economists actually are. They're being influenced by some defunct economist from long ago. These ideas do matter, even though it seems that they might not. There's one point to be made. We should care about what they say. But another point that needs to be made is that all of the branches of academia need to become much more unified than they are. And so the fragmentation of knowledge, I think, is a problem that needs to be acknowledged.

And I actually have a biological metaphor for that, back to my training as a biologist. So if you actually look at an archipelago, which is a collection of islands, you find they're biologically extremely diverse, many species on archipelagos. Why is that? Well, it's because of barriers to gene flow. So if you're isolated on an island, then there's no gene flow with other islands, and so those populations tend to drift apart. Before long, they become different species, and they couldn't innovate even if they were brought together. Also on single islands, there are species that occupy different niches, and so they become

different for that reason. So archipelagos are very diverse. Got that? Now think of academia as an archipelago with many islands of knowledge. So basically you have all of these different groups, schools of thought, that are developing their ideas largely in isolation from each other. This includes not just the major disciplines but all the schools of thought within any given discipline. They're not talking to each other. So what happens? Well, they begin to develop different vocabularies, use the same words in different ways, it goes this way, it goes that. Pretty soon what you get is like a form of cultural speciation, which is mutual incomprehension.

No one can understand each other. It's a Tower of Babel, you might say. So that's not a good thing. So that's the kind of diversity that's not worth wanting. Diversity is not good per se. There's forms of diversity that are not worth wanting, and that's one of them. So there needs to be some sense in which people can communicate with each other, and that's not happening. That's one major role evolutionary theory plays, is to actually provide that unification of knowledge, as it already has in the biological sciences,

and can for all things human. Okay. I was just about to ask, so how do you see it being unified? You said it would probably start from evolutionary sciences? And this is a hard point to make because it seems... Self-serving. It seems... What's the word I want to use? Proprietorial or totalizing, as is often put.

But there's... Hold on a second. What the heck is totalizing? Totalizing? Yeah. What do you mean by that? What's the word of totalizing? It's a postmodern term. It's basically that you're kind of imposing a worldview on others and privileging it. And of course there's a trigger sensitivity to

that which we can appreciate. But that loses the fact that when you go back to the way Darwin approached different people — back then, before evolution, we had naturalists, they studied plants and animals, all these different branches of biological knowledge, embryology, biogeography, all the different contrivances of plants and animals, natural history. What Darwin did was he actually managed to put these together, a single theory that made sense of all of these branches of knowledge. That didn't eliminate them, it

organized them. That's what can take place now, is taking place now, quite rapidly in historical terms. That's a great thing. When do you think the left goes too far, ideologically speaking? I think that anyone goes too far when they... Let me just try to think about this for... For... So... I think that anyone goes too far when they deny the authority of empirical evidence. If they're not being science-based, trying to work out what's actually out there, the facts of the matter, and then proceeding on that basis, then they become unmoored from reality.

And then the second problem is tribalism. And I think the left is as prone to tribalism as the right. These little academic tribes that we've talked about, I think, is when they become just universes in their own right, then that becomes part of the problem. Sometimes it becomes a problem with fighting between tribes, but even without that you get academic tribes that become so ingrown that they're only writing for each other, and at that point they become irrelevant. And nobody should care other than their own kind. And they wink out of

existence after a period of time. So there has to be some sense of remaining connected. There's some kind of common project so that when we communicate, we actually are trying to do something actually are trying to do something important at a large scale, which involves communicating with other people, other perspectives and so on, and then actually working towards those solutions. I was going to ask you about the meme-gene interaction. What are examples of memes that have lasted so long? I guess we can only talk about human society. What memes have lasted so long such that they affect our genes,

the direction of evolution, maybe sexual selection? Yes, I was going to spend a little portion of time talking about memes. And let's begin with the derivation of the term and the person who coined it. Of course, it was Richard Dawkins and it was part of his book The Selfish Gene and then meme was some kind of cultural analog to gene. And so you can't really understand memes the way Dawkins introduced the term without thinking also about genes the way Dawkins introduced the term, without thinking also about genes the way Dawkins conceptualized that term, which is really kind of esoteric. For

