Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to forms and mechanisms that are unmistakably useful. We see this clearly in eyes and fins, but the basic pattern also holds for brains and forms of social organization. I talk with philosopher Rachell Powell about what these ideas mean for humans, other terrestrial species, and also for forms of life we have not yet encountered. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/26/342-rachell-powell-on-evolutionary-convergence-morality-and-mind/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Rachell Powell received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University. She is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Society at North Carolina State University. Boston University web page PhilPapers publications

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If you know the feeling, you should know the facts. The eczema medication you're taking may not be right for you. Visit my rawtruth.com and talk to your dermatologist about your symptoms and treatment options. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We talk a lot about complex systems here at Minescape. And one of the interesting things to me about complex systems is there's a little bit of a tension between the fact that on the one hand, the space of possibilities is mind-bogglingly large, right?

When you have a bunch of small constituents that can come together in different combinations, different patterns to make some kind of aggregate, which is a very typical thing that happens to get complexity. Generally just the numerology works out that the number of possible aggregations or ways to aggregate things is ginormous. You cannot even possibly imagine searching through all the possibilities. And yet, the tension is with the fact that in some environment, if we're talking about a complex system that persists and adapts and flourishes and whatever that is somehow fitting into the environment where it exists, there's kind of natural features that we see happening over and over again. Power law distributions are just one famous example of this.

But in specific complex systems like biology, in evolution, we see what is called convergence, right? You have different developments of sight, vision, and the eyeballs in different kinds of organisms may have developed in completely different ways, but end up looking very much the same. If we just thought about all the different ways you could arrange the molecules in the eyeballs, they would be just, again, unimaginably large. But there's the right way to do it to actually achieve the purpose that you're trying to achieve. So both of these facts, the fact that the space of possibilities is ginormous and the fact that there's nevertheless sometimes convergence onto the best way to achieve some purpose or some goal or some adaptation, if you wanted to call it that, is very much alive in real world biology. And we can talk about that not only at the level of organs or different features of the physiology of an organism, but also culture, thinking, social organization, things like that. And these are exactly the issues we're going to be talking about today on the episode with Rachel Powell, who is a philosopher who thinks about these things in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary way, bringing them all together. How is there co-evolution between social traits and biological traits?

Is there some sense of convergence onto different forms of social organizations? Are we a little bit overly anthropocentric when we look at the ways that other kinds of species have decided to organize themselves? You know, we know a little bit about humans, and we tend to view what other species have achieved and how they've organized themselves through that human lens. And as Rachel points out here and there in the conversation, all of this in addition to being very illuminating when it comes to life here on Earth may even be relevant to thinking about other forms of life, whether not on Earth or completely artificial or something like that. So I urge you to stick through to the end where we have some provocative thoughts on the future of humanity. You can't predict anything. That's one of the things about biology and society, et cetera. There's no absolutely firm unimpeachable predictions, but one can speculate about this large space of possibilities.

And in the case of the future of humanity, the space of possibilities is very large indeed. So let's go. Rachel Powell, welcome with Mindscape Podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. We're going to be talking, of course, about one big question in evolution, contingency versus, I don't know what to call it. I think you like to call it convergence. or people might call it, you know, predictability or whatever.

There's a long necessity, yeah, inevitability. Exactly. Before we get into all the fun details, why don't you give us your take of the big picture state of the argument right now? I mean, as you might know, I have an evil twin biologist, Sean Carroll, who studies evolution. And he wrote a whole book about contingency in evolution. So that's still out there. Yeah. Yeah, so I think this is unresolved.

And there are massive methodological problems and conceptual problems that stand in the way of its resolution. So I think the best we can do it right now at this point is to basically think about the questions that we're asking and try to formulate better questions and then figure out what it would take to answer them. And so like, I guess like, one way that I would kind of come at this when you're asking like sort of what's the state of play.

I think historically there was an enormous amount of cross talk between physicists in general. I mean like astronomers and seti you know researchers and evolutionary biologists and that's what I kind of want and when I say cross talk I mean sometimes there was non-communication. Oh yeah. And so this is something that I think it's it's a helpful way way of thinking about, you know, how to think about contingency and evolution and how that has affected the way physicists have thought about, you know, extraterrestrial life versus biologists and all the various research programs surrounding them. And it helps illuminate some of the key differences between physics and biology, I think.

And so I think this is like a nice way of doing that. And partly as a tour through the Fermi, paradox and how biologists have viewed it very differently, largely because of the contingency phenomenon. So maybe that's a place I can start. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So, okay, so basically, I think, and this is something that you were saying we could edit out insults of colleagues. I won't name any colleagues specifically, but I would say that I'm going to say something, which I think would irk a lot of philosophers, at least the classic kind of old school philosophers.

And that is that I think that the most profound worldview-shattering insights in modern human history haven't come from philosophy, they haven't come from religion or anything out. They've come from science. Yeah. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, I assume, but a lot of people would probably take issue with that. But I'm firmly convinced that.

I'm always asking people at conferences everywhere, please, someone, you know, give me something that's on the level of these kinds of insights that science has given coming from other disciplines. And it just doesn't happen. And as I see it, and this is why this is going to become relevant. So I see the kinds of insights, these profound insights coming from science as sort of falling along to arcs. Like one is this, you know, kind of like an intuition-shattering wrecking ball that science has. where basically it's taking a destructive kind of demolition approach to common intuitions that we have about the world around us, about the causal structure of the world. So like, you know, relativity of space and time, the microphysical structure of objects, the mechanistic origins of adaptation, the nature of organisms and their ontology and stuff like this.

So there's a lot of talk about like biases in science, but really the deep kind of, you know, in methodology, in data collection, and so on. But I don't want that to distract us from the main plot, which is that science really is about exploding our most cherished assumptions about the causal structure of the world. And the second kind of arc that these insights have taken, in my view, is sort of this decentering project,

which is sort of, this is the kind of thing that Freud described as a dethroning, sort of as inflicting like a narcissistic wound on our collective ego by shattering the way humans essentially understand their place in the universe. And so the idea is like you have this great decentering project of science that goes from like, you know, the work of the likes of Copernicus or Hubble or Darwin, which is moving humanity from a privileged position, whether we're talking about the center of the solar system or galaxy or the pinnacle of the history of life.

life and moving it, translocating us to some kind of unremarkable periphery in this larger system that is not tailored in any way to human existence. And that gives rise to all sorts of principles that are, you know, are various ways of formulating that idea. Some of them are sort of puristic, like the Copernican principle. Others are more statistical, like the mediocrity principle and so on. But the common thread to them is that, you know, the point is we should expect our situation to be run of the mill. We should be suspicious of theories that afford a special place in the living cause or physical cosmos, right, to human beings. And I think that this is where the biology and physics start to come apart, okay? And this is where the contingency comes in. So this is

where I was going with that. And, you know, I think, and, you know, maybe you'd be better off saying whether you agreed or not, because it's not my specialty. But I think that the Copernica and stuff holds up quite well in physics. You know, you have the universality of physical laws, the same laws that govern terrestrial affairs also govern the celestial phenomena, like Newton showed. Everything that we can tell seems to suggest, like we have, you know, we're living in a garden variety solar system, you know,

So with inner rocky planets, out of gas giants, a garden variety main sequence star, in a sort of unremarkable location of the galaxy, which is just one among many in the observable universe. Now, that all seems to work. But then when you extend those principles, those ways of thinking, those modes of inference that are very familiar in the physical sciences

to biology, things start to break down pretty quickly. Okay? for a bunch of reasons. And continuity is going to be one of the big ones. But I think what's happened, you know, especially in the 20th century, where, you know, evolutionary biologists were largely not part of, I don't know if I can say historically excluded, but they weren't sort of active participants in discussions about SETI

and, you know, an extraterrestrial life. And it was always sort of a foo question. in biology, whereas in the physical sciences start to be taken more seriously. And then the interesting question is why and why were biologists not playing a big role? And part of the reason is they were very skeptical and they would be real, they would be naysayers at these conversations. So like the most prominent evolutionists of the 20th century, like that were involved in the major evolutionary synthesis, it's called, you know, like Ernest Meyer, where Dub Janski, G.G. Simpson, they were all very negative about the SETI project.

