Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

It's easy to be cynical about humanity's present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we're doing better than we used to be. Today's guest, Nicholas Christakis, is an interdisciplinary researcher who studies human nature from a variety of perspectives, including biological, historical, and philosophical. His most recent book is Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, in which he tries to pinpoint the common features of all human societies, something he dubs the "social suite." Marshaling evidence from genetics to network theory to accounts of shipwreck survivors, he argues that we are ultimately wired to get along, despite the missteps we make along the way.   Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Nicholas Christakis received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science in the Department of Sociology, with additional appointments in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Statistics and Data Science; Biomedical Engineering; Medicine; and in the School of Management. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yale web page Google scholar page Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter

What if you could get more from what you already do? As a Shell Fuel Rewards member, that's just a regular weekday morning. You get more rewards, more savings, and more special offers. Earn rewards when shopping, dining out, and fueling up. And all of that becomes fuel savings when you're at the pump. Use the Shell app and enjoy life with more. Your nearest Shell Station is less than five miles away. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn.

I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, EIRSA, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHart audiobook club on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast. I'd like to mention books that I have written or am in the process of writing. My most recent book that has actually appeared is, of course, called The Big Picture,

and it was an attempt to put together the laws of the physical world with the human side of things. And this is an element of a genre, right? There's a kind of book where you try to synthesize some gigantic picture of things. And it's, you know, there's successes and less successful books in this genre. Our guest today is Nicholas Christakis. who is the author of one of the most recent attempts in this genre. It is called Blueprint. Now, Nicholas, unlike me, is not a physicist. He's a, well, it's hard to say what he is.

I almost said he's a social scientist. But one of the things he brings to the table as an author of an incredibly sprawling book like this is that he seems to be a professor of everything. He was originally a medical doctor. And now I have to read this from the back of his book. He is at Yale University the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science. and particularly he's appointed in the departments of sociology, medicine, ecology, evolutionary biology, statistics and data science, and biomedical engineering, as well as being the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. So he's a sociologist, a medical doctor, he studies ecology and networks, applied math, a whole bunch of things.

So in Blueprint, he's trying to put this all together, right? He's trying to write a book about humanity and what makes us. special, not just culturally, but how that relates to our biology, our genetics, how we came to be different than other animals in different ways. And he identifies what he calls the social suite, the list of that's sweet, S-U-I-T-E. So it's a suite of characteristics that make us human. And some of them are good, things like the capacity for love or cooperation. Some of them might not sound so good, like the existence of in-group bias. We like people like ourselves. We don't like people, not like ourselves, the preference for hierarchies and so forth. But the overall message

that he comes away with is an optimistic one. That's what makes this book special in a sense. He's not simply saying how terrible human beings are. He's saying that there's good reason to be optimistic about what we can become. And, you know, it's not 100%, right? It's not at all determined. He has examples in the book, for example, of societies that were created after shipwrecks. So little semi-controlled experiments with small numbers of people. Some of these experiments went terribly wrong, but some of them turned out really, really well. So Nicholas wants to make the case that what makes us human is part of what makes us good, and we do have reason to be optimistic about the future.

You know, of course, as long as we don't destroy the planet or anything like that. So let's see how that's going to happen, and let's go. Now I'd like to introduce you to meaningful beauty, the famed skin care brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful beauty makes powerful and effective skincare simple, and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types, and it's designed to work as a complete skin care system, leaving your skin feeling soft, smooth, and nourished.

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Then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary not. Medical advice. Eligibility required seaside for details. Nicholas Christakis, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sean. So I do, you know, I want to dive right into the meaty substance.

You've written 500-page book. Very, very good. I've never quite reached the 500-page mark in any of my books. I've come 400 and some a couple of times. But you also, you know, I'm equally intrigued by the About the Author section at the end of your book because you have an MD, a PhD, you've been a hospice doctor, and you're talked about as a sociologist. Tell us, you know, how you think about yourself and how you got to be.

be this. Oh, goodness. Well, I mean, you said a little bit about the biographical details. I mean, I think to me, one of the most interesting observations about the sciences or more generally about scholarly inquiry is that innovation and novelty often come at the intersection of disciplines. And this idea is often realized in many ways. I talk to my graduate students. I say, you know, yes, have depth, but also some breadth early on. You know, go to nearby, you know, meetings and conferences and departments and see what they're doing. And you'll never know when you get a good idea unexpectedly.

You know, you might be building a kind of a laser device and go to a talk by a biologist about how natural selection has solved a similar problem, you know, millions of years ago in the design of an insect eye, for instance. Or the same principle comes up when you think about civilizations. And there's this wonderful lecture about when ideas have sex. You know, like innovations come at the intersection of trade routes, right, where people mix and ideas mix.

And I think the same thing happens in discovery. It's not just a pedagogic tool. It's not just an argument about the emergence of novelty and ideas at sort of at a civilizational level. I think it happens at the level of a work of a practicing scientist where if you cultivate some breadth in yourself, you're able to discover new things. So in my own career, I've tried to do that. I've tried to be as broadly educated as I can be, and I have rather enjoyed it. And so, but, all right, let me play the part of the devil's advocate here. Yes.

Do you, you, you've just cast this interdisciplinary nature of your work as a sort of, of rational, instrumental, good thing to do. So is it mostly that or is it mostly that you just like it? It's both. I mean, I derive a lot of satisfaction. I mean, the thing is, you know, I force like most people, you know, I think, again, it's, I just, I want to emphasize that. I think it's important to have expertise. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not advocating for being a dilettante. I think it's important to, to have skills, to have depth. But I also think it's important to keep your head up and look around. And people, different disciplines and different people do that at different phases of their career. And in my case, I made heavy investments

in my 20s in both the natural and the social sciences, you know, the biological and the social sciences. And, you know, I, and over the course of my career, I tried very hard to keep those parts alive and to look for opportunities for discovery at the intersection of those fields. So that's why, for instance, a lot of the work I've been doing has been on the evolutionary biology of friendship, for example. You know, how and why did we evolve to have friends? That's a question at the overlap of those fields. So, yeah, it's been sort of deliberate.

Yeah, and so you've come out with this wonderful new book called Blue, is it Blueprint or The Blueprint? Sorry, I forgot. Blueprint. Blueprint. As I said, yeah, 500 pages. It has the feeling of, you know, a summing up of many years. We're both too young to have, you know, anything that is specifically, the culmination of our career quite yet, but it does have this synthetic vibe to it.

So, of course, what I'm going to ask you to do is to summarize it in 30 seconds or less for our readers. What is the point of the book? What's the elevator pitch? Well, I think for too long, in my view, the social sciences and the biological sciences and sort of the person on the street have been obsessed with the role of our evolution in shaping our propensity for bad things. Our propensity for our. violence and tribalism and selfishness and mendacity. But equally, natural selection has shaped us for good, has equipped us with capacities for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching.

And I would argue that these qualities, these good qualities over the sweep of our evolution must necessarily have outweighed the bad qualities. You know, if every time I came near you, you killed me or you were mean to me, you need to me or you filled me with lies, you know, gave me fake news or information that was false about the world, then there'd be no utility in my being near you, and we would evolve to be solitary animals, but we're not, we're social animals.

So the benefits of a connected life must necessarily have outweighed the costs. And the subsidiary ideas that there are a number of sort of, you know, motifs. One of those is that to the extent that these core features are good, and to the extent that they have been shaped by natural selection, they give us a kind of a lever or a kind of insight into our common humanity. The fact that humans around the world share these properties, we all do because we're all the same species. They are seen again and again a kind of core, fundamental, universal,

a set of cultural universals, which are a universal and be good. So it gives us a kind of opportunity to empathize, with each other and kind of address in some ways some of the forces that might otherwise divide us. These are modern political forces, but that's not my main agenda. So those are some of the themes, the role of natural selection in shaping not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but the structure and function of our societies. How have we been shaped across our evolution to manifest particular forms of

of social order. Why are those forms of social order universal? Why are those forms of social order good? And what does this tell? And how? How do they become to be that way? So that's, those are some of the big ideas in the book. Yeah. I mean, okay, that was more than 30 seconds, but that's okay. There's a lot to peck in. That's perfectly acceptable. It's 500 pages, John. I mean, I know, but you got to work on your, you know, I live in Hollywood. You got to work on your elevator pitch. Yes. So it's, it's guns, germs, and steel meets better angels of our nature. Perfect. There you go. Now I'm thinking about students. video deals. Okay, good. It's a fundamentally optimistic book, right? I mean, that's, and it was this, was it just because that's how the facts led you? Or do you think about it as coming into being within a milieu of other discussions going on and you want to push back against certain trends? I would say both. You know, I mean, I think that is where the facts led me. And I, I mean, there's no doubt that we've also been shaped.

for all kinds of awfulness and every century, every millennium, every epoch is replete with horrors, you know, warfare and pogroms and inquisitions and, you know, Holocaust and nuclear weapons and every other evil you can imagine, you know, incompetent leadership. And so that's true. And many of those propensities, of course, are also part of our nature. part of it was my desire to focus on the good side. That is to say, I directed my gaze there. But part of it as well was the fact that I think

there's so much evidence about this that hasn't been given the due it deserves. And that also hasn't been seen to counterbalance those other qualities enough. So that's where I was coming from. No, I think that makes perfect sense. And you just so if anyone only gets to listen to the first 10 minutes of the podcast,

I want them to get the take-home message here. I think the central point of the book is what you call the social suite. Is that a fair thing to say? So this is a list of eight things that are both, well, number one, you say they're common to human beings and human societies. And number two, we're going to attribute that commonality to evolution, to our genes. They're not just accidents of history, right? Correct. And also, very pertinently, there are specifically social qualities.

So, for example, I'm not discussing in this book those attributes of our human nature that we might manifest as isolated individuals. For example, the way natural selection has shaped you to be risk-averse or religious, for instance. You could do those on your own, right? You could go through the world on your own. I'm interested in those things that we necessarily must express between ourselves. These things include things like love and friendship, social networks, cooperation, in-group bias, the preference of us versus them, a kind of mild hierarchy and the practice of teaching and learning. And the eighth element is this capacity for individual identity,

this ability that we have to express our individuality, which very paradoxically also lies at the core of our sociality. That's very good. You got them all. You didn't get them in the right order that you put them in the book, but you remembered all eight of them and summarized them very, very nicely. So these are characteristics that human beings have that play a role in our social world, as you say.

And for the most part, they sound good, love and friendship and cooperation. There's a couple in there that don't, so we'll get to those. Is there a simple way of saying how you came upon this list of eight? Like, you know, was it a whole bunch of things and narrowed it down, or did you keep adding as you studied more things? Well, I suppose it could be like the standard model. you know, you find, you know, first you find neutrons and electrons. We should say that you have physicists in your family.