Dawkins, a gene was actually not a physical entity. It was some kind of unit for information. He thought about genes in an extremely atomistic sense. He gave genes agency. He called them selfish. When in fact genes are part of a biological system, they always interact with other genes and they always interact with the other components of the organism. So there's a systemic approach to evolution which includes genes in a more systemic way than Dawkins did, and without giving them such agency as selfish entities in their own right. Given the fact that Dawkins' concept of a gene was actually quite problematic, and biology

has moved beyond it, then we should be suspicious from the beginning about his concept of meme, which inherited most of the same properties. He thought of memes as very atomistic, kind of evolving on their own. He didn't think of complexes of memes. He actually had a term for them. He called them meme complexes, but never much thought about them. He emphasized mostly the possibility that memes can become parasitic. Sorry, complexes of memes are just collections of memes? Yeah, they're like complexes of genes. If there's a genotype, why can't there be a memotype? Well, memotype doesn't exist as a term. Meme complexes does, but hardly anything is done with it.

And so we're left with the idea that there's little bits of information, little cultural units that are kind of evolving in some soup on their own. And some examples are like the phrase of a song. The first phrase of Happy Birthday to You is a meme that spreads and so on and so forth. The field of cultural evolution as it's developed—there were lots of people that became entranced by the concept of memes and tried to do something with it. There were journals, there was the whole field of memetics and so on. And do you know those have tended to peter out while the field of cultural evolution as a whole has burgeoned? And so how can we talk about cultural evolution in some sense without buying into the concept

of memes? We still use the word meme as a kind of a shorthand for some trait. Since we don't know the mechanistic basis, really what we're talking about is some trait at the phenotypic level. So when we want to talk about a trait that's learned and culturally transmitted, we call it a meme. That's fine, but don't associate it with some of these other things that is part of the Dawkins terminology. Now, in a video that you asked me to watch, when Jordan Peterson, he talked about Jungian archetypes. And if you go back to some of the early psychological thinkers, such as Jung and Freud, you have to appreciate how primitive the evolutionary thinking was at that time.

So although they were big thinkers and they were trying to apprehend something, Freud's concept of the unconscious and the id and his basic concepts and Jungian concepts such as the archetype, I mean, they were reaching for something. But we really have to evaluate it critically from a modern evolutionary perspective. Again, there was a baby in the bathwater, but there was also quite a lot of bathwater and it's up to us to sort it out. I think there is an intriguing correspondence with what Jung talked about as archetypes with what evolutionary psychologists talk about as modules. That's, I think, a

better match than memes. Evolutionary psychologists properly say that our evolved psychology is highly adapted to solve the problems of survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. And often they take the form of modules, specialized circuits that are dedicated to solving this problem or that. And so we could imagine, for example, an us-them psychology, which is built into us that gets

triggered under appropriate circumstances, mating psychology, all of these sorts of things. Is there some kind of fit between the modules of evolutionary psychologists and what Jung was reaching for with archives? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. That's worth exploring. Also one of the things that's happened recently is that a lot of what's been attributed to genetic evolution now needs to be attributed to cultural evolution. Take language, for example. If you look at what Chomsky, people like Noel Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, thought about language,

and also Steve Pinker, it was like a product of genetic evolution. There's a module for language, that kind of thing. The language instinct, as Steve Pinker put it. There's a universal grammar that we need to decipher, all of which makes it sound as if language was something that evolved directly by genetic evolution. But now it seems, to an amazing degree, that language is much more of a cultural construction that has arisen more than once in different geographical regions by cultural evolution. And the

grammars that evolved by cultural evolution actually need not be universal. No need for that. There's so many different cultural experiments. And that many aspects of human psychology, which we would think because they're so unconscious and intuitive and so on, we'd think that they would be a module, a genetically evolved module. Maybe not. Maybe they're cultural gadgets that have been around for so long that they seem like first nature, actually they're second nature. So a lot which has been attributed to genetic evolution might need to be attributed to cultural evolution. That's how deep cultural evolution goes.