Interesting. Yeah. And so, you know, it's interesting because meanwhile, you have in the mid-20th century, right, the Fermi paradox is coming out, right? Where it's like, well, look, if we're going to go by something like a Copernican principle, then we should expect intelligent life to be pervasive in the universe, yet we haven't found a single shred of extraterrestrial life, whether on Earth or in the history of our visible cosmos, right?

There's no stellar engineering, there's no ships, there's no bots, all this stuff. And so, you know, this seems paradoxical. How do we explain it? And I think that it's paradoxical when you assume a sort of physics-like orientation to the world, a Copernican-like orientation. And but of course the evolutionists, like the G.G. Simpsons and the Ernest Myers and all these influential theorists,

and I'll talk about Stephen J. Gould in a minute because he's going to be like the first big articulation of this concept of contingency. But they weren't very moved by the paradox. Like they would say there's not much paradox to talk about. Why? Why is that? I mean, you have all the large numbers on your side. You've got all of the planetary science on your side. Why? And it's because they just saw, and they hadn't like fully really articulated very well yet. But because I'm talking in like 1960s, you know, there were

some papers that came out by advice by some of them being quite negative about the SETI project. and I'm sure SETI researchers took it a little bit personally, and it was not helpful to funding their projects and so forth. But I think what they saw was that when you have this big picture history of life on Earth, as some of these evolutionists did, what they saw was a historical sequence of events that involved all sorts of form, all sorts of formative, quirky outcomes that could easily have been otherwise, and that results in these sort of unique evolutionary sequences and trajectories that we cannot just project out

into the cosmos the way we might about, you know, in other physical sciences. And so like, you know, if you take like the science fiction of the 20th century, and actually it continues, is not much different, but if you take the science fiction of the 20th century, you know, where, you're, you know, where you have the Star Trek's humanoids and Star Wars, you know, everything is humanoid. It's like, you know, and actually this is sort of still goes on today. So like I don't remember when the film Arrival came out, but that was definitely 21st century movie. So this is a movie where it's essentially the exact same thing as the bipedal humanoid. it's just put into the body plan of a colioid mollusk.

Okay. So it's like what you're doing is saying, oh, and it's great because you're like, oh, like octopuses and, you know, and cuddlefish and so forth, show surprisingly sophisticated cognitive cognitive ability. So maybe they could have been the intelligent species on Earth. So that's the logic. But here's the problem. The problem is that, and this is something that I call like the bundling fallacy,

because I couldn't think of a better word for it, But we treat evolution as these like bundles of traits. In physics, when you get these bundles, they look, you know, they might look like natural kinds or something like this. In biology, it's this hodgepodge of highly contingent, non-replicable traits mixed with perhaps some lawlike stuff weaved into it. The problem is people tend to just project the whole bundle. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award because it feels like this.

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So basically you're saying people are able to imagine primates or cephalopods. Yeah, exactly. Or whatever the going kind of animal is, right? And so there's this idea that that the outcomes, these earthly outcomes are just projectable out into the universe to some extent. And that somehow they all come together, right? So like you get, when you get the body plan of a cephalopod in these respects, you're going to also get intelligence. And when you get a bipedal situation, you're going to get the kind of intelligence we're talking about. And the problem is that none of that is really parsing traits in evolutionary history in accordance with whether they're contingent or whether they're replicable. And so basically, I mean, and so then the big question, I guess, you know, sort of heading into these discussions of contingents,

is like, well, why exactly would we think that the Copernican principle approach breaks down when it comes to biology? Like, what's going on there? What's different about the evolutionary process and so forth, right? So there are some, like, general things that are a big problem. Like, for example, the observer selection bias, right? So if we're going to even be sitting around talking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we obviously came from a planet in which extraterrestrial, sorry, with terrestrial intelligence,

evolved. So we know it's consistent with the laws of physics, but that doesn't tell us anything about how common it is, right? But then the problem is this. In physics, you have all of these contentful laws, laws that you have to go out and discover and then it allows you to make predictions. In biology, there are arguably no or very few universal laws. And so just to give you, like one example of this, right? I mean, it's not even, it's not a peripheral example. This is a central one, the principle of natural selection. Okay.

That's about the closest thing to a law that we get in biology. That's pretty basic, yeah. It's very basic. You can, there are different ways of sort of formulating it. So like, it might be like, well, you know, wherever you have variation that's differentially connected to survival, causally connected to survival and reproduction, you will tend to get evolution by natural selection. Okay. Or you might say, well, we could formulate it in something like, you know, if A is better

adapted than B in environment E, then A will outreproduce B. The problem with all of this, right? And this is why there are these, there have been decades of debates in philosophy of biology about what kind of laws these are or whether they're laws. They're very different than laws of physics that have specific contents because, like, if you think about the principle of natural selection, like it almost looks like an a priori truth. It really skirts being an a priori truth. And people have, like, bent over backwards to try to figure out, no, to try to say, oh, this is actually empirical. Some philosophers of biology have said, you know, forget about it. It's not empirical. It's just a mathematical model. It has application conditions. But, again, it's all very different

than physical laws. Because it does seem like something you could come up with from the armchair, right? You didn't have to be Darwin doing the Beagle thing, right? And so, yeah. So, I mean, so that's the problem is that when you couch natural selection as this universal thing, even if we assume it has standard like empirical law content, it doesn't say anything specific. There's no content, and it doesn't tell you what's,

fitter than anything else. There's no predictions, right? It does apply everywhere, but it's very generic. It's like a schema. And so what you're, you know, we know that there are no traits that are, you know, always the fitter traits. Evolution does, there's no evidence that evolution pushes towards certain kinds of traits as being, always being the fitter ones. So sometimes being intelligent could be fitness enhancing and sometimes being stupid and just grazing on an easy food source can be fitness enhancing. And it just, you know, it just totally depends on local environments. So the big problem is there are no globally optimal traits, meaning traits that are always going to be fit, always going to be optimal. So as a result, you just don't get any specific laws falling

out of the principle of natural selection. That's not going to tell you what evolves. And that seems like a really interesting fact, but that's a fundamental reason, or one of the fundamental reasons why the history of life is not amenable to the same kinds of projections or predictability, or at least we just don't have any evidence yet that it is, although the convergence people are going to come and say, well, maybe there is, maybe there is some evidence. So let me just now just give you the Gouldian take on contingency. And then I'll tell you the convergence response and sort of where things stand now. And then we can just talk more freely.

