Extending Darwin's Revolution – David Sloan Wilson & Robert Sapolsky

[Music] [Music] for me but I would like to introduce our two guests tonight now dr. Robert Sapolsky as we were saying has honking advantage I was just telling him before we started talking that I have heard people gushing he is so beloved by this community in San Francisco and I don't know how many scientists can claim that he is an American neuroendocrinologist and author currently a professor of biology and neurology and neurological scientist at Stanford University in addition intriguingly he's a research associate at the National Museum of Kenya and the author of many books including fides most recently and he is going to be here in conversation with the visiting team no less exciting and dr. David Sloan Wilson is a SUNY distinguished professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University he applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life both in his own research and as director of ethos a unique campus wide evolutionary Studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium please join me in welcoming David Sloan Wilson and Robert Sapolsky because I'm kind of romance dead there let's just act natural Birds well I guess there's the interviewer I should start off let me let me start off by asking how many you people in here are currently or have ever been or even Noah scientists okay so one of the things that you may have picked up on either doing a turkey in close proximity to is your average scientists spend an incredible amount of time working on some incredibly obscure question in just magnificent and and eventually sort of festering solitude and when we can usually come up with some factoids and the most common response to that is just dawning disinterest or if they're really lucky somebody in some Eastern European University is intent on showing you were wrong or if it really works out well you've now contributed a factor into the universe and within that framework if you are a really good scientist you managed to generate a whole bunch of those factoids and they comprised something interesting or solve some puzzle or inspire the people that you work so that's one version of being a really good scientist and david has certainly generated lots of factoids the more fundamental way in which he can be an amazing scientist is one that David fits even better which is to fundamentally change the way people think about something and not with factoids but with often lone voice in the wilderness insisting the people's conception of something that is very important is totally wrong and sticks with it long enough to be vindicated and this is I think a fair summary of what the trajectory of your career has been as one of our most influential evolutionary biologists and in the and not a word I use often one of our most iconic plastic ones in terms of swimming against the tide and eventually show that he was absolutely reckoned so in terms of making people think differently about evolution like is my first question for you David is all of us in here I'm sure are accustomed to thinking about the great unwashed core interests first cousin marriage hasn't filling the countryside here who reject the possibility that there is such a thing as evolution we all know where they're coming from what I think is much more interesting is in the world of people who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of evolution is nonetheless the incredible tendency to misunderstand it and get it wrong and reach a wrong conclusion about what shows and thus my first question is one that you've spent a lot of time to be dealing with in your teaching why do people get evolution so wrong so much of the time right a smaller question and there's more than one answer of course and I think that you know the the best answer to a question like that is it has to do with meaning systems and the idea what are all the ideas in our our heads are basically there in order to help us to behave that's one thing you can say about about evolution whether you're meeting system is religious or or non-religious or whether it's left or right politically whatever it is the way you are and what you do is at least as much due to your symbolic meaning system as your genes as your games and when any idea threatens that interferes with your sim bow type as we're increasingly beginning to think of it then that is when you're inclined or objective and my my friend John hight and I just was did an event with him last week in New York City just like this one I often quote him as saying if you want to find science denial in any person look to what's sacred to that person look to what's sacred and so for one person it might be evolution or climate change for another person it might be sex differences or racial differences if something is sacred to you as part of the motor it's part of your motor that causes you to function and we don't tinker with that we don't like other people tinkering with it and so that's why I think it's always important to know what to relate basically any idea to a person's meaning system and also to respect that system to respect that system is that we really shouldn't be challenging that in some respects and that that governs the way I behave towards religious believers for example I'm not the kind of in-your-face person who says you must believe in an evolution okay given that in sort of your framing your newest book which is wonderful and great and incredibly interesting as completely the Darwinian revolution in what way right so the thesis of the book is that is that the Darwinian revolution will not be complete until it makes sense of everything associated with the words human culture and policy in addition to the word biology and for most people whenever they think of as biology is different than what they think of as human culture and and policy and we're so far from that - for me the most important category of person is not there is not the religious believer who has difficulty with evolution not even people who associate evolution with social Darwinism and there's a whole chapter about social Darwinism it's the person who thinks that they're perfectly at home with evolution and yet do not actually relate it to what they do what they do it's an article of faith for them that their ideas whatever they think either as professionals or as people is consistent with Darwin's theory what in fact they don't really know and when you go to chuck and what you find is elephant massive inconsistencies in in what people think and how they behave including professionally all the academic disciplines sociology history you know economics for sure are in fact at odds with with modern evolutionary thinking and so all of these all of these disciplines need to be updated most of all policy because policy evolution is absent from the entire policy-making universe evolutionary thinking is absent from the entire policy vision universe and most policy experts are secular and they're thinking they're not creationist whatever but the way they think is not tied to modern evolutionary thinking and that is what the book attempts to do is to show just how amazingly relevant evolutionary thinking is to just about any policy area that you might think of well in terms of seen word begins the intersect policy and policy in humans instead of Drosophila or something like that the thing you are most famed for is getting people to think differently about groups and the role of groups and evolution and maybe in terms of just orienting everyone here take people back to the early 60s when groups and group selection was dominated about the likes of Wynn Edwards