And that's pretty darned interesting. You mentioned in your book, This View of Life, that there's innovation oases, which are like geographic regions where innovation happens. Yeah. That there's some principles that guide the growth of such an oasis. Then you outline seven. I don't know if you came up with the seven or someone else did. Well, that was based on the work of Victor Huang, who is a leader in entrepreneurship and innovation. The point that I was trying to make there is that it has to do with adaptability. So many cultures are well adapted to their environments, but how adaptable

are they to change? How are they capable of actually changing and adopting to new circumstances? That requires some features of a culture that don't always exist. And so I provided a couple of examples from the business world of companies that are not just well adapted, but actually are capable of adapting to new circumstances, one of which was Toyota, which is famous as an adaptable corporation. And in the case of Huang's work, he points out that isn't it interesting that, I mean, innovation is the name of the game. Every region of the world, every university, every city wants to be entrepreneurial and to be able to change for the better. But there's huge variation, as Huang points out, in their ability to do so. And Silicon Valley is an example.

What is it? What's the magic ingredient? In a nutshell, and this is so very interesting, he says that there's two vital ingredients. One is the need to cooperate. It has to be a really cooperative culture. And it also has to be really diverse. And those two things don't go together. Typically we cooperate in our in-groups, right? And our in-groups are relatively homogenous. So it's kind of a special thing to have a culture where you cooperate with diverse people. That is what happens to take place in certain regions

of the world. What are some other innovation oases besides Silicon Valley? He points to Israel, and of course right away you have to qualify what we mean by being inclusive and diverse, because Israel is the very opposite as far as its exclusion of Palestinians, for example. So what does he mean? He means very narrowly that the compulsory draft in Israel takes people from all sectors of Israeli society and throws them together. Now they're cooperating in a military context, and then when they leave the military, Israeli society and it causes that to be cooperative. In the case of Silicon Valley, we have a culture which is, maybe a little bit surprisingly, much more easygoing than you might think. If you're an entrepreneur, you're not guarded of your ideas. You're not

actually out just to make a pile of money. Often you have some kind of vision and you're quite generous in sharing it. People will invest money on a handshake. A lawyer that Hwang quotes says that if you're a really good businessman, you don't need a lawyer at all because you have trusting relationships. And then actually if somebody acts selfishly in a context like that because it's quite a closed community, everyone knows each other, soon enough it gets out that so-and-so didn't behave right and nobody wants to do business with him.

And so there's a very informal level of policing, which is good enough. It doesn't require legal restrictions. And then once again, that's diverse in a sense, but it leaves all sorts of people out of the system as well. It could be very clubby and so on. So when we talk about being diverse, we have to qualify it quite heavily. Well, I was thinking, selfishly, one of my goals, I have a company called IndieFilmTO,

which is a nonprofit and it helps filmmakers with their arts so that they can be profitable with it. One of my goals is to make Toronto, possibly, the Silicon Valley of film. Yeah, okay. And then I was thinking, oh, that's so cool that this guy, David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist, outlined for me, great, thank you, seven principles that need to be engendered in the society in order to induce such Such a oasis of innovation right and then I was thinking wait a second seek fairness not advantage Was one of the principles if I'm not mistaken and and then I was thinking wait But that in my opinion I used to live in San Fran and I know a little bit of the business world I don't know if that characterizes Silicon Valley because there is a bit of,

and a bit is a bit of an understatement, there's a bit of bullying and corporate bullying that happens. Now, let's go to Hollywood. Seek fairness, not advantage. Definitely not a quality that Hollywood has, nor does it have the second trait, which is open doors and listen. Well, there's...

Because it's very cliquey. I wish that I could channel my friend Victor to have this conversation. And there's one dynamic that goes on that might explain some of this, which is like super interesting. And it has to do with once a company succeeds and then becomes proprietorial. So I've become fascinated with the open source software development and all of its analogs, the Linux development and stuff like that. By the way, this movie that you're in is an open source movie.

It's the first of its kind at this scale. All the footage is being released for people to see. So the dynamic is that the real creativity comes with this open source process. It's there that you get Victor's seven ingredients. People are operating in a really cooperative mode, so on and so forth. That's tremendously creative. Then you get companies such as Microsoft or Apple or so on that become really successful. They try to capture it all, and they're able to do so. Once they capture it, then all the creativity drains out of it. Then you have the open source part of it.