But so, you know, Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionist, you know, he came along in the late 80s, early 90s. And he was sort of first really robustly articulating this notion of there being contingency in the history of life. And he was really pushing back against the sort of like progressivist, the narratives that people have, you know, tended to imbue to the evolutionary process. Progressivist, I mean, in, in, I sort of, I guess in like in common cultures, like, you know, you see the, what, the quadrupedal, you know, creature, then the knuckle walking creature, then the creature walking upright. and it looks like a single linear trajectory of progress. We know that all of that is false. That's not the way we think about evolution. And so Stephen Jigl was very much keyed into that,

and his contingency thesis was very much aimed at kind of demolishing the idea that there are these kind of progressive forces in evolution. And by the way, the assumptions of progress in evolution, unlike in physics, I think that they have infiltrated, thinking about biology very profoundly, and probably even in 20th century thinking about SETI. So, but anyhow, like, so this is what Gould said, and it's really a beautiful argument,

and then I'll tell you sort of what I think the state of it is, and then what the responses are, why the responses are not adequate and kind of where we are now. So Gould basically said, okay, let's do a thought experiment. So in physics, right, thought experiments have played, interesting roles. In biology, no, not that I know of, right? Which is interesting in itself. Why is that, right? But Gould's thought experiments were profoundly important in the field and

thinking about contingency and law-like necessity in the history of life, and hence, you know, in life elsewhere. And so Gould basically said, okay, well, imagine if we, we rewind the tape of life and let it play again. Now there's all sorts of ways we can modify this for reasons that we might need to, that are sort of more arcane philosophical reasons, but imagine replaying the tape of life from different initial conditions with small changes occurring and then how would that affect the outcome, right? And Gould basically said, and there were a couple of Gould start experiments, these kinds of evolutionary

counterfactual thought experiments that were really important. One was rewinding the tape of life to the origins of the first bilaterian animals. The vast majority of all modern animal phyla arose with geological rapidity around 550 or plus million years ago. And Gould says, was inspired by this fossil assemblage, which is known, One is the Burgess Shell, which is in the Canadian Rockies, but it's also since been confirmed as a global fauna in China and elsewhere, where there was this whole sort of coming

out of these fossils in the Burgess Shell was this sort of chronicle of this parade of science fiction-y beasts that didn't seem to bear all that much relation to the kinds of animal phylla that we know today. And so Gould basically said, like, well, if we were wound the tape to the time when the first animal phylo were evolving, would we have bet that vertebrates would have become dominant in the way that they did? Would we have known which phylo were going to become the shape of life and which ones were not? And, you know, at the time Gould had said, well, like, I don't think there's anyone would be betting on the vertebrates.

and, you know, or some of these, many of these other groups, and groups that you would have thought would have been doing extremely well, didn't make it through. And so, like, Gould's idea is, you know, look, in the early, and this is sort of a way that we can understand this from a causal mechanistic developmental point of view, is that early, when you're first laying down the sort of genetic underpillar,

of a complex developmental cascade in embryogenesis, meaning you're gonna start an embryogenesis with a single cell and you're gonna start, you know, differentiating into all of these systems and subsystems. At the beginning, those early nodes, they're gonna be highly determinative of what happens subsequently.

And once those early nodes are laid down, and then you lay down all the downstream machinery, you can't change the early nodes the early nodes without disrupting the whole system. So once you get going, you kind of get locked in place. And that was the idea of why you don't get repeated origins of new phyla at that scale of organization. And so the idea is like, which I think is very profound, is that like, well, you know, if things had gone just a little bit different in the, you know, the base of the Cambrian period,

and all of these, you know, the vast majority of phylo originated, then if things have just gone a little bit differently, then our shape of life that we know, you know, mollusks, anilid, worms, and like, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, vertebrates and arthropods, that that shape of life would be sort of confined or relegated to, you know, science fiction, possibility. And some other shape would have come into existence, right?

And so for Gould, that was, you know, a very fundamental expression of this idea of continuity and history of life. But you could do counterfactuals that rewind to all sorts of different, you know, levels of phylogeny and history of evolution and run the sort of same kind of analysis. And so, like, you know, I think, I mean, the other most poignant one, although it's slightly tropy at this point, but it's still nevertheless the most poignant. into maze, the end Cretaceous extinction of all non-avian dinosaur fauna and everything, you know, so much else. You know, so there's yet another example where, well, like, you know, here we are these intelligent mammals doing our mammal thing, but like, you know, there was no evidence that that was ever going to happen if we hadn't vacated all of these niches abruptly, even though all of these

dinosaur lineages and others were doing extremely well. and succeeding just fine, for the most part, somewhat controversial, but for the most part, I think that remains true. And so there's like yet another focal point of contingency in, you know, in the history of life, and that's one that's particularly relevant to our own origins, right? The problem is, of course, and this gets into the methodological, I mean, these are just thought experiments, right? This is how do we know? How are we going to, we can't actually rerun tapes of life, right? We're dealing with an n equals one. And the n equals one problem is presumably the biggest problem that we're dealing with when it comes to the contingency question,

right? If we had extraterrestrial data sets, oh my, then we could start to get a sense of what's law like and what's contingent, but we do not. Right. Right. And so you might think it's hopeless in a way. Like it's kind of just speculation. But the, you know, Over the last, you know, maybe decade or two, some evolutionists have been sort of pointing to this phenomenon of convergent evolution where you get the independent replication of similar biological forms and functions. And saying that these replications, these convergences, these repetitions, can essentially be treated as tantamount to natural experimental replications in the history of life.

So, yes, we cannot actually go back in time, make some, you know, mutter around with the environment and the genetics and everything and then see what happens. But we can, you know, but thankfully nature has done that for us by running these tapes over and over again at smaller scales and we see repetition. And that is indicative of a law-like necessity that is inconsistent with the contingency thesis and kind of gives us a data set that we can work. work with in the absence of extraterrestrial information.

And the problem with this, though, is that, you know, this is the way that it had been, convergence had been sort of looked at is it as a, like a monolithic, homogeneous phenomenon. There's repetitions, therefore Gould is wrong. And, you know, I think that's a mistaken way of thinking about it. And I think that it's critical that you sort of look at what the underlying causes of the repetitions are. And what happens is that certain kinds of repetitions start to look like, well, maybe these really do fly in the face of a Gouldian contingency theory, whereas other kinds of repetitions don't. So I think we need to really be careful in parsing that data set before we can make any conclusions about any grander conclusions.

about a cosmic biology and that sort of thing. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award because it feels like this, right? That's farmhouse fresh skin, all right? I'm blowing, and everyone asks how. The best skincare is farmhouse fresh, and the award is you, your best you.

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Check out O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-com. So I will just say, for what it's worth, very quickly, this could get us off on a big tangent. But even on the physics-slash-astrophysics side, I have questions about the whole Copernican-slash-ty-point-of-view, and we'll talk about that offline. But I do think that it's one of those things that sounds humble,

but it's really actually presuming an enormous amount about the universe. Agreed. If you think you're a typical observer, what you're really saying is you think typical observers are like you, and that's actually not fair. Yeah, no, no, that's right. That's right. And in fact, you know, I mean, it's interesting, though, because the convergence phenomenon is supposed to cut against the Gouldian picture, okay? That's how most people interpret it. Um, but actually like, I think that looking at the, at the, uh, the nature of life or the living universe through a convergence test lens is actually critical to many of the projects that

Gould was trying to promote like anti-progressivism. Sure. Because it gets us outside of ourselves, you know? So I mean, in a way, you're right. the Copernican principles and so forth, it's all sort of indexed to us. So in a way, it's like you're trying to get out of anthropocentricism, but you're sort of falling back into it.

And I think Gould did the same thing in a sense when he's saying, you know, look, if there were no, if there was no asteroid from the Orte Cloud, I don't know if he knew that Orte Cloud was likely back then as the originator of that. But if there was no asteroid that hit contingently, they would be no intelligent mammals. There's no intelligent mammals.

There would be no intelligent humans. And so, blah, blah, blah. There would be no intelligence in general. And interestingly, that's like it's a contingency thesis, but it's also quite anthropocentric. So once you bring convergence of the picture, you say, well, actually, like, you know, the avian and non-avian dinosaurs were probably extraordinarily

cognitively adept and sophisticated. And if you just look at evolution like in birds or encephalopods or in Arthur, even in insects post-KT-Event, you see complex cognition kind of everywhere. So, you know, there's in a sense in which convergentism, although speaking to necessity, can also speak against anthropocentricism. So it's, it is a weird balance how these things are playing out. I agree. And this leads me exactly where I wanted to go next.

What do we know about convergence vis-a-vis questions of intelligence and minds? You know, from our perspective as human beings, it can be easy to say we're what is being converged to. We're better than anyone else because we're smarter than everyone else. Obviously, being smart has its advantages, but just like, you know, armor probably has its disadvantages too. Yeah. No, absolutely true. I mean, look, I mean, ultimately, I think, and this is sort of jumping the gun, it's probably a better thing to conclude with, but it's like, I think ultimately extraordinary levels of cognitive flexibility and intelligence is probably a liability in the long run. I mean, none of us are going to be here to know how that bed turns out, okay?