in what was what was the notion of the role of groups and evolution at the time right so evolution took this evolutionary theory took this big swing towards individualism in the in the middle of the twentieth century and so all of a sudden became about self all about selfish individuals and selfish genes everything that evolves had to be seen as a form of self-interest and the most interesting thing to say about that I think is that it was part of a larger cultural trend of individualism it's at the same time that we have of course Homo economicus and economics we have nothing a lot individualism in the social sciences we have at Margaret Thatcher saying there's no such thing as society only individuals and their families so something happened very broadly culturally that that caused this individualistic swing before that we had people talking more about society as something that existed on its own terms we had a meal Durkheim talking about basically functionalism the social facts that cannot be reduced to two biologically than psychological effect so society is an organism society is an entity in its our divide was a common idea and then was eclipsed by individualism and what happened in evolution was part of that larger trend it was like a tail being wagged by some larger cultural dog and now I think again broadly we're coming out of that and we're beginning to think once again and in a much more sophisticated way about the concept of a society as like an organism and its own right the concept of organism is not restricted to the individual organism a group can be an organism a small group is especially likely to be an organism and the whole challenge is of course to expand that envelope of being an organism up to the global scale and until you do that actually there will be dysfunctions that's part of what multi-level selection is is the idea that if you're going to evolve an organism you have to select at that scale well let's take people on a know maybe to the mid 70s or so where the opposite view helps way the most multi-level selection was as far from most people's minds as possible the range of what selection about was pretty much from the individual dominated by sort of eurosam and the socio biological revolution at the time down to selection at the level of the gene Richard Dawkins the notion of The Selfish Gene is ultimately the unit of selection and pretty much from that point you've been out there yelling that that's insufficient and that's too narrow of a view and you were the one who more than anyone introduced the phrase you just mentioned multi-level selection yes sometimes selection this forget selfish a selfish gene selfish DNA independent of a gene selfish gene selfish genomes but selection at the level of the organism at the multi organism is society's as a whole what has the process been like to get people to think that at different times selection is this far from a single organism a single gene as possible selection is in a very modern sense of at the level of the group well one point I'd like to make is that that although this it it was heretical and only there are a few people not just one but but only very few people actually stuck up for this idea back back that at the same time there was something cordial about it did not interfere with my career I mean I have good jobs and I got published George C Williams who was the main person knew his anti group selection was a good personal good personal friend so isn't it nice that science can be as it's supposed to be a process of constructive disagreement a process of constructive disagreement isn't that good nice and yet at the same time the only progress could have been made much much faster I mean the underlying ideas are actually very very simple and actually let me actually just in a few minutes I can give you the essence or what this is about imagine playing the single game of Monopoly where the goal is to beat all your partners and to capture all the properties there just imagine playing that game and then imagine playing a monopoly tournament where the trophy goes to the team that collectively develops their property the fastest so imagine playing that game and I think you can see that just about every decision that you make as a team player in a tournament will be then playing the single game of Monopoly and so the message from that is that when natural selection is operating within the single groups it is like the single game of Monopoly if selecting for the anti-social behaviour it's selecting for the behaviors that cause you to succeed compared to other members of your group in order to get a group that functions well as a group there has to be something like a tournament there has to be some sense in which groups are competing against other groups and that's the only way you can get teamwork everything we think of as pro-social altruism bravery loyalty being a solid citizen all of these things that are good for others and good for one's group as a whole are actually not giving you the advantage within the group and so there was the problem that Darwin was the first person to see it clearly though all of the pro-social behaviors everything that you consider morally virtuous he could not explain with his theory of natural selection just based on individuals competing with other individuals he had to embed group selection the process of tribes competing against other tribes and of course all you can see he strangely did not comment on it but that just creates a problem of the scale now the glutes become selfish they're internally cooperative but they're competing against each other so you have an eliminated conflict you just elevated conflict higher up the scale and that's why if we really want to solve these problems then we have to take it all the way up to scale and that this leads very very strongly to a whole earth ethic and that's actually the conclusion of my my book some of you probably already have a whole word ethic but you now have a a scientific Authority we're saying that we really need I really mean that that sounds ugly with the one home the one take-home message is science says when we formulate our public policies we have to have the whole words of mine and then we have to coordinate everything underneath it it doesn't mean that we have to be sacrificial but just the benefits can be distributed and need to be distributed all all up and down the scale but there's no way we're going to get some global problems without actually explicitly having the welfare of the earth in mind that is the only thing that's going to work and there's a very strong scientific argument from much stronger than ever before and it opposes the alternative narrative which is ways like there the narrative that the pursuit of lower-level self-interest to go busway benefits the common good as if led by an invisible hand okay that is we can say that is wrong okay so in terms of this notion of selection when it works well at the level of the group and the basic idea your basic idea is group selection is a circumstance where an individual with trait a loose is acting an individual with trait V but a group of individuals with trait a defeat a group of individuals with trait B was something that at the individual level is maladaptive a trait that instead emerges as adaptive at the group level just to give what will sound bizarre to people do you have an example of what this looks like with sociopathic chickens I give two examples I think we have trying for joint couples oneness from nature and then we'll get to the sociopathic chickens an example I've been using for four decades but it's ever been if you haven't heard of them though then