Extensive, yes. We can use the physics analogies, all we want this. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you know, so we first find the electrons and the protons and the neutrons. And then we say, wait a minute, you know, they are composed of, you know, the quarks and subsidiary particles. And then eventually we even get to antimatter, you know, so we got positrons. And, you know, it's just, you know, so we can keep going down and down.

And I suppose I would put this at the level of, you know, the first cut. So neutrons, protons, and electrons. These are a complete set of things that I think you can be used to define a social order as a first order approximation. Now, there are constituent elements in these things, which I allude to, but I don't go down. And you might even argue are more fundamental. For example, I talk about empathy, but I don't include empathy as its own independent quality. So, and I talk about religion, for instance, but I don't include religious, which we clearly

have natural selection has shaped our religious capabilities, for example, but I don't include that because that's something you can express on your own. You know, you could, it's just, so again, I narrow my gaze to look at these types of things. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience and all shift directly to your door in discrete packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer.

That's orderly meds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary now. Medical advice eligibility required seaside for details. Now I'd like to introduce you to meaningful beauty, the famed skin care brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin. Meaningful beauty makes powerful and effective skincare simple, and it's loved by millions of women. It's formulated for all ages and all skin tones and types, and it's designed to work as a complete skin care system, leaving your skin feeling soft, smooth, and nourished. I recommend starting with Cindy's full regimen, which contains all five of her best-selling products, including the amazing youth-activating melon serum.

This next-generation serum has the power of melon-leave stem cell technology. It's melon leaf stem cells encapsulated for freshness and released onto the skin to support a visible reduction in the appearance of wrinkles. With thousands of glowing five-star reviews, why not give it a try? Subscribe today and you can get the amazing Meaningful Beauty System for just 4995. That includes our introductory five-piece system, free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All that available at Meaningful Beauty.com. Speaking of empathy, I did have your Yale colleague Paul Bloom on the podcast. podcast, anti-empathy, and I bravely took on the pro-empathy side. Do you have a dog in that particular fight?

Well, I mean, I think, you know, Paul is very, he's wonderful. And yeah, he's, he's, you know, his book is very provocatively titled, which I, an ingenious entitled, you know, he's not, he's, he doesn't think empathy is bad, you know, I know, I know you know. So it's, but it's very clever because he does make an argument about, you know, the downside of empathy and why we, as you point out, So how did you do in your argument with him? Oh, I clearly won. No, he admitted that I was right about everything. No, yeah, I think we had a very productive conversation.

In fact, we disagree about very little. It's more a matter of emphasis than anything else. His next book is about cruelty, and I strongly urged him to call it, you know, in praise of cruelty to keep up that contrarian banner. But I think he's not going to do that. Good. So as you say, you have an interest in both the social sciences and the natural sciences and through your research and through study, you've come to this social suite, this list of common qualities that people have in their social lives and that we can help to use these, explain how cultures evolve. But there's an obstacle to being a good social scientist, which is that you don't have a human being version of the particle accelerator, right? You can't do controlled experiments quite as well.

Or LIGO. Yes, exactly, or LIGO. You have neither observatories nor colliders. So what do you do? I mean, you look at societies that exist, but of course it's hard to find a control group there, but you have a couple of ingenious chapters on ways in which we have more or less isolated experiments with human societies. Well, we do a number of things. I mean, first of all, in my lab, and in many labs, of course, we do do experiments, frank experiments.

And, you know, one of the things we've done is we've written some software that's integrated with online labor markets, and we can recruit tens. We have recruited tens of thousands of people that come and participate in our experiments, and in a godlike way, we can randomly assign them to different treatments. And actually, this was very much motivated by my own background of education in the natural sciences. You know, we take for granted, you know, many of us remember from high school physics, the inclined plane experiment where you vary the angle theta, you put the way. on and then you track, you know, the far it goes. And eventually you learn about friction and static and dynamic friction, et cetera, et cetera, all the classic stuff. Or chemistry, you know, where the teacher would sit in the front and titrate the red and blue

and you would get it. Or in biology, you would dissect a frog and get a like sciatic nerve preparation and electrical stimulation, see the muscles contract. And there hasn't really been an analogous way of doing that kind of pedagogy in the social sciences. So partly for research purposes, partly for pedagogic purposes, we have developed a kind of software that allows us to devise an experiment in the morning to, we call it breadboard because it's modeled after those other things.

Many of us remember from high school where you would build electrical circuits on a breadboard with interchangeable components, you know, resistors and capacitors and capacitors and batteries and flip the switch. The light of goes off. It's amazing. So our vision was that there would be interchangeable social components. You might manipulate the topology of the network. into which people were placed, or you might manipulate the directionality of the ties or the payoff

matrix, or the information quality, how much noise was there in the communication, or the wealth endowments of the individual. So all of these social properties could be manipulated, and you could create these artificial societies and then experimentally, you know, change them and see what happens consistent with theoretical predictions. So we've done a lot of that work, and that is in the book. But I kind of put the cart before the horse. Let me tell you before the real experiment, some of the natural experiments, which is, I think, what you're asking about. I mean, I loved your real experiments, but the natural experiments are even cooler. Yeah, it's natural ones.

Exactly. Well, this is the thing. You know, this goes back. I mean, we can have a bigger conversation about causal inference. You know, I like to invoke physics models because it's often, you know, people say, well, this work is sometimes a criticism of some work in the social sciences is that it's sort of a theoretical or it's, you know, merely observational. Well, Galileo's discovery of the moons around Jupiter was merely observational, you know,

or they'll say this is observational, not experimental, we can't be sure. Well, astrophysics, you know, there's limited experimentation in astrolet. I mean, it's beautiful, complicated work that relies on observation and theory and computation. So those critiques in and of themselves, I don't think conceptually have much bearing, But I will admit that a lot of the work that's done is not a very high level or quality, but it's the proper critique of those works, I don't think, is that they simply are observational rather than experimental. Anyway, so for experiments, so what, so in an ideal world, at least, you know, from my mad scientist's point of view, what we would love to do is take a group of babies that were acultural, that is to say had no cultural upbringing or exposure.

and abandon them on an island and let them grow up and then come back, you know, 30 or 40 years later and see what kind of society did they make. Now we're talking. Now this is the scientific brain at work. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. This would be, this would be exactly the kind of experiment I would do if I could do it. You know, is this type of experiment. Of course, this is obviously cruel and unethical. And, but it hasn't stopped people from thinking about it for thousands. thousands of years. You know, it's been called the forbidden experiment. But so there's an official title for this. This is something that people fantasize about at drinks at sociology conferences. Well, no, it's not drinks at sociologists. It's monarch. So Herodotus talks about an Egyptian pharaoh who was very interested in what was the first language that people spoke, what language was in our brains. It's actually an interesting question that a smart,

powerful person might have thought of thousands of years ago. And so what he did was he took two babies and gave them to a mute shepherd to be raised up in the mountains to see what language did they make if they were never exposed to any language. Obviously an awful, cruel experiment. And many more, many more, yeah, but. But we get some European monarchs also in the beginning of the 1100s and later also thought about this experiment. They framed in more religious terms. You know, what language did Adam and Eve speak. So they wanted to, you know, take babies and let's do the same experiment. And so it's been contemplated and sometimes allegedly done, but it's obviously forbidden. So, so instead what I look for

some natural experiments. And one class of natural experiment would was unintentional communities that were formed in the wake of shipwrecks. So a group of people who were, didn't choose to be, were just sort of grabbed and dropped on an island and who spent who were at least 19 people as I pick as a threshold and who spent at least two months there and then what could we learn from what kind of social order they made did they cooperate did they have hierarchy did they did they befriend each other and did they teach each other things for example um that were their divisions and what were the implications of the presence or absence of those features for the ability of the group to survive, for example, which is a nice objective function, you know, do the group.

And eventually some of them had to be rescued so that we could hear the results of these experiments. Correct. And in fact, there's some famous, very famous cases where, for example, my most favorite case. So yeah, so one further necessary criterion for this is that, yes, there can be a supernova, but the light might never hit the earth. And so we would never see it. So we would need, So we need one at least one person to survive to tell the tale. Otherwise, we never heard, we would never notice that this thing had happened. So, but one famous example where that didn't happen is it was a shipwreck where a large group of people, I don't remember the details at the moment, except I remember the crucial detail,

which is they managed to capture some kind of huge bird, I think a petro. They were in the South Pacific. and they attached to this bird's leg a message in a bottle, like a little capsule with a note, identifying where they were, their coordinates, who they were, they were the shipwreck crew of such and such a vessel, and they attached it to this bird,

which bird then flew thousands of miles and was found in Australia a few couple of years later. And the message was found and read, and an expedition was sent to actually find these men. And by the time the expedition got there, the men were all gone. They were dead. It was felt that they had somehow sailed to another island because there was no evidence of their bodies. So obviously we don't know what happened with that crew, but it's an amazing attempt to communicate.

No, so we need someone to survive. And what I did was is there are about 9,000 shipwrecks between not ships lost at sea, ships that wrecked on a coast between 1,500 and 1900. and I found 20 of them that meet these criteria of at least 19 people living for at least two months, often for a year or more, and often larger groups, 50 or more people. And I got all of the old records, the journals that they kept, and also any modern archaeological excavations, and try to get a sense of what did these people do, how did they organize their societies.

But that wasn't the only kind of evidence. I looked at the settlement of Polynesia, the Polynesian expansion, when the ancient Polynesians spread out over the Pacific and populated all these islands. I looked not only at unintentional experiments, but also at intentional experiments at the communes in the 19th century where people set off to make a utopian community. And even since Roman times, people have been doing this. They've been saying, this society sucks.

You know, let's go and make our own society, and off they go. And in the 1960s and 70s, they were communal movements in the United States, kibbutzis in Israel, where I looked at settlements of scientists, you know, in Antarctica, on the South Pole, since the 1950s, the American station in the South Pole, has had groups of scientists and technicians that winter over. So, again, isolated population have to organize themselves in some way. What did they do? And then these are all made by people who, of course, come from our actual society.

So it's not the forbidden experiment quite, but you're at least going to ask how they might diverge. Correct. And they choose to be there. It's volitional. They're in culture. They're adults. There are lots of problems that make it not ideal as an experiment. But here again, you know, I use some of the examples.