But that would be my guess. And, you know, there's going to be a lot, yeah, hopefully. There's going to be plenty of much stupider animals peppering the stratigraphy of the earth long after we're gone. So I think it is quick to, we are quick to tout the things that we take to be, one, unique to us or close to unique to us, and two, to be morally important. And so there are values-based assumptions sort of playing a role there. But I agree with you 100%. And that's why, like, I think the big challenge, and there has been a movement to think about, like, cognition and minds in very biological ways. Okay.

But the big challenge, of course, is like, how do we get outside of ourselves, right? Because this is what we know. So we start with ourselves. And that seems natural, right? But I think that the more we learn about the forms of cognition and minds in more, especially in more distantly related lineages, including things like slime molds, right? The more we can understand what the nature of our own cognition happens to be and where it kind of fits in the law-like structure of the universe

as opposed to the contingent aspects. So, like, I mean, this is, and so I'll come back to the mind question in a second, but like just to give you an example of like how that plays out, I mean, you know, you know, take a question like, you know, questions about like burying the dead, right? You say, okay, like Neanderthals were burying the dead, that's interesting. So why were they doing that? What's the implication?

Oh, they have supernatural beliefs and that suggest stuff about symbolism or intelligence, right? And that's all plausible, right? I mean, but then you see all sorts of social insects burying their dead. And you're like, whoa, hold on a second. What's going on? obviously they're not you know they don't they don't have rituals around it they're not you know they don't have representations of the supernatural presumably right I don't think so what's the common between them well epidemiology etc right and and

and so evolution is just working with what it has on hand it's working with the contingent proximate causes that just happen to be around that it can work with in in social insects you know you're not going to have representations of the supernatural, but you have very predictable kind of like flexible fixed action patterns that you can work with if your evolution. Humans tougher case, because like we are very flexible and you got to fool us a different way. So what happens? Like we have we come up with these elaborate justifications which are actually they are the proximate cause but they are not the evolutionary cause and there is there arguably at least this is if it works

out this way, there is a common evolutionary cause, and really that's what the trait is. It's not the supernatural attribution. That's kind of just a confabulatory way for evolution to get at what it needs to get at, namely the function. And so I think if we start thinking about, you know, human traits that way, it changes quite dramatically how we think about ourselves. And what I just said would be probably offensive to a lot of people. Like, you know, not not in the circles that I'm arguing with, but like, you know, like, oh, you're saying, you know, that really it's just all about epidemiology and we're the same as Anne's and so. Well, but you know, I mean, this is this is the problem with humanities though. The humanities

wants to keep humans at the center. And there's times when you sort of need to do that, but there's times where that really holds back knowledge and understanding. And I think that this is one of those times. Now, if you go back to the mind question, just to sort of be on your side a little bit, as you indicated, there's multiple levels of perfectly legitimate causal explanation going on here, right? Like maybe we do it for epidemiological reasons, but also for symbolic sacred reasons. But the reasons, exactly. So that's why like everything, and this is something that sort of falls out of modern

contemporary philosophy of science, it's all question relative. The explanations are question relative, right? And so that's why you end up getting so much cross-talk because, you know, if you're trying to explain Neanderthal behavior, right, well, you know, then a complete picture is going to involve things like maybe, right? I mean, even that's contested. But it's like a complete picture would involve those kinds of proximate mechanisms.

But if you're trying to sort of understand what the trait actually is, why it arises in evolution, what's going on, that requires a bigger, more convergentist-like approach perspective. And I think it sheds light on deeply, like on human, you know, the metaphysics of human institutions. Like, I've run the same kind of argument about the, you know, the nature of social norms and what the structure of normative societies are. And, you know, and I think the same kinds of lessons apply there. But going back to the, oh, should we go back to the mind thing that you were talking about earlier? Yeah, I mean, so I think like, and this is interesting. So I think that the, I think that there's overwhelm, well, I don't know, I don't want to, it's hard to characterize.

things. But there's very, there's strong evidence, right, that brains and active bodies and minds evolved multiple times independently early in animal evolution. First, then the arthropods, devastating seek and destroy predators going on in the Cambrian before vertebrates even got going. Before vertebrates probably even had heads. Okay. And, you know, that triggered all sorts of arms races. And then you got several other, a couple of other lineages that also developed what we would talk about as brains. I mean, brains are like, you know, on a continuum of neural complexity, right? So you have like ganglia, nerve nets and so forth.

And your brain's like, when does ganglia become a brain? Well, I mean, evolution doesn't care. Right. So that's the question we can talk about. but we don't want to get too, you know, bogged down in artificial distinctions. We did have Peter Godfrey Smith on the podcast, just so you know. Oh, that's great. That's great.

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you do get the repeated evolution of brains in encephalopod mollusks in vertebrates and arthropods in reverse order. And I think that there's, you know, this is where you get into some of the, uh, the, um, ongoing work in comparative cognition. And this is by the way, why the convergentist approaches are so important. I mean, historically, there was this focus in comparative cognition, a very heavy focus on homology.

So it's like, well, where's consciousness in humans? It's in this part of the brain. No, of course, it's not the penial gland. Yeah. That they cart thought. But here's a portion of the brain that we associate. Let's look for that brain in other lineages. oh, they don't have that kind of brain, that portion of the brain, then they don't have consciousness.

It's a ridiculous way of thinking because, of course, they could independently evolve a structure that has the same function, right? But I know it sounds so simplistic, but it actually was a stumbling block for a long time. And it was a stumbling block with birds, and presumably it would have been with their ancestors in the dinosaurs, if we're, theropod dinosaurs, if we were able to reconstruct their cognitive world and, you know, and so I think that comparative cognition sort of moved away to some extent from just looking at our closest living relatives and like, you know, what can chim's do? Can chim's mind? Remember? And, you know, start to look at all sorts of other animals. And so like birds were early examples. But the most astounding is, in my view, is, in my view, is, you know, bees and it's like you know if you you show someone like you know oh here I got you know I got my you know my crackles to make this this object or color

discrimination and X number of trials you know the B people will say oh like our bees did that in you know half time right I mean it's actually quite remarkable there's there's there's I think compelling evidence for abstract concepts in bees like same this different and then actually transmitting that across sensory modalities. So same different shape, then same different smell. I mean, it's quite remarkable. And more than that, there's a lot of evidence for, like, holistic kind of worldviews

where, you know, the worldview of, you know, of a bee or other pods consists of like, you know, a unified sort of field with objects spatially distributed, bound with all sorts of properties in space and time, which is like that's our experience. That's our own wealth. We have our own quirks of our own wealth, but that's essentially how we perceive the world. And I think that there's a lot of evidence that that was recreated essentially in these other lineages. which suggests that there's something quite lawlike about that. You know, once you get into phenomenology,

science kind of reaches the end of what it can tell us right now, right? Like, you know, I'm talking about the experiential qualities to things and so forth. But if you think that that experience is, maybe we don't know how or why, but it just somehow falls out of that kind of a worldview, right, where you have this unified field that you've stitched together when you have objects in space and time

and you learn how to navigate them and more importantly classify them based on their relevance to you presumably based on fitness, right? You know, predators, prey, objects to avoid things to eat, you know, so forth. That has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life. And that, I mean, that to me is a big deal.