but here's an example from nature who all knows what a water Strider is oh so many of you there's a beautiful elegant insects which skate on the surface of a quiet water where they scavenge on on unpretty insects that have fallen into the water and it turns out that the males vary greatly in their aggressiveness towards females at one extreme the males are psychopathic sexual predators they simply hunt females and attempt to forcibly mate with them when they find one on the other extreme we have docile males gentlemen who wait to be asked to perform their manly duty so and everything in between and so my graduate student Omar el Dakar composed groups of water Striders so six males six females at each group and the composition of the male's was altered from all Psychopaths do all da Sal melts and mixes in between so what happened within every pool that contained both types the aggressives were more successful mating than the docile of course of course the bad boys got the girls and every single pool aggressive beats agasa but in the pools where all the males were aggressive they were terrorizing the females I couldn't heat therefore they couldn't lay many eggs and there's a three-fold difference in the egg-laying Prachanda T of pools with docile males compared with the the aggressive males so there you have it selfishness beats altruism within groups aggressive beats da seller with intercourse but docile groups be aggressive groups now the final part of the story is he may he made up that variation he composed those groups but where does the variation come from a nature and so he did another experiment in which he allowed free movement between the groups and so now imagine that you're a female and you go into a pool and there's an aggressive male what are you gonna do you're gonna leave the male can lead to anyone can leave but the whole thing settles down and do a kind of an equilibrium with an impressive degree of clustering of the females around the docile males and so the variation among groups which is needed is actually caused by the free movement of the individuals it's not caused by Kim selection and up genealogically related it's caused by partner choice and here right away we can think of our partner choice why is it the friendship when we get to choose our partners and we end that we tend to cooperate with those people more so than if we were just aired with a stranger and so you can see how this kind of thinkin can lead to a theory of friendship and the like so the chickens is chickens living I've always lived in groups I'm sorry to say they often live in cages now in the poultry industry and in this experiment which was do breed for productivity in one experiment the most productive hand the egg-laying was monitored and the most productive hand within each cage was selected to breed the next generation and in a second experiment the most productive cage was identified and then all the hens with in that cage were used to breed the next generation well in the first experiment after five generations even though you had selected the most productive him and productivity had gone down and what you had done was basically the most productive hen was the biggest bully she intimidated all the others and which we were really selecting for was aggressiveness just like my water Striders after five generations you had a nation of psychopaths and these hens were murdering each other and plucking each other's feathers and of course just like the water Striders they productivity was very low by selecting the most productive cages that would be group selection like the monopoly tournament then you selected the most cooperative hands and they were nice and docile and fully feathered so so here we have water Striders hands and I do hope that you can see how relevant this might be I could give you business examples truly I love telling the story that when I've used the chicken examples long ago a professor van up to me afterwards and said that chicken experiment describes my department I have names with earth so just imagine a department that promotes its members surely on the basis of their individual productivity okay not on your team work not any of that just basic how many pump do you have whatever I'm sorry what are you gonna get what are you gonna get genetic evolution didn't take place but something else did and so there's another important message that just behavioral flexibility individuals exercising their options is going to give you something like genetic evolution like genetic evolution so that introduces the theme there's more devolution than genetic evolution if I say evolution and you think genes then we have to go beyond that evolution goes beyond genes to all of the fast paced changes swirling all around us and even within us each of us as individuals as an evolving entity we change and the way we change is actually it could be understood as an evolutionary process using the same tool kit that was developed for the study of genetic evolution now in terms of this the lessons from water Striders or chickens or corporations is incredibly important in the sense of exactly the traits that mainstream theory and evolutionary biology said we're going to be the most adaptive and would lead to the most copies of one's genes in the next generation built around individual priorities individual selfishness maximizing of individual reproductive success are exactly the traits that are selected against in a group context and it was in the face of this but a lot of people who are resistant to this idea would sort of say okay that's great but water Striders or like chickens where you're artificially grouping them together this is a circus trick it is very rare to get so action occurring at the level of groups were suddenly these traits that were once maladaptive for exactly what are selected for make the argument as you've done so successfully that rarity though this may be in the natural world there's a no species out there that is move more from towards doing this than humans and humans in small groups okay well there's that I want to give two answers to that to that after that question this this dream swing towards individualism selfish genes and then back out again when you unpack it what you discover is is that this this dynamic that I described basically selfishness beats altruism within groups altruistic groups beat selfish groups this is very general this is so general and why is it journalist because it's just based on on the very nature of trade-offs that the behaviors that are required to do the best within a group are simply different but I bite you a crate offs and the behaviors that are required to function well as a group and so what that means is is that every theory of social evolution no matter what is labeled actually has to include this logic and in retrospect looking back if you look at the other theories of social evolution that seemed to provide an alternative to group selection such as kin selection inclusive fitness Theory Selfish Gene Theory evolutionary game theory a concept called social selection all of these were developed as if there were alternatives to a group selection but when you look under their hoods when you look at them carefully you see that you see that they actually give back with one hand exactly what they took away with the other hand and so for the cognoscenti in the audience you know Selfish Gene theory we have replicators we have vehicles and vehicles are giving back with one hand what they took away with the other in an evolutionary game theory the color in person game through what that mean well it turns out that individuals are a new active in groups of size n