Sometimes it's just squelched, and that capture is permanent. But sometimes, as with Linux, it actually flourishes and becomes so good that it beats out the proprietorial competition. competition. And so as soon as you get corporate, basically, as soon as things turn corporate, then they tend to deviate away from these principles that Victor was talking about. What do you define as

becoming corporate? Becoming corporate is that basically you become an entity that becomes profit-maximizing and more interested in your own profit. Instead of vision-driven? Then vision-driven and so on and so forth. In a book I recently read called The Master Switch by Timothy Wu, I believe his name is.

These are well-known books that I'm just kind of channeling. He talks about this dynamic again and again and again, stretching all the way back to the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, cable television, all communication innovations that began in this open source fashion with this wonderful diversity and then became captured, in some sense that was a good thing because you don't want more than one telephone system, frankly. There's some sense in which one big system makes a lot of sense, but not if it eliminates innovation. In so many of these cases, once you become a monopoly, you don't

want the next thing. You definitely don't want the next thing. Then the final version of this was Hollywood, basically, now being captured by a few giant studios churning out superhero movies. But where is the diversity? I mean, actually it does exist. It exists with the indie films and with Netflix and so on and so forth. But the dynamic of this open sourcey kind of process in which those seven principles that Victor talks about are present, is competing in a sense with these leviathans which do not have those properties and cease to be innovative. So I think Victor's right. But that said, you can point to aspects of Hollywood or Silicon Valley, that are counting against that. And even given Hollywood as it is, I think, if you were to look at the assembly of whatever

team gets assembled for any particular movie, with all of those credits at the end of the movie, I mean, it is a symphony of cooperation. And if you're the first grip or the cameraman or something like that, how you come together for something, all that is based on your reputation, the spirit of generosity, so on. So somewhere within the system, I think, that those ingredients that Victor was talking about might be present. But I don't know.

those ingredients that Victor was talking about might be present, but I don't know. So what do you say to people who claim that there's no such thing as biological sex? For example, I sent, I don't know if you got a chance to look at the video, there was a professor who said, there is no such thing as biological sex. I'm a historian of medicine and I can debunk that. But then he didn't go on to debunk it. Well, I think that that's not correct, that there is such a thing as biological sense. But where we draw the line is, and where it's been drawn before by scientists and doctors, is pretty shameful and has been revealed to be false in retrospect. I think that my wife Anne is in

earshot, but she'll tell you that back in the 70s when she was a young woman, it was received scientific wisdom that women's bodies would fall apart if they were to run a marathon. How's that? And so what is essentially male and female, I think, so often is socially constructed for the benefit of the powerful members of societies. And so more often than not, we have to pay attention to the socially constructed aspects. But at the end of the day, we just have to let the chips fall where they may. Earlier, I was talking about the Inuit, and I think my question could be more simply asked. It's a rudimentary question. What is adaptive defined as? Is it simply your propensity to reproduce? Is it that you're not experiencing pain in your environment? What is the definition

of adaptiveness, such that we can say this is more adaptive than this? Well, the narrow definition of adaptiveness is something which survives and reproduces better than its alternatives. And so that's true for genes. Drift is not adaptation. If we have a case of genetic drift where they have two things that have the same survival and reproduction, well, chance is going to cause one to become more frequent than the other, but that doesn't count as an adaptation.

So it's not the case that anything that evolves is adaptive. Nevertheless, if something becomes more common based on its properties, then it counts as adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word. And so that's the definition that is standard for genetic evolution. And to a pretty large degree, it also counts not just for cultural evolution, but also learning. But learning, if you look at the Skinnerian process of operant conditioning, and you put the rat in the maze and it does a bunch of stuff and presses the lever and gets some food and ends up pressing the lever, because that was the behavior that delivered rewards

more than other behaviors. What's called the matching law is basically a comparison of alternative behaviors and it's saying the one that's most rewarding gets amped up. So it's adaptive. Do you believe in free will? Yeah, I do. I think that on that I side with the early Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett and I don't agree on many things, but he wrote a book called Elbow Room, Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting,

that basically equates free will with a latitude to make choices. And so I think that's a common sense definition of free will that both exists and is worth wanting. But to elaborate on that just a bit, you told me earlier about your physics background and the theory of everything, which is basically very reductionistic concept that knowing only about the physical world, we might be able to explain everything. And I think that there's something profoundly false about that, which is revealed by evolution. And that evolution is not at all deterministic. There's something not probabilistic, but basically evolution results in things which they exist by virtue of their adaptedness.