And this is a critical thing. We mentioned observer selection effects very early on. So, yeah, like obviously we can't just project ourselves because it's the only way we we could even be asking this question is to come from a world where this happened, but it could never have happened again. The big difference with convergence, which I think is beautiful about it, is that we don't have to hail from a world where consciousness, intelligence, complex problem solving, whatever you want to talk about evolved multiple times. that starts to really look like you're getting around observer selection effects and you're looking at a more law-like type of phenomenon. Then the big problem comes when you get to human cultural capacities. And that's going to be, that takes you into a whole different realm. So so far we've been like, well, you know, there's all this historical contingent.

embedded in the evolutionary process that gives rise to bodies. But there's quite a bit of convergence going on in the mental sphere, which is really interesting and is suggestive of some kind of a law-like pattern that we might actually be able to glean some like contentful laws of biology that are universal to some extent. you know, contrary to sort of the classic view of there being no laws in biology or there being no contentful ones. But then it sort of swings back. And I think when you get, so like, you know, getting intelligent living things, whether we're talking about social insects or we're talking about cetaceans, you know, dolphins and whales. or we're talking about cephalopod mollusks.

It is a very, very distant place from getting a species with cumulative culture. And that is a respect in which we are unique. But it's worse than that. It's a lot worse than that. So let me say why I think it's worse than that. It's a lot worse than that because it's not just that we're unique. We weren't even that for the vast majority of our history, right?

We were not that. We didn't even have robust cumulative culture, and we were human beings with all the same accoutreement, all the stuff that we would tout today, you know, language, morality, mind reading, mental time travel, like whatever, you know, imitation, all these capacities that we think, you know, highly cooperative that would have gone into becoming a cumulative cultural species. All of that stuff was around for possibly hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even more, maybe even well over a million, before our culture kind of started to become cumulative and really start to take off. And by cumulative, I mean like allowing for the retention

and incremental improvement of innovations down generations so that you don't have to reinvent the proverbial wheel every time because otherwise what you're limited to is, you know, as a species essentially, is innovations that one individual in their own ontogeny in their own lifetime could just happen to stumble upon, but they can't really build on anything and they can't retain it. That's going to be a highly limited species

in terms of its ecological impact. It's obviously not going to be a spacefaring, you know, detectable extraterrestrial type of species. And humans were that kind of species for 99% of our time. And so I'm... So we had the biology. We didn't have the culture yet. We don't know.

I think that... So this is a... It's kind of a parlor, but you're right. All the anatomy, let's put it this way. All the anatomy and everything looks like it's in place. And you do have culture, like you... You have cultural traditions. You have robust forms of cooperation that allowed humans to become essentially apex predators,

which is astounding for something like us. And you had all that, but you didn't, you know, it becomes like a parlor game of possibilities to try to explain why did, you know, what they call behavioral modernity or the upper Paleolithic Revolution. and then subsequently right with about 10,000 years ago with agriculture, that's when you get the real explosion of technologies. And all of these things were like the most recent eye blink of human history. For 99% of our existence, as ourselves, as I'm sure full persons, you know, in all respects,

for 99% of that history, we were, we essentially had the ecological footprint of like other social carnivals. I mean, there was nothing. Our numbers were tiny. Like, you know, I mean, we were scrappy. We made it. But like, you wouldn't be betting on us. Like, you know, the toba super eruption, whatever, 75, 70,000 years ago, you have an effective human population down to, what, 2000?

And then, like, you have a human population hovering at 20,000 global for like tens of thousands of years afterwards, I mean, that is not an inevitability waiting to just explode, right? I mean, it could have easily disappeared. We could have easily went extinct just sarcastically. And what would happen with the rest of them? I mean, obviously, we wouldn't know and we can never know. But where we are now is such a far cry from what we were all this time that I think, like, it's really, it's a sober thoughts and you know that there's nothing inevitable about this outcome and that you know people will list and this is what I meant by like there's it's a parlor game we can list like we could probably come up with like 30 or 40 orthogonal adaptation major or adaptations that are all relevant to creating

cumulative culture you know I mean just you can even go back and say you need some preexisting anatomy like you need fine motor manipulation. You know, so you need freed up hands, but you don't get freed up hands to get fine motor manipulation. So you get some other quirky reason that you got freed up hands because bipedalism was more efficient form of locomotion than knuckle walking, not quadrupedal, but knuckle walking. So you can get to this new adaptive peak in a right environment. But then a long time, millions of years go by, right, before you're making really good use of those fine motors. And so there's a... so much like that, right? And so I think, you know, going into the nature of cumulative culture,

I don't think humans are that smart. And let me just say what I mean by that. I don't mean to be like iconoclastic, but I genuinely believe this to be true. I do not think humans are, however you would operationalize this, I don't think humans are smarter than, say, dolphins. I don't. I don't. I don't believe that. I do believe that we benefit from cumulative culture. And, that is a tremendous, tremendous difference. And I think that that's where a focal point of contingency lies. And that's the closest I can come to anything even approaching a Fermi paradox resolution on genuinely biological grounds. Some days you just want to amplify your everyday look.

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to do that. There's accumulation of all sorts of different things that were kind of individually unpredictable and just came together in the right way. That is the signature of contingency in macro evolution. And you see that in lots of cases, like in the history of life, like where it takes enormous amount of time for some innovation to suddenly pop out. And, you know, when you look down at like even at very basic genetic levels, like trying to understand how innovations arise. That's what it looks like has to happen. And so that introduces an enormous sort of like, I can't think of a good word for it, but an enormous sort of point in which contingency arises at every level of biological

organizations. It could be at the mutation level. It's genetic backgrounds interacting with other. aspects of genetic backgrounds, genetic backgrounds interacting with stochastic environments, different biotic lineages interacting with each other strategically. It's kind of endless and that's the thing is like, you know, all of these things clearly are important

like pedagogical structures and everything that goes into that, right? Which is a huge suite of cognitive capacities, although weirdly ants can actually do some teaching too with, you know, using very different methods. But, yeah, so like, you know, so I think that that, you know, that's the kind of thing that really bespeaks a kind of contingency. And when I asked the question originally about, you know, minds and intellect and the extent to which one does converge towards those biologically or through evolution, I think people get that question, you know, they understand what it's going on. Is there as much effort put into sort of the social version of that question?

You know, is there a natural convergence to different kinds of social, cultural organization? Well, that's a, yeah, that's an awesome question. Because normally, right, I mean, when we're talking about convergence, at least like classically, we're talking about like morphological convergence or, you know, convergence in anatomy and morphology. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. You know, like, you know, the sort of the fish-like shape of, you know, sharks, ectheasors, and dolphins, which is remarkable. It is, yeah.

But when you get into other kinds of traits, like behavioral traits, maybe that harkens back to the undertaking, the burying the dead that I talked about. There's a behavioral trait, right? You have to think about it in behavioral terms. But there's an example of convergence. Behavioral traits are a little harder to kind of to delineate than visual quantifiable morphology, but we still are able to do that. Then you get into social traits, and that poses its own set of problems. But here's where things get really interesting. So, like, I, for example, think and have argued that, you know, that, you know,

You know, so humans are sort of quintessentially normative creatures living under social rules that sort of regulate behavior in our communities and our groups, and it's critical to human cooperation. Yeah. And, you know, punishment of norm violations is critical to stabilizing cooperation in human groups, for example. Now, when people ask like, well, what other, do other animals have social norms? Like, you know, like if you build complex cognitive features that humans use to follow social norms into our definition or delineation or specification of social norms, no one else is going to have them, right? I mean, and so it's kind of like it's a theta-complea and you're just sort of going through the motions. But of course, no one, no other animals are going to have what you have because you're just picking out the things that are unique to us, that are unique. realizers of a social normative structure. If you give up on that and you say, forget about it,

social normative structures are social structures that are multibly cognitively realizable, meaning many different cognitive forms could give rise to the same functional structure. Then it sort of opens the door to start thinking out, well, where else might we see the same kind of functional structure. And as you do that, you start to kind of, you revise your understanding of what that structure even looks like. Because you're starting, so this was sort of going back to your early question about how do you get away from some of the anthropological thinking about some of the stuff,

which I don't think anyone has great answers to. But like you start with something that looks like something that works in your theories, in your research programs. And then you start looking for it elsewhere and you start realizing it takes on very different forms. So then you go ahead and you revise the way you thought about the original structure. And that's what I think happens

when you think about these functional structures as being multiply relizable. So, like, I mean, to give you an example of how silly it would be just to build human-specific mechanisms into our understanding of these social, configurations, like, you know, imagine like you're like, okay, look, and this goes back to the evolution of brains in, say, cephalopod mollusks, okay? They evolved independently, and they connected in a very

important way with the evolution of vision, by the way, and I should have mentioned that earlier. So arthropods vertebrates and cephalopods all have, you know, visual ecologies connected to brain processing and active bodies, okay? And imagine you're like, okay, let's define an eye or visual ecology in terms of human-specific mechanisms about like what goes into what human eyes looks like precisely and like what goes into the neural processing and like how it works. And then you say, oh, look, cephalopod mollus, they don't have eyes. Yeah. Like they can't actually see. They're not visual foragers.