they're getting back with one hand exactly what they took away with the other in CHEM selection you're assuming that these socially acting individuals are genetic relatives more groups are giving back with one hand what you took away with another and this didn't really dawn on on people until the 1970s or 80s WD Hamilton the inventor and inclusive fitness theory was among the first to see the light and that's what I think is where you have to kind of turn to become a sociologist of science to ask the question why wasn't this just understood a long time ago why were decades and decades required and even still you get confusion on this point and it's there where I think that in just the same way that Darwin was for all of his insights he was still a creature of Victorian cultures or some things he just couldn't see through he was a Victorian you know he couldn't help but see European culture is superior to other cultures we can see it but they couldn't I think this this individualistic worldview is like them so many people can't really see beyond it they must see things in terms of individual self-interest I've had quite a few conversations with economists and and I actually go to s a few years ago about Paul Krugman and Paul Krugman yeah turns out as an evolution junkie yes he put it and he was given a talk to some evolution group and he wanted to say oh I love evolution I read a lot about it what I love about evolution is it's a sister discipline to to economics and then he lists the major things they have in common and the first thing on the list was individualism isn't it great that both her explaining everything in terms of self-interested individuals and and my essay was saying yeah that's how I went back then but if you want to keep up with evolutionary trends and this is a exactly what we're doing getting away from his this idea that everything has to be understood as a form of individual self-interest that's the kind of axiomatic stands for which there is no one well to give the people a sense of sort of what group selection looks like it's a human level and one of the things that's amazing about David is this is not only the world's expert on water Strider sexual non-consensual aggression and personality differences but at the other end of the spectrum you've written an incredibly influential book on the evolution of religion Darwin's Cathedral and analyzing the specific example of the emergence of Calvinism in the Swiss cantons why did it succeed when so many others around that time didn't and this is just a classic example of a group selection level of analysis and what works and what has not succeeded in humans well then thank you again yeah he's asking some good questions I believe what better person can I ask for the room and it gets to the second part of your question is there are us being such a cooperative species and and let me just kind of gather my thoughts are so basically I think you haven't the idea of basically these warring forces within group selection favoring selfishness between their selection favoring pro-social traits of all sorts most species are mosaic these things evolved on a trade by trade basis and yet sometimes this balance between levels of selection is not static but can itself evolve and so what happens on a rare a rare basis is that mechanisms can evolve that suppress the potential for disruptive self-serving behaviors within groups basically suppress disruptive within group selection so that between group selection becomes the dominant evolutionary force and then those groups become so cooperative that they become a higher-level organism a super organism and in biology this has happened many times the first time it was documented was some of you might have heard of lynn margulis and her symbiotic cell theory the idea that nucleated cells did not evolve by small mutational steps from bacterial cells but as communities of bacteria that became so cooperative that they became the higher-level organism and multicellular organism social insect colonies probably even the origin of life as cooperating molecular reactions and this is called a major evolutionary transition and so the big surprise something would only dawned upon us we're doing that last 20 or 30 years or so is that is that our species is the newest major transition that in most primate societies is a mosaic of cooperative and selfish threads that you should know with your good studies on on baboon societies is yes there's some cooperation but also there's intense disruptive selection status driving and so on and and so on and so forth so also for for chimp societies but in the in our ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive self-serving behaviors and so they became mostly cooperative at the scale of small groups at the scale of small groups and that leads to a very important conclusion that this small group there's your organism is a fundamental unit of human social organization that we should be that we should be ma large-scale society needs to be multicellular it means to be composed of small groups and then when you look at what happened with the invention well the whole concept of cultural evolution and the ability to transmit information symbolic thought encoding information in the form of symbolic systems that led to a rapid evolutionary process and then and then and then with the advent of Agriculture suicide becoming larger and larger and us now that you get to such things as religion and the arts so here's another little piece and I I feel like I'm speaking fast but hopefully still still communicated lots of things are just Grantley utilitarian and so explaining them as easy with evolutionary perspective there's other things which are not utilitarian they don't seem to be utilitarian and those are puzzles for us so why don't we believe in the gods why do we believe in agents which actually aren't out there we can understand why we walk why do we dance we can understand why we talk why do we sing we can get why we make a bowl why do we decorate a bowl and so most of the arts and religion puzzle us because they don't seem utilitarian and there's two potential answers to that question one is they are in fact not utilitarian we have to explain them some other way all are despite appearances there are they are utilitarian after all and Emile Durkheim started this off by saying that religions despite appearances have great secular utility and his famous definition of religion as a community united by a moral around the sense of the sacred forms into a moral community called a church and so if you look at religion and all the arts and religion is is really nothing more than a collection of arts activities is an interesting way to to to think about that what you find is is that all of that stuff is immensely useful at the group level it's basically it's your it's your physiology and anatomy of the society is carried through by these mechanisms and this is so amazing because what it does is it places the Arts and Humanities on such an interesting new foundation onto the humanities are so precarious in academia and this is such a powerful way to to to look at them and I hate to say it but most scholars people in universities in the humanities really have have yet to grasp those basically and they still have a hostile stance towards science and evolution and they don't really understand what a powerful new foundation this is for for not just studying the the arts and the humanities but basically making sure that they're strong in all aspects of our lives well in that context let me let me shift this to up the somewhat more personal question for you I think it really is fair to say that you