You know, I borrow some, again, some physics metaphors. The fact that, you know, the telescope that Galileo used was really crude. And again, he was able to see a lot. on with this telephone. You know, the absence of a Hubble doesn't mean, you know, that we should look down on a more primitive way of understanding or preliminary way of understanding the world. So, yes, there's, there's light interference and atmospheric interference and there's noise and our equipment isn't perfect, but we can still see something when we look at these unintentional and intentional communities. And the last thing, which I mentioned earlier,

was I collected data about artificial communities, you know, either online worlds like World of Warcraft, or other massively multiplayer online games are our own experiments or the experiments of other scientists that have done these artificial experiments where they create groups and manipulate them, including, incidentally, some of our groups where we replace some people with forms of AI, you know, bots. So we create hybrid systems of humans and machines

and replace some people with programmable agents, and then we can really test what's happening because we have complete control over that agent. Right. So anyway, so you look at all of this evidence, and then should I sum up or? Yeah, yeah, no, well, yeah. I mean, I think we could easily spend two hours

just telling stories of these shipwrecks. So let's just encourage everyone to buy the book. There's some great stories about shipwrecks in there. I mean, maybe mention just the one island that had two shipwrecks on it at the same time. I'll come back to that. Yeah, that's amazing. But just to sum up, so that's a challenge becomes,

so you have all of this data from different sources. But one way to think about this is to imagine a kind of a hyperspace let's imagine it's three-dimensional space where you can you have axes that are defined by for example how large is a face-to-face community that is to say how much can each how many unique individuals can each person be friend and that number could go from zero to a thousand let's say you can imagine a creature like ours that could have a thousand real friends you know most of us have three or four or five real close intimate personal relationships and then you can imagine a society in which you are

array how cooperative they are. That is to say on a one-off game, how likely are they to cooperate with a stranger, and that probability could go from zero to one. And then you can imagine a society in which, another axis which define how unequally is the wealth distributed in that society, from again, zero to one, you know, all the wealth belongs to one person or all the wealth is equally shared, let's say. So those might be three, or of course, you could have more axes. And when you do that kind of an exercise, and what you find is that all human societies that have ever arisen occupy a small fraction of that morphos space. They're all clustered in a little tiny region. And if you look at all the evidence from the unintentional and intentional and artificial societies,

they all again and again manifest these same qualities. So there's a kind of universe, there's a kind of way in which we only manifest a small, it seems like a lot of variation, but it's actually not in the small region of this space. And so then that question becomes, well, how and why did that come to be? How did it and why did natural selection? constrain us to be, you know, just here. Is it easy to summarize what that space is? Well, it depends on which axes you pick, how many axes you allow. I use some examples from other animals. I use examples. I borrow actually some of Richard

Dawkins ideas from even older work in the 1960s on shell shape morphology. So if you're trying to get a set of mathematical equations that define all possible shells that could ever arise, it turns out you can summarize these shells with either three or, or 11 parameters. We can talk about that. These are the kinds of shells that snails crawl around in, right? Yes, exactly. And you can, and you find that only certain shells that could ever potentially have

arisen have arisen. And, you know, why is that? Is that because, for example, it was impossible for natural selection even to give rise to such cells? Or is it that there is no shell outside this cluster that is fit in any modern or any environment that has ever existed? And so the argument by analogy is that something similar happens with human societies, that there are no other kinds of societies that would make sense to make.

And further evidence of that is in the book, and that I look at animal societies like elephants and whales, and I find that this social suite that we find in humans also is in elephants, for instance. And the elephants, you know, our last common ancestor with elephants was 85 million years ago. by independent evolution, you know, converged on the same solution. Just like two species might independently converge on an eye. We have, because there's only, you know, there's only certain ways you can make a camera type eye.

Then we can, to see the light, we have, you know, there's only certain ways you can live socially if you're a mammal. And we find that again and again. Anyway, do you want to go back and talk about that one ship example or I don't know where. No, no, no, well, I think that I just want, if it's possible, you know, I get that there's this large parameter space of how the societies could have evolved. And clearly, the evidence is that we don't randomly fill up that parameter space, right? We stick to certain commonalities. And even the elephants stick to these commonalities.

So there's clearly something beneficial and selected about some aspects of the social suite, the love and friendship and social cooperation and so forth. But so the actual communities that you talk about, though, seem to, at least on the face of it, turn out very differently from time to time. So is there a simple way of understanding what the commonalities are, or is it just that there's more than one way, but still to be a society, but still far fewer than all the ones we could imagine? Well, I mean, I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but I think I did. So let me give two potentially responsive answers. Please. So one question you might, one way to refer you to your question is, well, sometimes they're mutants.

You know, like your body is programmed to, to do certain things, to have a certain height or make insulin in a certain way. And maybe you have a mutation that makes you not capable of making insulin, so you get diabetes. So, and that's not as fit, let's say, for the environment in which we live. And, and, but that, but that, that, that mutation is no, no more in illustration. of the ordinary structure and function of a human body. That is to say there's something that pushes you away from, let's say, the ordinary structure, and this is a thing that's in your genes, it's biological.

And of course, there can be environmental things. So, for example, if you have a group of children and you starve them, they don't grow up to have bodies. They might be actually more prone to diabetes in adulthood, and they might also have stunted growth. And in both of these cases, either the intrinsic, let's say, mutation or the environmental constraint, we would not think, we would say those have caused a swerving away from what was otherwise predestined to occur, that otherwise would have been, let's say, normal, quote,

unquote. Now, of course, I realize that sometimes these mutations actually are beneficial. In fact, that's how evolution works. But for now, I'm just cultivating this notion that there's something that normally would occur, but for an intrinsic or an endogenous or an exogenous reason, you've been pushed away from it. Well, the same argument I would make about societies. There's a kind of inborn society, but sometimes we're unable to realize that. For example, in times of scarcity, if there's not enough food in the environment, we might fall upon each other and eat each other. Now, we shouldn't do that.

In fact, some evidence in the book suggests that if we cooperate, we're more likely to survive. But I would argue that the society that humans make in a moment of scarcity, that is to say, when there is no food at all, is no more illustrative of the society humans would actually make if they had adequate resources, than the body you make, if you have been raised in scarcity, is illustrative of the body you would make if there wasn't scarcity. So I'm trying to get at the kind of natural, you know, sort of innate thing you would have done. Yeah. Without constraint. So why don't you talk about the island example? I think this is a good test case for these ideas where you had two different shipwrecks, more or less overlapping in time. Yeah.

I didn't know about each other. Yeah, that was incredible. I got so lucky with that case. I think it's the only such case that I'm aware of where in about 1846 there were in the South Auckland Islands south of New Zealand, slightly north of Antarctica, there were two shipwrecks at the same time and the same place on this island. And they spent over a year there. One crew was almost two years.

One crew was just over a year. And they overlapped for about a year. And they did not know about each other's presence. There's some hint in one of the diaries that they saw some smoke in the distance one day. And they went to the smoke. And they almost met. I mean, they almost met, I think. Did you ever watch Lost?

I did. I saw a few episodes of last. Yes. You know, that's what it is. Yeah, there was actually like, there was Sean Carroll in a bunker underneath, you know, like... The others. Yes, the others. Engineering is an incredible story. And they, and they were different, they were very interestingly different. So in one rep, the Grafton, actually the Grafton, I had to relax my standards a little bit. There were only five members of the crew. Whereas in the Invercote, which, which wrecked on the northern part of the island, the Grafton, it was wrecked on the southern part, the Invercotein had 19, So on the Grafton, the ship hits the shore in their foundry.

And the captain had already been sick. He had a fever and he was in his cabin. And the ship is sinking and the other men make it to shore. And they have to decide what to do about the captain. So they set up a rope pulley system and at great risk to themselves, they ferry the captain the shore. So this this wreck starts with the saving of a life where the people band together to save someone's life. And there are other examples. Some sacrifice, right? There's some risk. Yeah, some risk and some sacrifice. And there are other shipwrecks, not this one, where similar

things happen, where, for example, there's another case that I discussed where the captain had a big, big bag of gold in his cabin, and the crew were trying to rescue the gold, and he told them not to rest of the gold to rest to a girl who was drowning instead and the gold was lost but the captain acted this way and i think that type of activity uh sets the tone right for the group to understand we're all in this together we're going to cooperate we're going to sink or swim that's what happens on the graft in the invocco the ship atomizes much more rapidly there's also a slight difference in salvage and the other details of the two crews the the invocco hits the shore and it's it's reduced to splinters within an hour and

And 19 men make it ashore, and they have a pencil. Many of them, they have no shoes. Some of them arrive naked. This is a very common scenario of the way the crew would arrive naked, literally, on the shore. They arrive with a pencil, some matches, which eventually dry, and they're able to light a fire a few days later. Although they screw up, and they're trying to dry their matches by the campfire, and then they ignite all of them. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Total disaster. But they got their first fire. And a couple of pounds of hard tack and a couple of pounds of salted pork. That's their salvage, plus some clothes. And one of the people was injured, and they're at the base of these cliffs, and they abandoned this man. The other 18 climb up, they sent an advance party up that find some pigs that had been previously set loose on this island by other people decades earlier, wild pigs. So they could see there's some food up there, and so 18 of them go, and they abandoned this man to die. And that's the beginning of the Inverco.

And ultimately, all five of the Grafton people survive and make it off. They sail away on their own. And only three of the 19 on the Inverco survive. And they have cannibalism and they're routinely abandoning their weakest members. It's a totally different destiny. Now I'd like to introduce you to Meaningful Beauty, the famed skincare brand created by iconic supermodel Cindy Crawford. It's her secret to absolutely gorgeous skin.

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Right. Well, it's again, like I would just invoke the analogy of the body, you know, that your body has a set of the DNA programs your body to be a certain way. For example, it might program you to be very hairy, but you might shave your hair. You know, so there's an environmental thing that happens that makes you shave your hair. So, I mean, that's, I'm really mad at itself that that's the best, that's the best analogy I could come up with on short notice. But, you know, or there's some cultures, for example, that bind people's heads, like South American cultures to reshape their heads. So that the elites of this society were supposed to have a head that looked like a boat.

It's called scapezocephaly. Sometimes babies are born this way because the sutures of their cranium don't fuse and are prematurely fused and they get an oblong head. They thought it was very beautiful, so they would bind children's heads to give them this really kind of alien-looking head shape. Now, that alien head shape is no more illustrative of the natural head shape than anything else. So I would say analogously to what we're discussing, even though there is an innate type of society we are predestined or pre-wired to make, which resembles other social mammals too, incidentally, there are contingencies that can swerve us away from it. And those can include poor leadership. It can include profound resource constraints, although often we see paradoxically, one of the arguments I make in the book is that we are better able to meet our needs for food and water and shelter.

It used to be thought that you had to meet those primary needs first before you could manifest these more sublime qualities like love and friendship and self-actualization. But I actually think that in many ways we have that the reverse, that actually meeting our needs for friendship and cooperation first is what actually allows us to meet our other more basic needs for food and shelter and so forth. So, and I think there's good evidence for that. So anyway, so there can be contingencies that swer us away for it, but I don't think those undermine the claim that there is a kind of basic core society that we're pre-wired

to make. Okay, that makes sense. Actually, you've intrigued me now. So what is this evidence that love and friendship need to come before food and water? Well, so, I mean, that's again, it's such a long, you know, buy the book. We all know that's the best answer. Yeah, exactly. So let me.

We're not going to run out of megabytes here. Don't worry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, I'm just mindful. I mean, like I'm dying to ask you all these questions about your own work. And, you know, but I take advantage of this opportunity.