Like that's obviously laughable, right? I mean, from a biological standpoint. But that is kind of what goes on when you take. defining human traits and specify them in a way that makes them essentially non-replicable. And so, like, I think, for example, like going back to the issue of, like, social norms, so I think of social norms essentially as, you know, rules of conduct that regulate behavior in social groups in order to stabilize ultra-cooperation. And I think that you can get that

through many different cognitive avenues. And one of them, I mean, the humans are the obvious example, but the best case, I think, for social norms outside of human beings is actually not in the animals you might expect. Like, it's not, I mean, in my view, it's not in, you know, cetaceans like dolphins in whales. It's not even in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. And, you know, it's actually in social insects where you get a robust institutionalization of rules of conduct that are enforced by subordinates against everyone in the colony. And even chimps don't manage really to do that

very well. Chimps are still structured in highly hierarchical ways. Um, where, where you can get turnover of dominant individuals through alliance making and so on. But you don't get rule of all by all. And I think in social insects, there's a strong argument to be made that that's precisely what you get. And that's because you can see that it's critical

that when you're talking about how social norms are enforced, you need to, in order for there to be social norms, need to see them enforced by subordinates. This is not just dominant individuals coercing other individuals to behave. That's pervasive in animals. But that's not what a normative society is. A normative society is precisely what the word means, which is a society that's law govern and governed by rules, not sheer power, not self-interest. And I think that that's precisely what you get in all sorts of rules in social insect societies, most of them surround

reproduction. In humans, we have lots of different rules, lots of different norms, because we're far more open-ended in our ability to learn different normative contents and so forth. But I think ultimately they're playing the same functional role, which is to stabilize highly cooperative social structures where you're essentially cooperating in every avenue of life.

like foraging and food sharing and warfare and collective defense and pedagogy and industry and all of those things. And so I think that when you start to think about traits in a deeply biological way where you don't tie them to very specific, uniquely human, very anthropocentric, you know, cognitive causes, then you could start to really appreciate the depths of convergence on social structures. And that helps you really get well beyond, I think, the prison of anthropocentricism. And it might cause us to go back and say, well, what is our, what is human morality? Oh, actually, that's just what it is. It just happens to be working with what humans got, because we can't just be operated on by natural selection through simple mutations

that are gonna cause a behavior. Like, we need to remain flexible in many ways. So what do we do? Well, you know, we have all sorts of complex learning environments. And so like, you know, social insects, you don't need to, you know, you could have a mutation that gets them to operate a single way in a certain way. That's particularly altruistic.

And humans, it's harder to do that. So in some sense, ants have in common with humans but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement. Yes. And I mean, it is absolutely, they do have police forces. And they, you know, they do have what I would call an institutionalized form of norm enforcement. Whereas it's, it's far, I'm not saying that it's like it's absolutely ruled out in chimpanzee societies. But there's not a lot of strong. evidence for subordinate enforcement of rules and which would explain why tympanese societies are not that cooperative I mean if you read a book on if you read a book on human cooperation you'll or you know you'll often it'll often start with something like apart from the social insects humans are the most

cooperative animal on earth and I you know I'm like well wait a minute let's go back to that what what's going on there why is why what's going on with the social insects? But it's as if they're not relevant because they're so evolutionarily distant from us. Their lifeways are so alien in many ways. They're life cycles. It's very hard to wrap our mind around them.

They operate on timescales that we can barely process. And so, like, we're, you know, it's much easier for us to think about chimpanzees societies than it would be about, but, you know, despite, it's actually, it's not despite these radical differences in their life ways and their life cycles and their development and their cognition. It's not despite that, but it's actually because of that, that we can start to glean really big lessons about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture. Maybe I'm running the danger of being anthropocentric

myself here, but I guess I think what many people would say in response to this, this is, sure, social insects and human beings have high degrees of cooperation and social organization, but isn't it different because aren't the ants kind of just hardwired with instincts and aren't we like agents making choices? Isn't that different somehow? No, you're right. I mean, like the objection is something like, you know, look, if you're going to, I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the contemporary FSB version in Ukraine, but I'm thinking of like the NKVD barrier troops, right? You know, forcing Soviet infantry to sort of keep moving forward and they'll shoot them if they try to turn, right?

Like, you know, social insects don't need an insect equivalent of the NKVD for the most part because, right, they can just be, you know, in defense of the motherland, right? You know, they can evolve these relatively stable mutations that then generate certain kinds of behavior. But the reality is that, and first of all, I want to say that I don't really care how these functions emerge in development. Genetics and environment and culture are just all resources that then shape bias certain outcomes in ontogeny. There's nothing special about, I mean, well, there's debates about this, but I'm not sure that there's anything special about genes in that regard.

They're just yet another important resource that could be used to shape an ontogenetic outcome, which could then affect evolution. And humans are subject to that exact same thing. So, you know, it's highly likely that human morality has genetic components, probably quite substantial ones. Through a process of gene culture co-evolution, humans evolve these highly cooperative societies, right? So it's not like we're immune to the idea that there are genetic influences. But I think at the end of the day, you know, how that, how that biasing occurs doesn't matter as much is the fact that it has occurred and the function is produced.

Yeah. And ultimately, like I said, yeah, humans might have more flexibility, but I can, I would bet everything that the social insects, which are probably, I mean, they're sort of equivalent in, even just the ants are probably equivalent to humans in their, in the fraction of energy that they commensere in the biosphere today, right? And, you know, or biomass and everything. And that includes their domesticates, by the way. I mean, we have a lot of domestics, but so today. And, you know, both fungi and animals. And so I really don't have much doubt for good or for worse, just as a statement of fact, I think, that humans are going to be long gone, and you're going to have social insects

peppering the fossil record for another 100 million years plus. And I, you know, I'm not saying that that makes them better in any way. In fact, there's nothing like morally, robustly, morally normative than any of this. Like, it's not like people sometimes ask me like, oh, well, if these are normative societies, what can we learn from them about how we ought to structure our society? I say nothing, nothing. I mean, well, you know what? We could have learned faster how to inoculate because they do that.

you know things like that quarantine you know they had it they had a functional germ theory of disease before we did i know it's funny but it's actually kind of true and so like you know and going back to your question about about levels of explanation which i think is important because it's kind of a way of um of not dissolving but like kind of like disarming potential conflicts between thinkers when we're talking about this. I mean, if you're asking, right, this question, why did humans become so cooperative? Why did they become apex predators? Why did they start to spread around the globe?

Right. Why did they invent agriculture? Why do you know all these things? When you eventually, and you ask that, when you ask that question, compared to chimps, then you're going to get a particular answer, right? And that's going to involve lots of human-specific adaptations that played a role. But that's what I would call like a divergentist explanation. Like, why did humans diverge from these other close cases?