have spent a lot of time being a voice crying in the wilderness during the long periods where evolutionary thinking was dominated by gene-centric selection models and and you've been vindicated everybody now accepts a multi-level selection as like violet and in lots of ways the biggest sort of signal of this was in 2004 having to do with neo Wilson Edward o Wilson Harvard he's like the most amazing naturalist of the last half century every everything he's ever written gets polar surprises he's incredible he's the person who popularized the notion of sociobiology in the 70s and he was the champion of Qi and centered selection as being what evolution was about and in 2004 you and he published a paper together in quarterly review of biology and this was I mean literally like I remember people saying whoa did you see that David Sloan Wilson a Neil Wilson published a paper together now for people were not in the field this must have just seemed like nepotism or organic but for people in the know I don't remember what your paper was called but basically what the title should have been is yo Wilson admits he was wrong after all this was an amazing paper in terms of sight of him saying you know not in quite as many words yes you will write all this time did this feel vindicating on some sort of level well and actually the history is a little different than that a slightly different so let me just correct that a little bit so my first paper on group selection was when I was a graduate student and I was working on something else and then I built a little model about group selection that seemed very general and and I could see its significance even though I was just a pup and I guess I was a bold pop because I call that Wilson up and I said I got to talk to you and so I so I went to see Ed Wilson and on my way I visited George C Williams the individual selection guy and I strode into his office and I said I'm going to convince you about group selection and he offered me a postdoc on the spot that's the way it should be that's the way and that initiated our friendship so then I go to Wilson and he's such a gracious man the first thing he does for any visitor he gives them a Corbett's ant laboratory and stuff like that he's also a very busy man and and so when time came for me to talk he sat me in front of a blackboard he sat down and he said you have 20 minutes and so I learned like a madman on the blackboard and he took my manuscript anyhow to the viewed and then that article was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences so back then he was actually quite sympathetic towards group selection that's the what people don't really know if you read the chapter in sociobiology on group selection he was actually putting the dust face on it that he that he could but nevertheless like everyone else he was tremendously persuaded by a wd Hamilton and inclusive fitness theory and and so on and so forth it was on his own not due to me that he basically have a guess an epiphany about about group selection after all and we were at a conference the human behavior and evolution Society meeting and this is so interesting because this is where evolutionary psychologists basic evolutionary psychology evolutionary anthropology these were bold thinkers in the 1980s and the 1990s well they were bold about about rethinking human behavior but they were totally doctrinaire about group selection Hamilton and Maynard Smith and Dawkins were their heroes and and and Ed Wilson was giving a plenary I was there the audience and Ed Wilson was laying this group selection on them and you could hear a pin drop you could hear a pin drop and Ed Wilson was actually talking about group selection in front of this audience and Steve Pinker was right in front of me and he kept looking at dad and then looking at me and so you thinker is still a holdout you said that it said I mean there's still a lot of angst out there so afterwards in the lobby I go up to add and and we're kind of go up another quarter and that said did you like the grenade that I threw in there and I was done that I suggested they would co-author yeah so there's the real story not all over the world well I reiterate the name of that paper should have been Wilson was ready one one last question before turning over in the audience not only is this someone who has done research on water Striders and the evolution of human religions but also on personality and sunfish and also on the molecular genetics of infidelity and promiscuity and humans and the evolution of humor and laughter and the evolution of gossip and incredible range of research and then on top of it taking your notion that policy should be a branch of evolutionary biology you've done the most ridiculous thing for an evolutionary I'll just I've ever heard of you went and started a program in the inner city schools of Binghamton to try to apply evolutionary theory you try to improve educational outcomes there does it strike you that you're a little bit of an outlier in terms of your sheer sort of intellectual restlessness and range do do you have a sense where that came from well I don't know or what you're making me blush so so but actually let me tell you about that school and I what it represents because this I think brings things quite full circle we talked about a major evolutionary transition takes place when any mechanism evolves it suppresses the potential for disruptive self-serving behaviors within groups then that group becomes a highly unit so that took place in genetic evolution as we've said but do you know it can also take place in real time for all the groups in our lives any group that you're in any group that you're in and you could actually design it if it's not already designed in order to accomplish what's really a major cultural transition here I drop on the work of Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in 2009 she studied common pool resource groups and she showed that they were capable of avoiding the tragedy of the Commons they did not over exploit their resources but only if they possess certain core design principles and I worked with her to generalize those principles from an evolutionary perspective and the way to see them is is accomplishing a major transition in these groups where these principles are implemented it's really hard to play the single game of Monopoly that's all there is that's all there is to it and so what we did in the school and what we're doing again and again and where we've created a framework for doing so look us up if you want us to work with your group please contact us then is to take kids that have flunked to be there more of their courses in the eighth or ninth grade bring them into the school and design note that school so that it includes those core design principles plus a couple others that are distinctive their education and do you know there's very same kids did as well as the average high school student on the state exams of everyone Turk and it was a randomized control trial so it's a gold standard of assessment and so there is such potential for basically increasing pro-sociality in our groups yeah basically becomes common sense when you view a peer this evolutionary lens this year of life those Darwin put it in the final passage of the original season well on that note let's open this to audience questions are definitely I can do it in less than a minute it's worth it okay the first you have to think of a good that's important in your lives or good that you know well okay and then see if these core design principles might work in your groups maybe your group already does well maybe poorly maybe you maybe you're thinking of a high-functioning