And I feel like I'm, I mean, I know it's partly the point. Like I'm being interviewed about the book, but, you know. Right. Anyway. We'll get there. Oh, okay. So I guess the basic point that I would make is the following point, in a kind of broad, high-level answer to your question,

which is our species, I think, has one of the broadest ranges on the planet of any species, maybe even broader than ants or, you know, a particular species. And we have what E.O. Wilson calls the social conquest of the Earth. Why? Why are we able to live everywhere from the equator to the Arctic? From, you know, deserts to rivers, to, you know, some people are seafaring. There are people that literally never live on land. They spend their whole lives. I discussed them in the book, the so-called sea nomads, for example.

They always live at sea, and they forage for their food at sea. They literally hunt underwater, and they have the best free divers in the world. Actually, they've evolved in some ways in response to this capacity. But anyway, so why are we able to do that? The reason we're able to do that is because of our capacity for culture, precisely because we evolved the capacity to accumulate knowledge across time and space and to distribute it across time and space so that, for example, a person born in the United States today

in high school can learn mathematics that would have made him or her the most sophisticated mathematician on the planet 500 years ago. Actually, as an aside, one thing that amazes me is that Isaac Newton invented the calculus at the speed at which we teach it, which is just mind-boggling to me. We're all amazed by that. Yeah, just unbelievable, right? The guy invents calculus in a year. You know, it's just incredible. Anyway, so you are the, we are all the beneficiaries of all of this knowledge that has been accumulated, you know, the roads and the smelting of metals and the agriculture and all the domesticated animals that are.

ancestors domesticated and the knowledge of the stars and of navigation techniques and mathematics. And actually that spreads across the planet. So it's very rare that someone makes a private discovery and no one ever else hears about it. You know, it's disseminated. And we'd like to disseminate knowledge and to learn from others where we've evolved to do this. So this capacity that we have evolved for culture is in fact what makes it possible for us to live everywhere in the world. So I guess what I'm saying when I've gone on this long digression to explain, you know, that we're cultural animals and that this equips us to live in many different

environments is that that very variety that we privilege and that we see is actually a quality that we evolved to have that capacity to manifest culture and to be animals that teach and learn. And that's the more primary and fundamental ability that we have. Yeah. And there's a wonderful example you have in the book of the fact that human faces exhibit a lot more variety than faces of a lot of other animals. And part of that is how we identify each other, right? Yes.

Well, that's another kind of paradox. There's like these some paradoxes when you think about human social living. The capacity to be individuals is itself lies at the core of our capacity to live socially. So we have evolved the ability to signal our individuality. We do it with our faces.

Every human face is different, and the regions of our genome that are responsible for the shape and appearance of our faces are highly variable from person to person, whereas the region of your genome that makes insulin is roughly the same. I mean, there are differences, but roughly the same, whereas the region of our genome that makes our faces is very different and gives rise to differently shaped in faces in all kinds of ways. Furthermore, each feature of our face is uncorrelated with every other feature. For example, if you look at your hands, people with longer hands also have wider hands, and there's like one parameter that is hand size. Whereas if you look at, for instance, the width of someone's nose, people with wider noses are not necessarily people with taller noses. Those two properties are uncorrelated in our face, precisely because we want as many combinations possible of all the features of our face to give the most variety in our faces. And not only do we have this capacity, which is actually uncommon in animals and is an evolutionary.

evolutionary luxury, we also have the cognitive capacity to tell the difference. So you can look at it as sea of faces and see that everyone's face is different. And this also is an evolutionary luxury. So both of these qualities, the ability to signal your identity and the ability to detect the identity of others are unusual among animals and are expensive, or evolutionarily expensive, all this brain power that needs to be engineered to be able to do this thing. But they're essential for living socially. And the reason they're essential for living socially is you have to first be able to identify specific other individuals if you're to be able to tell who's a friend and who's an enemy.

Or who's my child that I should actually give food to as a parent to a stranger's child that I shouldn't necessarily raise. Or who cooperated with me in the past and I need to reciprocate their kindness. So we've evolved this capacity for our individual identity that is essential for our ability to live socially. And we use our faces for that. For me, that was a little insight, a big insight I got from the book. You know, it's one of these things you take for granted. Of course, I know different individuals, and I have different relationships with different individuals. But maybe elsewhere in the animal or the plant kingdoms, for that matter, those differentiations are not quite as obvious.

The idea of friendship and having a social network, you talk about a lot in the book, is it really that different between human beings and other animal species? friendship? Well, it's very different. So, first of all, many animals evolve to reproduce sexually. So, you know, we, it's not uncommon that we form, and many animals also evolved to reproduce sexually with the same mate across time to have a kind of monotony. But we don't just reprimed, we don't just mate with each other. We befriend each other. We form long-term non-reproductive unions to other members of our species. And that's very rare. We have friends.

That's rare in the animal kingdom to have these sustained relations with non-kin, unrelated individuals. We do it. Elephants do it. Certain cetaceans do it. Orcas dolphins. Certain other primates do it. It's very rare.

Some people say dogs, you know, wild dogs do it. But that's not, they might, but it's not exactly right because packs of dogs often are genetically related, their cousins and so forth. Well, I was when thinking, when reading that part,

of the book, I certainly thought about pets, right? I mean, dogs and cats in some sense bond with their owners. Do they bond with their owners more than with other dogs and cats? Well, that's another whole topic, the domesticated animals and our friendships with those animals, which I actually use some examples in the book of that. And I think in some ways what's happening there is our innate desire for friendship and sociability is being a part of the relationship. apply to and met by our relationships to these animals. Now, often we domesticate animals that are quite social on their own.

So horses, you know, live in herds and dogs live in packs. And those animals already innately, even birds, you know, flying flocks, those animals innately already have a sense of interacting with others. Not always. Some people keep pet lizards, for instance. And we do this, as I said, certain other social mammals do it. It's not the same in the youth social insects.

So ants and termites and, you know, what? They're all clones, right? They're all genetically the same. So it's not so special that one ant will help another ant. It's identical twin, you know? Yeah. It's much more difficult to provide an account for why we do that, and we do. And the evolution of friendship is profound, actually, and very interesting.

And it occurs, as I said, not just in us, but in certain other animals. And maybe from my extremely anthropocentric point of view, I think I'm surprised that friendship isn't more common in the animal kingdom. I mean, we take it so much for granted that we have different kinds of relationships with other different humans. It shocks me that it's not more similar in other, at least in mammalian species, let's say. Right. Well, it would have to, in order for it to evolve, it would have to meet a need, right? It would have to serve some purpose. and in part you would have to have the availability of strangers.

You'd have to live in groups to start with. So the first order criterion is that there has to be a group of animals. A solitary animal would be unlikely, let's say, to evolve the capacity to befriend another solitary animal that occasionally ran into, for instance. So you'd have to have first group living animals. And then the further evolution of this capacity to form long-term non-reperimentary. productive unions to unrelated individuals. Again, it's not hard to explain, I mean, it was challenging, but scientists have done this. You know, why might you help your cousins?

Well, you know, there's kin selection and arguments from evolution. Why the evolution of altruism towards your, even life-risking altruism towards your relatives makes sense. But why would you willingly give to your friends? And there's a set of arguments about why that might be the case. One argument has to do with the fact that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The evolution of the ability to help people in need when it doesn't cost you very much is very valuable. So if you think about what friends do for each other, we often do each other favors of different kinds, or we help each other, we provide emotional support.

And we do that in a way that is not strictly reciprocated. It's not like, I'll scratch your back now, you'll scratch my back tomorrow. it's done in this sort of unconditional way. And that's an enormously valuable type of relationship to have in a social system, where someone is drowning and it doesn't cost you much to lower a branch to them so that they can be saved. This altruism to an unrelated individual could be extremely useful if such a thing were to evolve. And so there's a set of ideas that John Toobie and Lita Cosmides have already. argued correctly in my view about the evolution of friendship and Krushka as well. Donald Krushka

also makes these arguments. When people turn to telehealth for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptitide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience, and all shift directly to your door in discrete packaging. Do your research. Ask questions. Then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderly meds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary now. Medical advice, eligibility required seaside for details.

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free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All of that available at meaningfulbony.com. Is there some relationship to language? It would seem to me that once individuals became better, more adept at speaking and communicating and agreeing and negotiating in more subtle ways, then it would become more useful to have a higher level of differentiation in our relationships between different people. I think there's probably a deep relationship.

the evolution of language and the evolution of friendship and actually even group dynamics. Some people have argued, I mean, Robin Dunbar has argued that our capacity for language evolved in part to be a kind of efficient oral grooming. So chimpanzees will groom each other, so one will groom the other, maybe they'll take turns or whatever, maybe they'll form a little circle, but it's all diatic. You can only groom one other animal at a time. But a group of humans can sit in a circle and talk to each other, and I can give you five people something of value, not just one person using language. So I can, it's a kind of, this transmission of information is a kind of, a kind of grooming, a kind of

of, you know, way in which you can talk to multiple people at once. Okay. Yeah, that's, that's, that's Cool. And to study these, I mean, I do want to let the audience know, you have all sorts of little diagrams of networks in your book, the social networks, because we did, I did have a podcast with Stephen Stroganz, who studies networks from a purely mathematical point of view. And so you've been able to uncover sort of things about the structure of friendship by these network diagrams. Yeah. I mean, you know, Steve is a giant in the field. the we use various sort of mathematical tools

and analytic tools to map out these networks and to trace out the topology of these graphs and summarize them and analyze them

in various sorts of ways and there are a number of interesting properties that arise when you look at that one set of ideas

has to do with the fact that when you well there's several ideas let me write them down because I'm going to forget them

properties of networks worldwide. I wrote a very long book. I know. And then I start, you know, one of the things that happens is,

um, is that I, I get over excited and then I climb up a tree and then I go out on a branch and I go on a twig and then I fall off and I don't know where the tree is anymore. I know how it is. Yeah. Do you have a deadline for how long we can talk by the way? No,

no, no, it's open ended. No, it's open ended. Okay, good. Let's go. I'm worried that I'm being too loquacious. And so it's not possible. All right.

Okay. So, so, so on the network, So when you begin to use these tools to map networks, you can make a number of discoveries. I mean, first of all, you can ask yourself, you can ask yourself a following question, which I think is still not completely answered, although I'm spending a lot of time in my laboratory

trying to answer it, which is you can imagine, let's say you have 100 people, and you have the boundary conditions are a null set where no one is connected to anyone else, or a fully saturated graph, where you have n times n minus 1 divided by two connections. And of course, everywhere in between, you can have all these other possible networks.