Here's an answer. And it is powerful. But it's an explanatory powerful answer, but it's very narrow in scope. Because it only applies to that one-off kind of human case, which for all we know could be highly contingent. There's no sort of law-like lesson from it. But if you go broader, right, and you think about convergentist explanations, instead of saying, why did this lineage differ from this other lineage, what you're asking is, why did these two

lineages arrive at similar endpoints? Now, you know, you might come up with some underlying common causes that look like they have a more sort of deeper or more law-like structure to them, which is like, like you're saying, like, I mean, they're just, they're different questions. questions, and I'm not saying that one is more important, you know, than another. But if you want to think more broadly about evolutionary patterns and process, as opposed to human-specific quirky evolution, then it is important to go broader. Well, you mentioned a couple times the word normativity.

And, I mean, you are a philosopher after all. So we got to go there and dig in a little bit. I mean, I'm presuming, I was getting in trouble to make these presumptions, but you're not making some ought from is kind of statement, but you're trying to, by the way, normativity is a word philosophers used for when we talk about what you're supposed to do or should do, not just what things do do, right? So morality comes under that. But obviously our morality evolves. And one can then ask, like, is the morality that evolution has left us with what it should be? And then what does even that mean? So I, yeah, that's a great, and a very important,

question which sort of it does it does touch upon that what I just said a second ago which is that like when people ask well what do we learn from social insects about how morality ought to be it's like nothing I mean do you see how they treat each other but you know then again like what are we going to learn from you know aggressive colonialists I mean you know it's not that different but um but I think but it's a really important question and you know I have a book that I I co-wrote with the political philosopher Alan Buchanan from 2018 called The Evolution of Moral Progress. And basically, like, that book is essentially an argument that it sort of poses this sort of question. Given, you know, if we take the standard evolutionary picture about why and how human morality evolved,

it looks like there are certain types of, there's certain space of moral possibility that looks like it's extremely difficult to achieve or not sustainable because of the highly kind of parochial, tribalistic morality is that we are the legacy of. And there's a whole story behind that,

but the idea is like in order to get the kind of altruism within the groups, you need these intergroup conflicts. And so you have a group level selection process that selects for groups that are moral, but the only reason that that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other groups. So you have essentially what amounts to like in-group favoritism and out-group antagonism, which is extremely universal in humans, right? And so like that's the evolutionary picture.

But then you say, look at, you know, look at especially post-enlightenment, look at like these tremendous examples of progress that we would normally identify as progress, like the rule. Look, look, right now everything's up for grabs, right? I mean, you know, things. Yeah, well, the things that we wouldn't have even thought about as in question, like the rule of law, human rights, etc. But like the things that we normally take to be progress, like the increasing inclusion. of, you know, women and minorities and people with disabilities and, you know, LGBTQ and, like, you know, the ethical treatment of animals and going back before that, the rule of law, the abolition of slavery, it kind of goes on and on, and you can come up with a really long

list of these things. And how are we able to do all of that, given the kind of evolutionary legacy of morality that we have? And some people would want to say, well, we ultimately won't be able to sustain those ways of being, which you might say, oh, what's happening at this moment in the world is kind of evidence of, but I personally think you've got to see the bigger arc and the bigger trajectory. I think it's a little too fine-grained to make that conclusion. But I think, like, the sort of upshot is that humans have a capacity for normativity, this is going back to your question about normativity, for understanding, for thinking about what's right and what ought to be, that's not, that's kind of open-ended.

And under certain kinds of circumstances, humans are able to step back, critique the kind of norms that they're following, and, you know, make consistency judgments and other things that allow them to interrogate and improve our moral systems. And so like, you know, I think there is a legitimate, I mean, I'm trying to avoid very thorny territory in the sort of the Humian, Kantian debates about the nature of morality and so forth. We're all humians here at the Mindscape podcast, just so you know.

Yeah, no, I, yeah, I would figure. I would figure, but, you know, but, but, you know, actually to that point, it was a really interesting because I you know when I teach a moral philosophy like when you get to Kant it's bizarre it does like if the grounding is weird none of it like makes a lot of sense whereas Hume is just like very I mean for us science-see people it's really on point right whereas con is bizarre but then like you sort of get to the the bottom of Kant where sort of you know at a at the basics where he's saying like you know what, you know, there are certain things that are right and wrong, irrespective of what our

desires or preferences are. Hume ultimately rejects that, but in a more, kind of in a more philosophical way, I mean, what Kant to me is saying is who's so important is that, like, there are, there are rights and wrongs that transcend our own self-interest and that it's just not sufficient to say, you know, I don't desire that, so it doesn't have any grip on me. Once you're in the realm of reason giving, right, you know, you're within the realm of morality and you could be swayed. And so, like, I think that critical, though, for humans to be able to do that is that you create certain kinds of social conditions that don't replicate the kinds of cues and triggers. in the early ancestral environment that we respond to without group antagonism.

And that's a big process that means we have to create surpluses, that we have to educate, that there's so much going on. And it's very easy to turn back the tide and regress rapidly when there's actual or perceptions of scarcity, intergroup competition, predation of one group by another. And it doesn't matter whether they're real, because culturally we can, you know,

people can use that polemically to make people believe that. And bam, trigger these highly exclusivist, highly sort of outgroup xenophobic attitudes. So you're saying this sort of a vulnerability in our moral structures. Always. When everything is going well, we can be good people. but there's a set of situations that were not really equipped to keep it up. I think that's right.

And I think that, but I mean, this is the scary part. The scary part is that even, and this is the part that kind of would keep me up at night. Even if we knew all of the causal levers that go into human moral. psychology development and evolution. Like even if we sort of knew what that big picture story looked like, or at least the key aspects of it, we might still be feckless to do anything about it because of just the way these emergent pattern, you know,

like so we might know the playbook of a demagogue, but that doesn't mean we're going to be able to successfully battle it. And that's the scary thing, right? I mean, now, of course, you're dealing with social media problems and other things, which create new problems. So it's kind of an arms race between parasitic demagoguery that could stand to benefit in some narrow way from moral regression. And I hate to say something tropey, but it's like, you know, the light of reason and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, like we're, reason is powerful and empathy is powerful, but it's limited. And it could be steered in the wrong directions very quickly.

And you're right that to say, I think that these gains are fragile because we're susceptible to this. And that's what, I mean, you know, that is what we're seeing. We're looking right now down the barrel of the fragility of our institutions. Yeah, big time. And it is easy to take them for granted. And, you know, maybe we'll get to a point in human history where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with. But right now, it is quite precarious. Like, we honestly don't – I would not have said this like 15 years ago.

But, like, you know, I really don't know where we're going to be 30 years from now. I really don't. Well, that's too bad because that was the last question I was going to ask. I mean, you've been wonderful at saying, look, we might not. last, where we might not be the robust version of a social species here on Earth. And also it is hard to predict. Biology does not give us laws that are that determinate. But also, you know, one gets some feelings, some wisdom out of looking at all these different

examples of the space of possibilities where we could go. Are we going to become the Borg? Are we going to evolve into something else? We're going to upload ourselves into computers. Are we just going to crash and burn? You know, give us your honor. take here. What do you think should be the kind of prospects that we should keep in mind for the future of humanity? Well, okay. So there's like short term and very long term.

Yeah. And this is where you get into like sort of debates about long termism as an ethic, right? I mean, you know, anyone who's, you know, when I was little, I remember being worried. And I'm sure This is true for a lot of people when they're young and they're here reading, you know, reading, learning about the solar system and star life cycles. And I started to get real worried about the sun bloating, right? And whether it's going to swallow the earth or, you know, or what, you know, in the, in a red giant phase. And like, that's all freaking me out.

And so people, you know, anyone worrying about like, where are humans going to be at that time? will they have made it into space and common? I mean, this is just the scales that we're talking about are so vast that from a macro-revolutionary standpoint, it's like I, you know, on the other hand, I think that there is like, there are some interesting things to think about, even in shorter term questions, about human survival. And then I'll say something about the ethical side too,

because I think that ultimately, like, what's driving this question, what makes it so poignant or compelling is like that it means something to us and then trying to figure out what it means and, you know, why extinction would be bad or good for some people, I guess, you know, is another matter. But like, here's one thing. I mean, so an interesting question, I think, is like when you're, if you're, I don't want to get into the zeitgeists because I, but maybe we have no choice. and that's what happens, right? So, like, now I'm going to talk about AI because, like, that's what's going on right now. And probably 50 years from now, it's going to be something different. And I don't know. We'll be laughing about talking about it.