group maybe you're thinking of a trademark okay okay so here are the eight core design principles that cause groups to function well number one strong sense of identity and purpose you have to know that you're a group who's in it what's supposed to do and that it is important number two proportional costs and benefits it's not sustainable for some members to do all the work and for other members to get together there must be some sense in which what you give to the group what you get from the group is proportional to what you give to be there number three inclusive decision-making fair and inclusive decision-making not sustainable for some members to be able to make the decisions and for other members not to have input doesn't need to be strict consensus necessarily it has to be some sense in which decision-making is open transparent and and and fair number for monitoring of agreed-upon behaviors if you don't know if you're behaving as a greater pom then all that's our number five graduated sections if somebody's not doing what they should there has to be some correction but it need not be mean at the beginning you don't have to bring the hammer down most of us are trying to be solid assume that if we fail a friendly reminder is enough but there are some cases in which you have to escalate and there must be praise for good behavior in addition to punishment for bad behavior number six fast and fair conflict resolution conflicts will occur they have to be resolved quickly and in a manner disregarded as fair by all parties most people in a conflict think that they have a point of view and you should be respect amount when you resolve the conflict number seven authority to self-govern unless you have elbow room to govern your own affairs you can do all those other things and number eight appropriate relations with other groups which embody the same principles in other words these principles are scale independent they are needed for relations among groups in just the same way as their relations within groups all the way up to the interactions among nations and so when you listen to the European Union and all the problems that we have at a large scale just try shrinking them down and thinking of them of them as melody much the same as what happens in a small group of individuals there they are right and so I want to first praise Dawkins before I knock criticism under Dawkins have lots of great things he turned so many people on to evolution remains very articulate and you can answer your question for yourself there's an online discussion between Dawkins and this interesting man named Brett Weinstein who is the professor that ran into such problems at Evergreen State College and that has become a kind of a celebrity and enough so that he added onstage conversation with Richard Dawkins in Chicago which is online and so and he probes him on this she tries to get Richard Dawkins to say that my religions be adaptive I am you couldn't do it doctors would not not go there and the great the great mistake that was made back then with Selfish Gene theory was of course Selfish Gene theory is centered on the concept of replicators the gene is a replicator it's the only high fidelity unit an individual is not a high fidelity unit to find the high fidelity units you have to go down to the level of jade well that might or might not be true but either way it's not an argument against group selection no one ever said that a group is like a gene they said a group is like an individual an offender if an individual's not a replicator then a group doesn't have to be a replicator so this obsessive focus on replicators actually is saying nothing about whether or not a group can be like an individual for that you have to turn to the concept vehicles and so there we go [Music] and so Dawkins I believe you know you've heard the phrase science professors jr. back here no that's not true for all of us but I I'm sorry but it appears to be true for Dawkins a lot of science and religion and opposition and we seem to be or at least what you have said we seem to be perhaps coming back around that they are explaining the same things only in different language and that religion it may have some utilitarian purpose but it may also be real I mean all societies have found some sense of that there's something beyond their understanding it's going on you know that we may or may not be able to see I mean we didn't used to be able to know there was oxygen or nitrogen because we didn't know enough about it so could people hear that in the back go ahead question was in some ways the Enlightenment invented the notion that religiosity and a scientific perspective were incompatible and are we in an era where instead people are beginning to see ways where they are compatible Stephen Jay Gould term non-overlapping magisteria that there's room for both built around the notion that what religiosity may be about is the things that science is never going to explain compare a phrase yeah great questions and I want to give a number of answers as quickly as I can so the Enlightenment of course said science and reason on the one hand and religion on the other hand the first enlightenment thinkers actually shared some beliefs with the with Christianity and of course you know people like Isaac Isaac Newton were devout Christians so that distinction is not true that the force of my demon thinkers were irreligious so there's an interesting point to be made there I think one of the things that the Enlightenment thinkers assumed was that there was a natural order basically that the world was well ordered I'm talked to bottom from the universe all the way down to the tiniest insects and what made Darwin's theory so disturbing was was basically the idea that the order functional order what we associate with an organism such as an insect or human implement such as a watch might exist at a small scale and then cease to exist at a larger scale order yields to chaos that the individual is well ordered but the society is not today the individuals will order not the ecosystem the ecosystem is not automatically an organ but these higher-level units are not automatically organisms that's the whole import of multi-level selection theory they can be but they're not necessarily and so that is something which is distinctive with evolutionary theory and a comment that I'd like to make about humanism as a tradition and actually secularists traditions of all sorts is how much they actually are still centered on the early enlightenment values and have not taken on evolution I have an essay titled are writing evolution into the the fourth humanist manifesto look at what the humanist manifesto is there's three of them say about evolution almost nothing and so so there's one point that you make another point that I want to make is the distinction for any belief you can evaluate it on the basis of its scientific truth value does it actually describe something that's out there and it's practical value what does it cause you to do okay and these are not the same and so we're faced with situations where many meaning systems are score high on practical value that cause us to do sustainable things and yet they're chock-full of adaptive fictions falsehoods okay and this is true not only for for our religions but it's true for almost any secular meaning system what we think about ourselves is not the way we really are what we think about our culture is is not the way it really is and so the idea that believing stuff is not out there because it's useful that's something which is inherent in almost all meaning system a meaning system that really respects the facts of something which is we