Okay? Well, when you go out into the... And these networks have very interesting properties, you know, mathematical properties, and you can go out into the world and you map networks, and you find again and again that human beings make a particular kind of network. And then you can say, well, why do they make this kind of network as compared to any other topology? For example, human beings manifest something known as degree assortivity, that is to say that highly connected nodes are preferentially attached to other highly connected nodes. This is the opposite of an airport network. In an airport network, you have degree disassortativity. So you have hubs like Denver and Chicago and New York

that are connected to lots of small airports, but the small airports are not connected to each other. You can't fly from Lebanon, New Hampshire, to New Haven, Connecticut. You have to go, you know, from Lebanon, New Hampshire to Boston and from Boston to New Haven or to Philadelphia or whatever. So degree assortative networks are networks in which highly connected individuals are connected to highly. So very popular people, befriend popular people,

and unpopular people, befriended unpopular people. So you might ask, why do we do that? Well, it's very interesting. It turns out that degree assortative networks confer on a population, a relative immunity to epidemic diseases. So in a degree disassortative network, if an epidemic, if a bioterrorist strikes one city,

in the next hop, people will go from that city to Denver, and the next day, everyone else in the whole country will be affected because people fly out from Denver. In a degree assortative network, if the epidemic begins stochastically and it begins at random somewhere in the graph, only if it happens to strike one of these few nodes at its high degree will it spread to everyone.

Otherwise, the epidemic will tend to be localized within a particular region of the network. For instance, among unpopular people, just giving the germ to the few other unpopular people, so it takes a much longer for the epidemic to spread. So I don't think it's a coincidence that of all the ways we could come to organize our networks, we have organized them to have this property, a degree, assortativity. I think natural selection has played a role, and this touches on very contentious issues

having to do with multi-level selection and other topics, but the gist is, of all the possible networks we could arrange, we have networks that have this property and many other interesting properties, like, for instance, we have highly transitive networks, that is to say, you're friends are very likely to be friends with each other, much more likely than a random graph with a similar number of ties and a similar number of nodes. And this transitivity also confers certain advantages for group coherence and cooperation and so forth. So the first thing I'd like to say about these graphs is when you do these graphs and

you mathematically summarize these networks, you make a number of observations about the types of graphs people make from all imaginable graphs. then I don't think it's a just so story. You observe that some of those properties that you can characterize have benefits. And I think they have those benefits precisely because natural selection has worked on us to give us those benefits. First point. Oh, that was your first point?

Okay, let me make two little quick sub points. I know this is going to be an expanding graph. I've written down the other points out, so I'm not going to forget. Okay, good. So here are my two little sub points. One is I think it makes sense to me that the graphs like this are. are chosen by natural selection. But on the other hand, it's not obvious

because maybe there's a physical making the graphs mechanism that naturally just easily leads to graphs like this, and we're just lucky that it's also very useful. I would love to get evidence that points one way or the other. The second point is that the robustness of this kind of network structure, I think, is a wonderful lesson for human beings who intelligently design networks in computers

or on the internet or in their electrical grids that aren't nearly as robust as the ones that nature builds. And it's often because, you know, we try to imagine what the threats are ahead of time and we're not very good at that, whereas natural selection just sort of has put up with a whole bunch of unpredictable threats and generates, therefore, a very generally robust way of dealing with them. Yes, I would agree with both of those points, actually. And so, yes, do you want me to comment on them or just to say that? If you say yes, that's great.

I mean, I would agree with those points. So that was the first point that I was making was about why we have this particular topology of all the possible topologies. The second point is that when you go out, therefore, into the world and you map these networks as we have, and we've sent teams to Uganda and India and Honduras and the United States and various other places around the world, Sudan. You map these networks, you find that these networks again and again have a very similar architecture, a very similar topology. And I find that amazing, actually, that you can go all

over the planet and people befriend each other, and each person is exercising their predestiny to, you know, befriend each other, and then we assemble ourselves into this structure like ant colonies, you know, like ant hills, where we reproducibly make again and again this type of characteristic structure. So the second thing I would say is that first point is that we make a particular kind of network. Second is we always do it. There's some tolerance. But again and again, we reproduce these types of networks. And the third thing I would say is that, amazingly, other social mammals

make networks with very similar topological properties. So earlier we talked about transitivity, that transitivity of elephant networks is very, or dolphin networks, is very similar to our own. Why should it be that the friend of a friend among dolphins is the dolphin's friend, and a friend of a friend of a friend among elephants is the elephant's friend and a friend of a friend among humans is a human's friend. Well, because it serves a purpose, you know, yeah, and it's clearly evolved independently because again, you know, our last common ancestor was tens of millions years ago and was a

non-social creature. So, so I think these are all things of the, all three of these points relate to the issue of the universality of networks and their function in our lives. Yeah, no, I think that it's a fascinating feature because it is one of these things where everyone investigating this is a human being and therefore grows up as a human being and tends to take certain things for granted. And it's amazing when we learn that things could have been different or didn't have to be this way. Speaking of which, there's not only friendship but love, which you talk about in the book. And love seems different also. It's also something that is at least more often human than in other animals. By love, we mean sort of

romantic attachment to your lifelong sexual partner, right? And I love the, I'd never heard of the fact that there are some societies that try to do away with it, that try to make reproduction purely about, you know, or make sex purely about reproduction and not let you fall in love. And yet, as in Romeo and Juliet, people always try to get around that. Yes. Yeah, I mean, love is, again, another thing that's so interesting to me. It's a cultural universal. We love our partners, even in arranged marriages.

So about a billion people live in countries that practice primarily arranged marriages. Many, many tens or hundreds of millions of people meet their, only met their spouse once or twice before they marry them and go home with them and start having sex with them and raise a family with them and make a life with each other. And amazingly, when you use various metrics like the passionate love scale or you look at divorce rates, divorce rates are lower in arranged marriages for a number of reasons, but including cultural constraints. But the sentiment of love.

So even in those societies that have arranged marriages, while love before marriage is seen as a threat and not, let's say, the best way to organize how people should choose each other, love after marriage is very much seen as a desired property. Everyone thinks you should fall in love with the person I've chosen for you to marry. So this is a cultural universal too,

this fact that we love our mates, but you have to ask yourself why. I mean, we could be a species that reproduces without loving our mates. Most do, right? Yeah, most species. Not all species. So what we're discussing here is a kind of attachment that survives a single sexual encounter,

a kind of sustained attachment, which in our species we experience is love. It's a kind of sentimental feeling and a emotional bond and a social bond to the people with whom we have sex. Now, not every person has it all the time. Of course, you can have sex without being in love. You can be in love without having sex. it doesn't have to be straight. Of course, gay couples love each other, so it's not linked to reproduction in our species,

which itself is interesting. So all of these things are true, but the core is that we love, we have this capacity to love the people that we are having sex with, or feel attached to them. And this type of social monotomy, this sort of sensibility,

is seen in certain other, like 90% of birds are socially monogamous. They mate for life, as it were. They become attached to their partners. and certain other mammals, and it's seen universally in humans, and I think it's very interesting. But as you said, there's some exceptions. So there's one people, the NAA people in the Himalayas, who organize their society. They have a strong cultural overlay, like we were discussing earlier,

the way certain historical contingencies can swerve you away from the innate. They have a very powerful overlay, which is organized to prevent couples from feeling affection for each other. And for example, it's not uncommon for women. It's a matrilineal society. The men will go trawling for sex in the evenings. The women will stay at home. The young men and older men will knock at fences and say, have sex with me tonight, have sex with me tonight.

The woman will make a choice. She'll say, okay, I'll have sex with you. And they might have a kind of a fleeting relationship for a number of days or weeks or a year. She could have more than one at a time if she wanted. And the boys that are rejected, they are not supposed to feel rejected or jealous. Their friends will mock them.

They'll say, there's another girl in the other village or down the street. Why are you feeling this way? You shouldn't feel attached. Stop it. Don't feel attached. Just go have sex with someone else. And there's mockery of people who have sexual jealousy. And it's not uncommon for women in these villages to have had sex with every other man in that village

or every other village of their cohort, for instance. Now, even in this society, some couples, for them, the forbidden fruit is to be in love. And they will fall in love and say, we're running away to be in love to just be together. You know, just the two of them. Crazy rebels that they are. Yes, crazy rebels that they are.

Exactly. I just don't want to have sex with you. I want to be in love with you. You know, I want to spend my life with you. And they can't help it, you know. So, and this is, to my knowledge, the only society that's organized this way, Marco Polo

encountered it and writes about it. The Chinese Communist Party thought that this licentious behavior was sapping productivity and needed to be stamped out, these bourgeois values. Yeah, they would think that. Yes, and they tried to stamp it out, but they couldn't. Anyway, they still practice, they still have this type

of traditional order among the gnaw. So is there I mean, the social suite that you talk about, you know, your eight factors, one of them is love. Is there a particular explanation. I know there's always a danger of the just so stories, but can you come up with a theory at least as to why

love goes along with these other properties that are, it seems not maybe uniquely, but especially human? Well, we don't know exactly why we evolved the capacity for love. The leading candidate is that attachment of the attachment females feel to their male partners and males feel to their female partners because most of the evolutionary force was acting on heterosexual unions, that that capacity must have served a purpose and one set of ideas has to do with enhancing the prospects of survival of the offspring, that children have better

likelihood of surviving, especially in a highly cultural animal like ours that needs to be taught when the parents stick around, when both parents stick around. Now, we're not the, you know, penguins do the same thing, by the way. So we're not the only animal that has bi-parental care, but attachment seems to be essential for that to happen. The male needs to feel like that any contributions he's making to the rearing of these children are his. And one way to do that is by the female of the species telegraphed,

and I'm attached to you. In other words, if you see that I love you, you know these are your children. But as soon as you say penguins do it too, I mean, that sort of gives the game away because there's thousands of species out there and it's not like they mostly do it. It's like we have to kind of go pretty far in the evolutionary tree to find others that do it the same way. Yeah, well, 90% of birds made for life. So it's very common in the birds. Okay, that's better. Yeah, but it's very uncommon in mammals, incidentally. And also I should be very careful to emphasize that what's important here is the attachment, not the number of partners. For instance, so polygynous and polyandrous societies also have loved. Right. So it's not about having one partner.

It's about the extra feeling you have about the partner you're having sex with. Yeah, it's not purely reproductive. Correct. Some emotional attachment as well, yeah. Well, okay, so these are the good aspects. We talked about, you know, friendship and cooperation and love. Now, among your eight factors in the social suite, there's one that is in-group bias. And there's another one that is mild hierarchy.

So you say mild hierarchies. You want your little hierarchy, but you want your cake and eat it too. You're not too much hierarchy, right? How do you fit these two factors in, which might seem a little bit less obviously peace and love and understanding in with the other ones? Well, even these qualities, which superficially might seem to be disadvantageous, you know, like this, this, this, in group bias, for example, this preference we have for us over them, which is a human, which is innate, it's part of our nature, it's a universal. It's actually very depressing to me that we, you know, that we are this way. It's part of our nature. Even this quality has evolved

in order to support our capacity for cooperation. So it is one of the most robust psychological findings, right? I think that you mentioned in the book, and there's also a, a, study that came out very recently where you give children completely arbitrary markers of you're in this group and you're in that group and instantly they favor the people in their group, not the other one. I know, it's really depressing, isn't it? You can randomly assign, you know, children to t-shirts, you know, three-year-olds to blue and a green t-shirt.