Maybe. I don't know. But, like, you know, I guess, like, one thing that I want to, I do take the robots seriously. And I don't think most biologists would. They'll think, oh, you know, robots are. clunky, you know, they're brittle, they're not flexible. Like, you know, you could tell the whole story. At the end of the day, I don't know. I'm worried about functional convergence. You know what I mean? I'm worried about distributed intelligence. And I'm worried. And so I guess like an

interesting question to me is like, you know, to think about is, and this might be something that we can learn from looking at other animals. I mentioned that social insects, one of the things that they were, you know, that they've done repeatedly many times is domesticate fungi in animals and other insects. And so there's an interesting, and they're the only other ones that have done that, as far as I know, okay, besides humans. And an interesting question is like, when does it look like? So there's a conceptual question is like, when can we say, can we make a principal distinction

between a domesticator and a domesticate? It's a process of co-evolution. That's going to be a whole interesting argument in itself, right? But then the question is like, say we can do that. Now is there a way that we can think about artificial intelligence and other types of computational technologies, should we think about them as our domesticate? Or is there going to be a point where we're not even going to realize it and we're going to become the domesticate? And I think that that's actually important because it might be something that we want for ethical reasons to battle.

But I think at the end of the day, I personally, and this is like kind of, this is like kind of, of the macro evolutionist in me. Like one of the reasons I love macroevolution and got into it as someone like, you know, I came from a background in law and, um, and ethics and stuff like that, but I really loved macroevolution because it's kind of amoral, meaning like it doesn't, it doesn't say anything. Yeah. It doesn't care. It just is, but that's beautiful. And it helps us transcend ourselves and transcend our problems and like um and i think there's something wonderful about that and i think from a macro evolutionary perspective you know if there's any inference you're going to make from inductions that are you know all of every species time is limited and i don't think that there's um

I'm not sure that there's an ethical imperative for existence at any cost or in any form. And so, like, I mean, I guess this is kind of like more, this gets into a more sort of emotional Buddhist type of thing going on in me, which is like, I'm okay with disappearing. And, you know, like, I think, like, there's, you know, look, if you were in the end, Cretaceous, watching the asteroid come and hit, which to me is, like, one of the sad, is like probably the saddest events in life in Earth's history. And it's just so deeply sad, not just because of, like, just sheer pain, suffering, destruction, but, like, there's an entire. vibrant and modern world, which we don't normally think of that way, but I would, I recommend all the listeners out there to watch David Adambrose's prehistoric planet to see what we think these ecosystems and these animals look like now. And oh, is it vibrant and colorful and and smart and social and like all of this? And you know, if you

saw that that asteroid coming, you said, this is the apocalypse. But then of course, like, well, what came out of that? Is it something better than what was before? Is it better simply because there's maybe there's a highly self-conscious species? Is that alone going to give us the a greater value of the entire biosphere? I mean, all of this is going to rest on these insanely controversial questions, right, about how to parse value in nature, about how we put together the value of, say, rational persons against sentient nonpersons and then add it all up and figure out some kind of, right, is it, and there is no agreement on this. Like, once you get to aggregates and ethics, no one knows what they're, no one knows what to do. So like, you know, human extinction

might overall for sentient life be a huge boon, but maybe not. You know, the reality is, and this is something people don't realize, and this is like, you know, this is what I always, like, always kind of made me a little bit reluctant to go sort of like vegan vegetarian in the sense that like, I mean, it's as if like the, and it's just kind of like the colonialist narrative. It's like there's bad guys and the bad guys do something bad. And the rest of it is, and all they're doing is mucking up something. kind of a natural, beautiful, hermodious state. But of course, that wasn't true in colonialism. I mean, colonialism was a problem for other moral reasons, but like, point

being, there wasn't some kind of harmony that was being disrupted, right? And is, of course, the same thing in the natural living world. It is a horrific, horrific place. Right, and beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, and like, but it's like, I mean, just,

you know, like doing little things can give insights into this. Like, I've, you know, I've always been into aquariums. And when I finally moved out of my, my parents' house, I could have all the animals I want. So, like, you know, now we have like a bazillion aquariums and I've been breeding all sorts of fish for like many, many generations, years and years. And, and all I can tell you is like, you know, it's like, okay, you're going to, you're going to have fish that breed. Oh, my God, you just had, you just had 500 babies. What am I going to do? with this and you're like well actually only i mean if you want a stable fish population you're only going to get

two living yeah right and so and you immediately realize all these horror shows unfold right like what happens to these little little creatures is horrific and even you do everything in your power to try to you know as many can survive and and you can't so like you know this reminds me of groundhog day you remember that movie of course but here's i'm going to give you my take on groundhog day that i haven't heard anyone else to, okay? And this goes back to the nature of ethics, and it's relevant to this question because I think, you know, I'm at a senior enough state in my career where I feel like I could just say things like this. I think virtue ethics is stupid, but I think it's right. And I guess the reason why is because, so, okay, let's go to Groundhog Day for a second. The, the, the,

Murray movie, right, where he just keeps reiterating that same day over and over again. I think this is a really, really interesting movie from an ethics perspective because, so the way it starts is he starts out being an egoist. So now he knows he's going to, he knows everything that's going to happen. So he's going to manipulate the world to his end, right? So he tries to sleep with the girl, blah, blah, blah, blah, and like it doesn't work out well for him anyway in all of those cases. And he keeps getting reborn and recycled, right? This starts again. He at some point moves from this kind of egoist mentality to what essentially is a utilitarian mentality, like maximize utility, meaning maximize pleasure over pain, which is a deeply

selfless thing, but it's also futile. And so like, he's running around trying to save the kid from, you know, he knows where the kid's going to fall out of the tree. He knows like, you know, he's like, you never thank me. And then like, you know, and then like, but you know, there's still people that die. He can't save. Right. And it's like he's still, there's still so much horror that he can't fix.

And then at the very last phase of the movie, he becomes, he basically moves into virtue ethics territory where he stops trying to maximize good. He doesn't care about self-act, you know, he doesn't want to manipulate anyone. He just develops his own talents and flourishes in the world that he has. And I think there's something important and beautiful about that because at the end of the day, we don't know how to aggregate and maximize our lives in that way. And whether that would even be a good thing is not clear. And so I think there is something deep about just trying to understand and empathize with the world around us, while at the same time giving yourself space to experience the world and flourish.

And that kind of looks very virtue ethicsy, even though I hate to say it. I think I'm extremely sympathetic to this. My thing about virtue ethics is maybe it's right, but maybe it's not ethics. Like it's not quite comparable to... It's like aesthetics. Yeah, it's more like aesthetics. It's an approach to life, right? That's right.

Something like that. I don't know. I think that's right. I think that's right. Rachel, this has been quite a ride that you've taken us on. And we appreciate it very much. Thanks very much for being on the Minescape podcast.

Before I go, I'm going to, I just want to tell the audience that the voice they've been listening to is the voice of a stunningly beautiful woman. They wouldn't know that. They don't know. But it's true. Wink, wink, wink, self-deprecating. Very self-depicating. You know, that's the evidence they have. They have no choice, but to go with it.

All right. Thank you, Sean. This was great. much. All right. Bye-bye. And I wear Ashtro. To me, that means I know who I am. I trust what I like. I don't second guess it. I show up bold, intentional, and fully myself every single day. My style is timeless. It's beauty grows and gets stronger with time. Astro isn't just what I wear. It's how I express who I am, unapologetic, confident, whole. I know who I am. I trust what I like and I don't second

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