want to work towards but it's in the it's in the future and that the evolutionary worldview is is basically what I'm trying to do is to create a worldview which is like a religion of strongly motivating and it causes us to do the right thing and we find it strongly motivating and yet it respects the facts of the world as much as as much as as much as possible but then the final thing I want to say is that when it comes to the I up when it comes to concepts such as conscious evolution that we can evolve our own future and that there can be we can be part of something larger and ourselves and now something can become still larger jl de chardin you might know it might begin my book with with the phenomenon of man and i say that my book is updating the phenomenon of man this book is updating the phenomenon of man but the concept of conscious evolution and basically superorganisms Gaia has been taboo amongst in the scientific community we've been talking about group selection but I talking about conscious evolution it's like giving them a wedgie right I can't be true this idea that evolution might have a direction is something which is and so it was really the spiritual thinkers and the religious thinkers that actually maintained this idea that evolution can be a conscious process we can evolve our consciously evolve our futures we can become something larger than ourselves and make that stew largerr only now has that become something which is scientifically can be scientifically explained and and it's thanks to those spiritual thinkers that kept that alive basically so there is a sense in which in which I think there's been a truth that's been kept alive by by religion but at the same time religions are chock full of lore without a meaning system and you have to be able to call that out I mean you know the earth is not sorry well that is that gets to the where the fits in the book is to think about policy as a branch of biology seems shocking and yet another major figure in my book is is a Niko Tinbergen who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 he was a pioneer of the study of animal behavior along with Konrad Lorenz and Carl bone von Frisch and back then the challenge was to show that behavioral traits can evolve just like any other kind of tristan the study of behavior is just a branch of biology a behavioral trait like aggression evolves just like an anatomical trade or metabolic trend well we know that that's true now so that was well what is policy but a branch of a kind of behavior it's what we want to decide to do and so the idea that our policies should be based on biology is is something that I establish with three stories the first story has has to do with eye development and and begins with cataract surgeries in in in infants but just to make a long story short it's just if you want to so the story is that what infants are born with cataracts at first doctors thought that they should wait before they correct him because I didn't want to operate on kids that were true yarn but when they did it they discovered that those kids remained profoundly visually impaired what they didn't understand was that eye development requires a continuous input from the environment in order for normal eye development to take place knowing that then they would have a new policy for cataract surgery but then the Destroyer goes on to look at myopia why are some of us many so many of us are wearing wearing glasses that's because our environment the modern environment is sufficiently different than our ancestral environment that our eyes are developing aberrantly in a modern environment so this is one example evolutionary mismatch when something evolves against against the background of one environment and then the environment changes all bets are off and as to what is what is the environmental factor that causes our eyes to become misshapen that lots of people think of psyche a lot of close work focusing on close objects actually if it might be the amount of time spent outdoors the amount of time spent outdoors so that introduces the concept of evolutionary mismatch and the importance of development basically the importance of development so we have other things such as the hygiene hypothesis the fact that if we grow up in environments that are too clean then our immune systems malfunction and if we raise our children a certain way and especially if we don't allow enough time for for unstructured play and if we try to accelerate academic learning too early then that can cause pathologies and in all of these cases we think we're doing the right thing we think we're doing the right thing but because we don't have the right theory then we end up basically tragically doing bad things to ourselves and bad things to my children cultures within the world are more aligned or more organically aligned to the whole group mindset that as opposed to we know what the United States is I think but elsewhere in all the world that are much more in line with what you're describing let's see four people in the back question was when you look look cross culturally are there some cultures that are better fits your idea of when group level selection is optimal and its outcome right the answer is yes so there's the short answer and the person who is there's a number of books that actually get at this comparisons of Nations there's why nations fail by Acemoglu and Robinson there's the spirit level by by an Wilkinson and Pickett and there is an ultra Society but my colleague Peter Church and all of these documents basically variation among nations and how well they they function and absolutely we study this at the at the evolution Institute and some of the best functioning nations are the Nordic countries Norway Sweden Denmark Kansas Fukuyama has a phrase getting to Denmark everyone all nations want to be like Denmark they all work so so well what is it that causes of the work well to a large extent they've managed to scale up those core design principles those core design principles that I mentioned which are important for small occurs equally important for large groups and and the nations that function well more or less they managed to to scale them scale them and when you look at the United States what you find is actually throughout the course of its history it is varied from the best to the worst and Peter Turchin has a book called ages of discord which is a very technical analysis of American history which shows that if you look at the well-being of the average American and in the 1830s when Tocqueville visited America historians call that the age of good feelings and that was the best of time there was basically a lot of egalitarian ISM and you have the Gilded Age ok extreme income inequality and the average American their well-being went way not just economically but basically they they didn't grow as tall they couldn't get married until later and then flat out died earlier and then you had the New Deal that was the second era of good feeling and now we have the second Gilded Age it's worth a try right now but the well-being of the average citizen of America is an inverse proportion to the amount of inequality that gets showed very very clearly so it's pretty clear what we need to do basically you don't have to compare America to any other nation all you have to do is compare an air America to America at previous times during its history and yes we do need something like a new deal well what is meant by the by the the green New Deal we don't know but but we do need something like the New Deal we should learn from our own history and to quote Wilkinson in that context if you want to live the American dream move to Denmark