You can test that they know that it's chance. They recognize that it's not, they didn't do something to deserve this color. And nevertheless, with this so-called minimal group, this is called the minimal group paradigm, you can elicit from them, oh, those green shirted children, they're awful, they should be punished, you know, they shouldn't get any toys, you know,

it's awful, right? Screw those guys. Yeah, exactly. It's just an awful part of our nature. But it's kind of a, I think your argument is that awfulness is kind of a spandrel. It's kind of a side effect of there's a goodness,

there's a usefulness to this in-group bias. Yes, that's exactly right. And that it has evolved to support our capacity for cooperation. It's not the only tool that has evolved to support our capacity for cooperation, but it's an important one. So in a way, this in-group bias is a tool to reduce the scale. So imagine you have a large population here, and then in the middle level, you have groups, and at the bottom level, you have individuals. So top level, you have a huge population, middle level, you have groups, us and them, and the bottom level, you have individuals. The capacity

to draw the distinction between us and them is going to be essential to reduce the scale of the people you need to cooperate with. If I put you in a large group and say cooperate with everyone, it's very hard for cooperation to evolve and for you to practice it. But if I say just cooperate with your group and you don't have to cooperate with everyone else, actually it makes it easier for cooperation to evolve in that type of a situation. So one of the theories about the evolution of xenophobia or parochialism or in-group bias is that, it makes it possible for us to cooperate with each other. But I should say that it's not the only thing. The evolution of friendship also meets that need.

Because if you think about friendship, what friendship does is it adds structure to a population. So instead of a well-mixed population, instead of having everyone is randomly interacting with everyone else, a network imposes structure. So each person is interacting only with certain other people, but everyone has their own altars. Everyone has someone they're interacting with.

And now I just tell you, cooperate with your friends. Everyone is cooperating with just their friends. And so it reduces the scale by adding structure to the population. And so that's another way to get cooperation. But in-group bias is one of them. And it is a depressing, I mean, it is one of the most depressing, you know, things that I have to think about because, because, you know, why can't we just have indifference to the out-group? You know, must we hate it? You know, why can't we just love our own group. Okay, fine. We'll let you love their own group. But, you know, you don't, you don't have to kill the other group. You know, why should you just let them be? Or even, well, you know, we're,

we're recording this podcast in the midst of the NBA playoffs. And as a Sixers fan, I can tell you that, you know, Celtics fans are just not as morally good as Sixers fans. Just an empirical finding. But do you think they deserve to die? I mean, would you, would you watch? Well, you know. Would you launch a war against them? I wouldn't kill them. But if they were. in distress, I might go out of my way to help. That's all. I can see that. But this is also something where maybe this is the time when it is worth mentioning that we can talk about innate tendencies and things that make us human, but we also have the cognitive capacities to overcome

them, right? You know, we can think about how to shift our in-group biases and change the focus as to where we put our locus of care, right, the expanding circle. Right. So, you know, I I think the way I would argue about that is, yes, that's one tool at our disposal is just to use our brains that we have been endowed with to say, okay, this is a part of our nature. But, you know, I have agency. I don't have to, you know, do this thing. Correct. But there's also other tools that we can draw on. So, for example, earlier we imagined a three-level model, like the large population, the subgroups that are defined, you know, subset, and then the individuals. One thing we can do is you can go up a level, and you can use the capacity that we've been endowed with to draw the boundaries. These are artificial boundaries in our groups.

We say us and them, we said like the T-shirts is an artificial boundary. Instead, what you can do is you can, or, you know, language or religion, these are artificial boundaries. You can go up a level and you can redefine the boundary to be the whole group. And if you think about the American project, for example, if you think politically about what ails our society today, there's a kind of over-identification with groups and a kind of suspension of a commitment to the American project. And one of the things that's amazing about our society is that anyone can be an American.

We say if you come to this country, it doesn't matter whether your ancestors were Greek or Irish or Indian or whatever. You can be, you are an American. You just have to accept our political principles, you know, the Bill of Rights and our constitutional government. and you can be an American. Other countries don't necessarily do this, by the way. It's very difficult to become a Swiss citizen, for example,

or a Japanese citizen, but you can become an American. And so this has always been a part of our society. De Tocqueville talks about this extraordinary thing, and what it is, in essence, is, you know, you go up a level and you say, what really matters is we're all American. I think that one of the reasons we have ascendant tribalism in our society today is in part a side effect of the,

collapse of the Soviet Union. I think when we had, when we were all united against the common enemy, I think there was a bit more solidarity in our society. Yes, of course, we had political differences, and I'm not saying it was the best of all possible worlds. But I think it's not a coincidence that this recrudescence of tribalism in our society at this historical moment follows closely out on the heels of the, you know, the lack of another superpower that we're kind of trying to counterme.

and for response. So what we should be hoping for is an invasion by aliens. Yes. Yes. Yes. I think that would be terrific for our commonwealth. The problem is those aliens, I'm quite convinced. Actually, I love your opinion on this. I think those aliens would be just very likely to wipe us out. I don't think they'd be beneficent.

What do you think? You know, yeah, there's, well, the way that I would put it is, we have no idea, but if there's a 5% chance that they would wipe us out, is that a risk worth taking? I mean, let's put it this way. We have a very good idea that they could wipe us. If they got here, yes. Yeah, the chances if we meet any alien civilization that we would be able to put up a fair fight are negligible. So I would rather see the human race try to figure stuff out for themselves for a few more 100,000 years before we meet the aliens personally.

Yeah, I mean, I'm inclined to agree with you. You know, like I, leaving out the fantasy that in a world of a world situation, you know, they would be infected by our bacteria and be wiped out. I think much more likely a species that could reach our planet would treat us with the same indifference that we might stomp on an antel if you cross an ocean to go to another continent, or frankly that we saw with the colonization of South America, right? I mean, the indigenous peoples were just wiped out by the Spaniards. And so just indifference. And so I think, well, to be fair, you know, there is a counterargument to that, which we should put on the table. which is that maybe... They would have known again, but...

Well, maybe there's a threshold that species cross into self-awareness, a certain level of cognitive capacity and consciousness where they can use language and have technology and so forth. And once you reach that, you have a certain empathy and fellow feeling for all the other species that feel likewise. Now, maybe not, right?

How are we treating the elephants on our planet? Well, hopefully we're getting better. We're terrible, right? I mean, is obviously the answer, but maybe we're getting better, right? Like, all of these things are happening on such a rapid time scale that, you know, if we're trying to ask questions about, well, we will be doing a thousand years from now, it's almost completely hopeless, right? So I'm not saying we have figured it out, but I'm saying that there's a logical possibility

that we are in the process of figuring it out. And by the time the aliens get here, they will have figured it out. I mean, that's what I used to think. And, you know, I would be happy to follow your lead, you know, in thinking what you're saying. But I increasingly, I'm getting more aware. I mean, we're on a tangent of a tangent right now, but I'm getting more worried about, I'm not so, I mean, I'm sort of buying the Stephen Hawking's argument a bit more, you know, than I used to about this topic. I knew the one who just wrote a 500-page book about optimism. Exactly.

Okay, but hold on. So we were talking about groupiness. and the collective identity. And there's another technique that evolution has equipped us with, which often is overlooked, and that's the capacity not to step up and take advantage of our ability to define groups, but to step down a level to the level of individuals. And so here the idea is we face the tribalism, not by expanding the boundary, but by decreasing the boundary down to the individual level.

What we say is that you should treat each other person as an individual. Earlier, we talked about how we have the capacity as an animal to uniquely identify every other person. And this, too, has been a part of our culture and our society. It's actually at the root of what Martin Luther King argues when he says he looks forward to a society where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He's saying each person should be judged as a person, not as a member of a group. And this also is a tool that evolution has equipped us with. And as it turns out, in my view, provides an avenue out.

of the tribalism that is sufflicting us today. Yeah. Good. That's a whole long, maybe for the next podcast, when I have you on next year again, we'll discover some of these because there's so many other things I want to get to. The hierarchy question, right? Mild hierarchy is one of your elements of the social suite. So this seems to suggest that on the one hand,

human beings like to have a little bit of hierarchy, but not too much. Is that a fair gloss? Yes. And again, you have to ask us. why we evolved this there's I need to scribble some notes regulate so I don't go off the deep end again so why do we have mild hierarchy again you can imagine a parameter space of hierarchy from you know complete absence of hierarchy when everyone is absolutely equal there are no differential resources or power

let's say to a complete autocracy you know where one person can completely dominate other individuals and kill them at will, let's say. And we are in the middle regime, it turns out, as a primate species. And we have evolved this capacity for mild hierarchy. And mild hierarchy is important because both extremes are bad for us. And they're bad for us in rather specific ways. First of all, in the absence of any hierarchy, turns out that there's some experiments that have been done by Jessica Flack and Santa Fe and other.

where they've taken primate species, they've mapped their networks, they've identified the top dogs or the top primates, and they have experimentally removed them from the network. What they find is that chaos ensues. There's tremendous amount of fighting as people jockey for power and position, even among the subordinate peripheral individuals. So one of the things that a little hierarchy does is it tamps down on violence. It keeps the peace.

It keeps people from, you know, fighting with each other. In addition, there's some evidence that a little bit of hierarchy, and here and I'm meaning when there's like popular individuals, when some people are popular, regulates the flow of information through the graph and optimizes the flow of good things and suppresses the flow of bad things. So you're saying that Walter Cronkite was better than Twitter for spreading news around. Yes, actually. That's a really good example, approximately.

But yes, that's right. that there's some kind of central filter in the information. So for example, and that this helps keep the piece. So there's some evidence of this role of mild hierarchy. But in addition, we humans have evolved two different ways of communicating status. So there's two different kinds of ways you can think about hierarchies or sort of status in a society. And one of them has to do with dominance hierarchies. And many animals have this.

And this has to do with the ability, typically physical ability of bigger animals to impose their will on others. These sort of dominance hierarchy. And you can think about these as costs, the costs that one animal can impose on another animal. So the animal with bigger antlers or bigger tusks, for example, can kill and drive away the other animal. And so subordinates in those types of hierarchies try to avoid the superordinates. Because of the cost, the superordinates can impose on them. But we humans have a parallel kind of hierarchy, which is based on prestige. And prestige hierarchies have to do with the benefits that superordinates can impose on subordinates.