And you can't predict them on the basis of their physical properties. There's this concept of downward causation, that when something evolves on the basis of survival and reproduction, the parts permitted it to happen, but they didn't cause it to happen. As long as the physical material results in heritable variation, but they didn't cause it to happen. As long as the physical material results in heritable variation, then it's the environmental forces which cause something to be brought into being. And so the theory of everything has to include evolutionary theory. And there's a large portion of evolutionary theory which is amazingly detached from physical processes at all.

I mean, everything that evolves has a physical process, but that physical process did not determine what evolved. All it provided was the raw material of heritable variation. And so all of that, I think, really provides a lot of grist for thinking about free will.

Okay. Now my last question. This is just one that I've been thinking about. Your last questions are killers, I will. Okay. Now my last question. This is just one that I've been thinking about. Your last questions are killers, I want to say. My last question is, I'm a scientist, so I'm a scientist at heart, but I always like to critique and critique and critique.

So I was thinking, I have this document of theories that I feel like undermine themselves. And postmodernism is one of them because it says there are no truths and therefore any claims to truth is power. Self-contradictory. Yeah, exactly, because that's a truth that you've claimed the power truth, the power narrative, in other words. Okay, then I was thinking about evolution. Evolution is interesting because, in a sense, it can undermine itself.

And I'll explain how. Evolution is interesting because in a sense it can undermine itself and I'll explain how. We're selected not for our interaction with reality as such or the objective world, but we're selected for what allows us to reproduce and that may not necessarily match up to reality. So another philosopher, and I don't remember his name, said that even this world that we think is solid, we should think of it more like a computer icon that looks like a male. And then we don't confuse that male icon with the male itself. That's a user interface. So all of this is a user interface because that's all that evolution provides you is the ability to interact with the world such that you get what you want. And hopefully that's something like survival. you is the ability to interact with the world such that you get what you want and hopefully that's something like survival. Okay, so then that means that we don't, we're not selected

necessarily for our relationship with reality, which means that whatever we think of as real might not necessarily be real, including the theory of evolution. So if the theory of evolution is true, which obviously like I believe you you believe, I believe, then we can use it to undermine itself by saying the theory of evolution would say that we're not selected to match with reality, including our own theory of evolution. And I want to know what you think of that, because this is just something I thought about for five minutes. Well, that line of reasoning would undermine any theory. But I think the best part of what you just said is that you're right. What we perceive as reality is based on its survival value, not on any direct apprehension of reality. under any direct apprehension of reality. Fortunately, I would qualify that a bit to say that the relationship between objective reality and survival value is sometimes positive

and sometimes negative. Sometimes knowing the world as it really is helps us survive in that world. And sometimes flagrant departures from reality helps us survive in the world. What that means is that we're able to function in both modes. That we actually have a module, you might say, we have ways of thinking that are proto-scientific and that's proto-religious, to put it cruelly. So that we do have a capacity to function in scientific objective reasoning modes to decide upon what's out there. And then science is an elaboration of that. But the point to make

is that even if we didn't evolve to apprehend reality, luckily we have a procedure, which we call the scientific method, which actually is capable of doing that. It doesn't come too naturally for us, and it has to be a social process. It's not an individual process, but are we lucky that there's a social process that enables us to actually determine what's out there? And that's why we need to protect science and make it the centerpiece of what we do in a modern world because more and more our survival does depend on knowing the world as it really is so we need science more than we ever did before thank you man

i think there's a pattern with this and you're familiar with Daniel Dennett's Second Endo-Symbiotic Revolution, right, where we get memes. So what struck me when I was… I studied both… I majored in history and biology, minored in philosophy, and what struck me was so many similarities between these disciplines one of which was in biopsy starting with prokaryotes you have these vessels that have code and that code you know is the interface or helps the interface between themselves and the environment navigates them through life. The ones that make it continue, the ones that die, die. Protobiome, right? Then a miracle occurs, and this is going really well, and then a miracle occurs. First, endosymbiotic revolution. They're trapped together as one, and in being trapped, they