Channel: Wonderfest Science

Views: 36,016

Rating: 4.8236775 out of 5

Keywords: social science, anthropology, society, green new deal, psychology, neuroscience, social darwinism, natural selection, group selection, darwinism

Id: RsOIiW_Ec4c

Length: 65min 33sec (3933 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/leto78]

I think that a lot of people including Chris interpret the theory of the selfish gene as an gene that makes people selfish or that genes are selfish in nature, which then reflects on selfish behaviours by their hosts.

The theory in fact is how cooperation is an emergent behaviour from selfish genes. Cooperation at celular level, at organism level, at community level.

The clash is about group selection as a valid evolutionary theory, which is considered a fringe theory and with significant shortfalls. In group theory, traits would be selected at a group level, rather than individual level.

[u/DoWorkSon2525]

Actually people like Dawkins etc. argue exactly what you are attributing as a misinterpretation to people like Chris. The pop science view of evolution is very persistent but when you dig in deeper to view the full landscape of the field and hear what experts in the field are saying it's obvious that things are way more ambiguous than they seem and way more political than is obvious.

In his lecture series: https://youtu.be/_dRXA1_e30o that Stanford released on youtube, Robert Sapolsky does a really great job laying out the history of evolutionary theories. Sapolsky lays out each viewpoint including the 1970s group selection theory and a different type of group selection that has emerged all this is covered in the first five lectures and especially the two on molecular genetics.

[u/sherlock-cones]

honestly blows my mind that of all the rogan facilitated grifters you guys get into chris. a few anecdotes about polygamy and not wearing shorts in spain is somehow enlightenment? crazy