And because superordinates, let's say, have knowledge. We are smart. So your graduate students, I'm assuming, want to spend time with you because of the benefits you can confer upon them, I'm assuming. So they believe, yeah, they don't know. But don't tell them. Exactly. Rather than avoid you because of the cost that you can impose on them. These are prestige hierarchies, and in our species, these often have to do with cognitive abilities.

We can teach each other things. So we have two parallel ways of having hierarchy in our society, roughly speaking, the costs which often are physical and the benefits which often are common that we can distribute. And there's evidence for both in our ancestral, you know, in our evolution. But it's because of this connection to prestige that mild hierarchy can be beneficial. the existence of people with special knowledge that can distribute these benefits to others is part of the reason you want some of the mild hierarchy. Now, when you get too much, what typically what we feel has happened, what's likely to have happened,

we're not sure, is that subordinates probably resented too much power going to some particular individuals and probably banded together and killed them, actually. And so one of the reasons we think in our evolution we've been sure. shaped for a mild hierarchy is precisely for this reason. Yeah, so it seems as if I'm going to guess, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that the thing about mild hierarchy is it is the best system for various reasons, and therefore maybe it explains why we evolved to like it. I mean, obviously there are examples in history where we've gone to complete autocracy

and stratification or complete anarchy and egalitarianism, but there's some happy middle where you're going to argue that we tend toward. Yes, that's what I would argue, and that there's evidence from other social mammals that this is optimal, including experiments with primates. So that's right. And it often has to do with social animals that have the capacity for teaching and learning that can collect and distribute information, that you get these kind of counterbalancing forces. So basically, instead of organizing the society against around the dominance hierarchy, now all of a sudden you need to reduce the ability of, physically very powerful individuals to to dominate. And so let's see how to put this exactly.

It turns out that one of the reasons it is felt that we have mild hierarchy is that there's been a kind of rough justice, a kind of rough calculus between dominance hierarchies and prestige hierarchies. And that's why we wind up a little bit in the middle range as I talked about the book. That makes sense. I mean, all of these, you know, features of the social suite from identity, love, friendship, hierarchy, and group bias. You want to say they're not only there, but you want to say they're genetic,

is that they're built into our DNA somehow? Is that mostly sort of circumstantial? You know, what else could it be if it's that universal? Or is there something, is there more directly genetic evidence that we can point to for the origins of these features? That sounds like something to be very difficult at this point in human history to really establish. Well, no, for some traits, there's quite a lot of evidence. I mean, my lab has done a lot of work on the genetics of friendship, for example, and we've been able to show that the propensity for friendship,

some of the higher-order structures we were discussing earlier are partially genetically encoded. I mean, there's no doubt a role for culture also and nurture, but there's clearly a role of nature. We've shown that the way you choose your friends is partly shaped by your genes. You might be able to reason by analogy and see, like, for example, people are capable of love at first sight, it's not an uncommon phenomenon, you should have the intuition that that love at first sight probably has something to do with genes. That is to say that, you know, that some kind of optimal, you know, that's some kind of optimal,

you know, that the partner choice should be under, under selection is not a shocking claim, and there's a lot of evidence for that in animals, for example, we do experiments with that. But I would say friendship choice also is under natural selection for analogous reasons. And we have evidence for this. And so there's evidence for that. There's also evidence for a partially genetic basis for attachment, for love. There's surprisingly little evidence so far that we've been able to adduce for the genetics of cooperation in our species. But we do have some such evidence in other animals.

So it's, again, doesn't strain credulity to me. So we have information on the level of genes using a variety of approaches that provide evidence for this. Plus, there's a comparative phylogenetic approach where, for example, we find similar properties seen in other animals, or we can trace it out across evolution so we can say, when did social monogony appear in our species, and we see a very specific historical evolutionary moment when that occurred, and we can trace out the branches. And this type of evidence also is evidence. So there's lots of convergent evidence that supports the claim that many of these qualities are shaped by natural selection and partially encoded in our genes. But we're not at the point yet where we could actually point to a place in the genome where, oh, this is a preference for mild hierarchy or something like that.

No, and in part because these traits are so complex, we cannot even do that with height. Yeah, exactly. schizophrenia risk. And increasingly we're seeing that many of these complex traits are polygenic. So the kind of thing we all learned in high school biology about, you know, about sickle cell disease or calisemia being, you know, monogenic mutations that, you know, follow mandalian inheritance. You know, those are the exceptions, actually. Most of the, forget most of the behavioral and complex traits we manifest. Even a lot of the physical traits, like your schizophrenia risk or your diabetes risk or your height,

also are polygenic and we barely understand. You know, we know there are hundreds, a couple hundred genes that are responsible for height. We know height is very heritable, but only one or two percent of the variants can be explained by known genes. So something else is going on, and that's being worked on very actively. I mean, I think in our lifetimes, we're likely to know the answers to some of these questions. I think it has to do with the combinatorial complexity of the genes. That is to say, it's not about which genes you have. It's about how they interact with each other.

And furthermore, the temporal unfolding. So you might have five genes, each of which has two variants. The precise sequence at which they turn on and off might determine how tall you are, even if you have the same variance in a given individual. And we don't know anything about that yet. We know some about it. But we're learning more about that. Yeah, I think it's just important to emphasize because a lot of people hear that something is genetic

and they think, oh, there's a gene for it that we'll find the gene. And we both know, and I think probably most of our listeners know, it's way more complicated than that. So you can have good evidence that something is heritable, as you say, without having any idea where it comes from in the DNA. Yes. But like the facial, like for example, I'll give you an interesting thing. We're talking about facial morphology. There's one of the most famous examples in evolutionary biology of something known as an adaptive radiation,

which is from an original species, how many other species evolved to fill in various niches is Darwin's finches, right? So he looks at all these. and he sees that different animals have different beaks depending on what kind of food is available on the island with those finches. From an ancestral population of finches, the finches on this island involved to eat nuts and the ones on these island to eat flowers and they all have different things. And just recently, I think it was published in nature like a couple of years ago, the genetics of this was worked out. So we actually know what are the genes that have variants that affect the shape of the beak in these animals? you know something that same gene affects our faces and there's evidence that that same gene

plays a role in facial morphology in humans and I think I have the footnotes to that in the book so I think you know we will find for example increasingly the genetic evidence for some of these qualities including for example the individual expression what do you think are some of the we're winding down here So what are some of the normative implications of what you're saying? You have a brief section in the book at the end where you talk about morality, for example.

And I think this is a place we're going to disagree because you seem to be more sympathetic than I am to somehow extracting some moral lessons out of the facts about who we are and how we got here. Right. So, you know, the moral philosophy is a, you know, is a attempt to provide a kind of building up of moral principles from axioms, you know, like Euclidean geometry. You know, we start with seven axioms. I think it is. I can't remember. And, you know, you get all of Euclidean geometry from some, you know, parallel lines continue indefinitely and you understand, blah, blah. So, and. But the moral philosophers have been working for at least 50 years, maybe more, and they have yet to uncover what these universal,

what these fundamental axioms that are universally applicable are. And it's clear that moral philosophy cannot be, it's not about voting, right? You don't like have everyone vote what's right. We know horrible things that we would consider to be grossly immoral, like the killing of autistic kids in Nazi Germany, where, you know, everyone thought that was fine, but you and I would look at that,

I think that's just clearly immoral. So it's not about majority rule, or it might make right. It's not about, you know, majority rule. You know, otherwise the cardinals would have been correct and Galileo would have been wrong. So that's not what determines whether something is right, is how many people believe it. It's not determined by who, whether powerful people espouse it.

So there's a sense in moral philosophy that there must be some kind of outside of human ways that we can come up with developing these moral principles. Now, I am skeptical, actually, that that project will succeed for a number of reasons. And here I share Churchill's perspective, the philosopher. But I do believe that biology can help us help guide the way, as I argue a little bit in the book. And here I borrow some ideas from philosopher Philip of Foot, where she very famously says, in moral philosophy, she said,

I think it's helpful to think about plants. Which makes you think, yes. Yes, I love philosophers. It's just incredible. You know, you're like, what does she mean by that exactly? It goes on to explain that when you think about plants, you can think about whether a plant has good roots. And she says that you can speak of this plant has good roots or bad roots. And what are good roots?

Good roots are the roots that make it possible to be a plant. And she also uses the example of clocks. She says you can speak of a good clock or a bad clock. And she says that a good clock is one that tells time. A bad clock does not tell time. So she makes an argument about how, while much of morality is very contingent, eventually slipping and sliding, it meets reality. It meets the kind of foundation. And that there are, you can develop moral principles against constraints.

speak of something that is good or bad, given the constraints, conditional on the constraints. And so this is in essence what I argue about human societies. Given the need for us to live together, given that we are social animals, what equips us with that? And that's what makes it good. So our capacity for love is good in that sense. Our capacity for friendship is good in that sense. And I can't help but notice that many of these qualities are good in the everyday meaning as well. If you ask people, you know, we don't care if you love yourself or are kind to yourself or are just to yourself. We care whether you love others or are kind to others or just to others. Our virtues are social virtues primarily.

And so we clearly have a connection between that which we think of as good, a good life or good practice or good behavior. Much of that, not all of it, because we also, for example, can think of bravery in facing a, a violent animal, for example. So it's not social, but we would think of that as a moral virtue. You know, most of our virtues, many of them, are social in nature. So that's sort of the argument that I try to make, you know, at the end of the book and why I think that it is possible to provide at least a partially biological foundation for morality. Yeah, so I would, I mean, I think what you just said is extremely clear and understandable.

and I don't quite go, I'm not quite on the train. And the reason why is because I think it's very important to draw a distinction between meta-ethics or metamorality. I don't know why people don't use the word metamorality, but what are the foundations of morality that give us its foundation, its own for whatever, versus morality and ethics themselves? Like, okay, so what are the morals that we pick? I think that biology and the constraints that get us here and the goals that we have is both individuals and social creatures, clearly are going to have a huge impact on how we decide to actually be moral, right? What counts as being moral, et cetera. But the foundations of morality, that doesn't follow from those constraints or that biology.

You can always choose to be very different and no one can say that you're wrong in the same way, that they could say you were wrong if you were wrong about something scientific or logical. So I would like to encourage the world to just relax and accept the fact that morality doesn't have an absolutely. foundation, and nevertheless, we have enough shared concerns and shared desires that we can construct a way to live that seems to us to be moral. I wouldn't disagree with that. I mean, I would sign up for that. You know, I have to understand more about how you were framing the distinction between

metamorality and moral rules, because if anything, initially when you were expressing it that way, I would have said that the biology could provide a foundation for the metamorality and the sort of culture or history would fill in the specific rules. So, for example, not killing strangers might be something that natural selection might have shaped, but who counts as a stranger might be something that's very culturally specific. Yeah. So to me, both of those are morality. So morality is that killing strangers is bad.