externalize their internal codes into a new system still within the boundary of the new wall, we'll just call it that, the new wall, and this new externalized code becomes the interface or let's say tailors the interface of the new wall and runs you know is kind of the face of their revolution. I know I'm being a bit, you know, is kind of the face of their evolution. To be, I know I'm being a bit, you know, furtive. The next question I have is, okay, does the pattern continue? Do they gather together, a bunch of eukaryotic cells, do they gather together, externalize their code, and that code changes the interface of that new wall, and thus governs their evolution in that hierarchy.

And, of course, this is Daniel Dennett's memes, right? I mean, Daniel Dennett, I don't want to disparage him, but, I mean, this has a whole literature that doesn't depend on Daniel Dennett. Totally, totally. Major transitions of evolution, Maynard Smith, Swarthmorey, and on Dennett. Totally, totally. Major transitions of evolution, Maynard Smith, Swarthmorey, and on from there. And Sanford.

So, anyhow, I'm not sure. I haven't read Dan's take on it, but whatever. Let us simply say memes. Right. Just to bring it down. Memes. Do memes gather together, externalize their code, and then have that code govern some

larger interface, which governs their evolution? My question to you is, is that what history is? That we come up with the law, or written text text and this externalized text governs our evolutions and thus the evolution of our first our ideas then of our DNA then of our RNA and does that code then take on new life and become for example computer code which acting upon itself, and we're trying, this is the new push, getting it to evolve upon itself, is this going to be the next level of consciousness? The next code that is externalized from us, that governs our lives, our evolution.

And that thing, computers in this way, computer code is alive, follows this Matryoshka, Russian-esque, and gold trend. So that's my second question. Okay, well, I mean, broadly, yes to that last one, believe it or not. And I think quite a lot about that. And so I think that you're traveling in a good direction. One of my projects funded by one of the Templeton Foundations

is to actually create, first do interviews, and then to create a documentary series on major transitions from the origins of life to the Internet age. So it's really that story that you were saying that we're documenting by interviewing experts. And I'm working with a documentary filmmaker named Alan Honick who has really immersed himself in this and so he's achieved an expert's level of knowledge

with a lot of creative input on his own. And we're interviewing people like us, Spothmary, Athena Actopus who studies cancer from an evolutionary perspective, Rich Michaud who's contributed to this, all the way up to internet folks like Tim O'Reilly and the like as to how there's we're at the point now where we need to have the final transition up to a global consciousness. If you've read my book

This Year of Life, you know that I anchor it with Pierre-Thiel de Chardin, his concept of the Amiga point and so on. So it sounds like science fiction. And these transitions are very much transitions of information, as you say. And it ends up with a symbiosis that's going to be thoroughly entwined with technology and so on. I mean, the internet will be the global nervous system, but it does not self-organize is one point that needs to be made.

Does it need to? No, it cannot. It has to be guided by a selection process. And it's here that we have to be targeting the global good, making that the target of selection. And if we don't do that, then it won't happen for sure. So this is where the idea of selection. And if we don't do that, then it won't happen for sure. So this is where the idea of managing cultural evolution, what does that mean? It means managing all three components of an evolutionary process. Those three components are selection, variation, and replication.

What does it mean to manage them? It means we have to decide the target of selection, the global good, orient variation around the target, and then replicate best practices. That's what needs to be done, all with the global good in mind, and nothing less will do. So it's pretty amazing that you could actually make a strong statement like that. Yeah, I thought about it in my undergrad. I discovered Dennett, I don't know if you'll believe me, afterwards. And when I found out about your How to Dig Your Evolution Institute, I was very, very excited to speak. Well, that's awesome. And I hope that you can get involved

I would love to one of the things I'm trying to do is actually literally build a movement which is you're building an army, I love it well not yet but hopefully. And has the same kind of energy as a political movement,

but motivated by an evolutionary worldview rather than a political ideology. That's the goal. Any help would be appreciated.