Metamorality is why do we say that killing strangers is bad? What's the warrant? What is the justification for that? And rather than being a moral realist, whether it's Kantian or otherwise, I just want to be a moral constructivist and says, Well, look, we all think that let's figure out how to live it. Okay, so I get the point. So there are some arguments that evolutionary biologists have made, like Brett Weinstein and others, that actually what has evolved is not the content of moral rules, but even the capacity for moral deliberation.

In fact, the argument is that what matters is that we evolved to argue with each other. That serves a purpose. It binds us together. The fact that we, for example, don't fight, don't kill each other necessarily as a first instance. We just argue and that we might come to different conclusions, different groups of people endowed with the same capacity for argument might argue a lot and then at the end come to different conclusions. But the fact of arguing actually is what's forming, giving an outlet for otherwise bad inclinations

and also binding us together by giving us something to do. So some people have even argued that the very capacity for moral deliberation is itself an evolved property that we have. So, you know, I understand, I think, what you've said, and I don't think it's crazy, but I still think that I can do be more charitable. I think you're probably right. No, I mean, I'm in a plucky minority here.

I think most people don't agree with me, including most professional philosophers, It's just a matter of time. Before they come around. Yeah, you know, the words that you're using, it's very similar to communicative rationality, right? Habermasian way of thinking about how human beings interact and how we come to things. I think that we have, I even want in my less charitable moments to say that this is a relic of our religious upbringings, the fact that we want to find this absolute bedrock, logical geometric derivation. of things rather than just saying, hey, let's come together and agree about it.

Yes and no, I would say to that. I would say there's no doubt that modern moral philosophy owes a lot to theology. Religion clearly goes way back. We don't know exactly how far back it is. Tens of thousands of years. But I also think that a lot of the stuff we're discussing these sort of moral sentiments, like tip for tap or reciprocity, for example, the evolution of a sense of reciprocity. That you see in elephants.

I mean, that proceeds, that goes way back. It's a pre-religious sensibility that we humans have. Yeah, but they have morality, not meta-ethics. Okay. They don't worry about a foundational basis for their actions. That's uniquely human, right? I would agree with that. Okay, so when you write a book like this, why do you do it?

Who's your audience? Are you reaching for the general public? Is this something that you think of as part of your wider mission as an intellectual or is this just part of your, you know, scholarly CV? God, that's a good question. I would say that there are many different reasons. One is it's, it's, it's both painful and joyful to write a book, you know. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's an, it's, it's an, it's, it's an, it's, it's an, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's, it's a learning that goes into it. You never learn anything as well as when you have to teach it. And, uh, you know, you know,

you really have to drill down and drill down. I love all the meandering paths and you stumble on stuff as you look at one paper's references, then on other papers references, than other papers, that you find this incredible classic, some forgotten scholar in 1890 who saw things the right way. And nobody understood it. You know, it's incredible how smart those guys were. And, you know, we think we're discovering everything. So all of that is very joyful, but it's painful.

You know, it's difficult to distill everything down, to kill your darlings, to articulate it, to finish the project, to allocate the time, all of that stuff. So first is just personal satisfaction. I like it. This is my third book, my third unedited book. I've also done some, edited some clinical textbooks on hospice medicine. So the first point. Second point, I think the audience is my peers.

You're trying to make an argument. You're trying to say to your colleagues, you're trying to defend and advance a certain perspective on the world. You're trying to say, look, I think these ideas help us organize our thinking. And do you agree with me? Please agree with me that this is a healthy way to think about things. And then I think as you alluded to, I think there's also the broader public. And here I think that as academics, we have a, I would even go so far as to say an obligation to serve the needs, you know, to advance the public understanding of science.

I think, you know, we, universities and academics are the institutions. institutions in our society that are supposed to preserve, produce, and disseminate knowledge. You know, we're supposed to preserve Sanskrit and preserve, you know, shell anatomy and preserve, you know, every obscure branch of human knowledge. And we're, and we're supposed to disseminate it. We're supposed to discover new stuff. That's clearly an hugely important mission. And we're supposed to do that without reference to its utility because we have, I think it's a mark of our civilization that we do this. You know, we give money to institutions and people that are just supposed to sit around and think up stuff. I mean, I think it's miraculous.

I think, and I think it's a source of our wealth. I could make an argument. It's a source of our wealth and power. And has been, you know, ancient kings did the same thing. Galileo, let's not forget, was in the pay of the Medici's. And, you know, all of these, you know, Archivides worked for the King of Syracuse and so forth. So we're supposed to do that, but we're also supposed to disseminate the knowledge. And we're not supposed to just disseminate it to ourselves. We're supposed to disseminate back to our

paymasters, which are the society at large. And so I think in that regard, I think the engagement with the public understanding of science and the effort to increase the way in which people see the utility of science and of knowledge, I think is important. So that's a way. another reason to write books. Yeah, so I think very quickly parenthetically... You do the same thing, of course. I do. I was going to say two things. One, just that this

wonderful fact that you are allowed to dive into the literature and the research and the other fields and to be interdisciplinary and to talk to people outside, this is a wonderful feature of writing books, and I had it when I was writing the big

picture. My podcast audience here knows this, but this was major motivation for me starting Mindscape podcast because when I stopped writing that book, my license to knock on people's doors went away, right? You know, like how do I get to talk to Nobel Prize winning biologists now? But now I can

do it because I have a podcast, so here we are. So you might want to start a podcast if you want to do this. And the other one is... I can never catch up with you though, Sean. I think you're doing it, so I'll just learn you, you're doing it so well. It's a big ecosystem out there. And the other one is, yeah, I think that it's very

interesting to think about the audience and how we write books because, especially in physics, there is a well-established tradition of outreach, popularization books, right, where you're basically trying to explain something that is perfectly well understood, general relativity or particle physics or whatever. And sort of secretly, it shouldn't be secret, I should be louder about it, but my books aren't mostly that, right? My books are actually, like you said, trying to make an argument and you can disagree with them for the most part. It's not simply saying here is stuff, you know, here is why space time is curved. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to say like, let's go beyond a little bit. And partly I do it in the trade book format to reach a broader audience, but

partly because it is kind of a bigger picture, more interdisciplinary thing that would be less appropriate for a professional journal article. Yes. I mean, I think that's right. And I also think there's a in which I mean this is a bit of the craft of being a professor at our stage of life I would say that I like to take intellectual risks both in my own laboratory I like to say my students will say I'll go to them I'll say this is crazy but it's got to be true and oh yeah and and and 50 percent of it's more than 50 percent of time I'm right like they take bets on whether I'm right or not and I have a pretty good nose at this point for stuff that's crazy but it's got to be true.

And but it's very difficult to publish that stuff in peer-reviewed journals, as you know. And so until you get all the right evidence, I mean, the path to proving something is unusual. You know, what is it? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So but with the books, the thing you can do is they're not peer reviewed.

So one of the things that I find very, very welcome about writing a book for, is that, you know, while I stand behind everything in the book and I thought deeply about it and researched it at length and 20% of the stuff are experiments I've done in my own personal laboratory. You know, I know it down all the way to the bottom level what's going on there. Nevertheless, you have more breathing room, right? You don't have those peer reviewers that are breathing over your neck saying,

well, you know, can you say that? Or I disagree with that. Because I disagree, R3 says, because I disagree with that, cut it out of the paper. You're like, no, no, I want to say this thing. Yeah, and it gets worse. The more interesting your work gets in some sense. I feel myself, like, 10 or 20 years ago, I was doing pretty darn mainstream cosmology and gravitation theory. And I never even contemplated the possibility that a paper that I wrote would get rejected.

You know, it's just that you do the solid work and it'll get accepted. And these days, I'm doing infinitely more interesting works. But it is more speculative, more interdisciplinary. And now I'm always worried that it'll get rid. Like half the time it sails through fine and other half the referees decide to be obstreperous. But, you know, it sadly, and it really, it hurts me to admit this, but my opinion of academia has gone down in the last decade because as it affects me personally, the fact that academia is so conservative and traditionalist and hidebound is just much more obvious. And there's a reason for that. It's just like, you know, the evolution of different human capacities, right?

I mean, there's sort of selection pressures that push it in that way. but it's too bad that there's not more room in there for encouraging just a little bit of off the beaten path kind of stuff. And the reason why I say I'm reluctant to say it is because it will give solace to all sorts of complete crackpots who'd say yes. My theory about how the universe is made of pipe cleaners is absolutely being rejected by the establishment. But so be it. Well, it's more than that. I mean, first of all, I would agree 100% with everything you just said in the last two minutes. and I've had a different career than yours in different fields.

And I don't know if we've ever overlapped it in universities, but mostly different universities. And it's the same thing. And it's really, you know, sometimes describe my laboratory as the island of lost toys. Like I've gotten to the point where I can provide some cover and protection for my students. But I worry, you know, because I, you know, I have tenure and I have job security and I have reached a certain stage where I can take these risks, but I don't know. I want to let them take their risk.

I want to encourage them to. And we all know the famous scientists that swam against the tide and made those major discoveries. But the truth of the matter is, for every one of those we know, they're 999, who either were wrong or they were right. But they spent their whole life beating their head against the wall and were never recognized in their lifetime. You know, they were penniless and had no, you know, no jobs and so forth, even though they were right. So we only hear about those outliers who were right and successful. And it's very difficult to organize a career or to mentor young people in this regard. So I typically give the advice of, you know, belt and suspenders.

I say, you know, develop technical expertise, develop detailed knowledge about a narrow, very conventional kind of thing. And even though you are young, still have these crazy ideas that you pursue in parallel and just work harder, you know, do two careers, until you get to the point where you can really give yourself liberty to go off in crazy tangents. I mean, there's all these guys at MIT, these full professors, that you go to talk to them, and you're like, well, yeah, this is the stuff I'm publishing and sell, but let me show you the really cool stuff. You know, that's over here and back room. And their eyes light up, you know, and, you know, I think, you know, we're talking now about, like, different things. We're talking about just a craft of mentoring young people. And we're also talking about having a good life in science.

And for me, you know, I would I would rather take risks that I might, you know, here, let me just tell you this. And I'm sure you feel the same way. Once you've tasted at the well of scientific discovery, there's no other feeling like it. Nothing like it. Nothing like it. If you're the first to see something, anything can be the tiniest damn thing. And you have that feel. Oh, my God.

Look at this thing that I saw. And nobody has thought of it before, seen it before. It's like a drug, right? You just want it again. And you will invest years for that again. And so that's, you know, I try now that I'm at the stage where I'm at, to allow myself that pursuit. And, you know, a lot of my grants get rejected.

A lot of my papers get rejected. And I think more than yours, judging from your hit rate, you're describing. But, you know, I would rather, at this stage of my life, that's the game I would rather play. Well, it seems like you've been doing it very successfully. And at the very least, we have our books and podcasts to fall back on. Yes. Thank you.

It's a true, you know, a real intellectual pleasure to be discussing these ideas. Sean, thank you so much. All right, Nicholas Christakis, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors. and their clients to thrive. So what if you could?

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