The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence by Samuel T. Wilkinson

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence by Samuel T. Wilkinson https://amzn.to/3WaeLU5 A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence. Generations have been taught that evolution implies there is no overarching purpose to our existence, that life has no fundamental meaning. We are merely the accumulation of tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents. Some scientists take this logic one step further, suggesting that evolution is intrinsically atheistic and goes against the concept of God. But is this true? By integrating emerging principles from a variety of scientific disciplines—ranging from evolutionary biology to psychology—Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework of evolution that implies not only that there is an overarching purpose to our existence, but what this purpose is. With respect to our evolution, nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love. When we couple this with the observation that we possess a measure of free will, all this strongly implies there is a universal purpose to our existence. This purpose, at least one of them, is to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a truth, as old as history it seems, that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of a God, not against it. Closely related to this is meaning. What is the meaning of life? Based on the scientific data, it would seem that one such meaning is to develop deep and abiding relationships. At least that is what most people report are the most meaningful aspects of their lives. This is a function of our evolution. It is how we were created.About the author Samuel T. Wilkinson is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Yale Depression Research Program. Dr. Wilkinson received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Brigham Young University and later his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his residency at Yale, where he joined the faculty following his post-graduate medical training. His primary research has focused on depression and suicide prevention and has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. His research and articles have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been the recipient of many awards, including Top Advancements & Breakthroughs from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (2017 and 2020), Top Ten Psychiatry Papers by the New England Journal of Medicine Journal Watch, the Early Career Scholar Award from the American Psychiatric Association, and the rank of Eagle Scout.

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Follow the big LinkedIn newsletter, 103,000 LinkedIn group over there. See us on the TikTok, ChrisFoss1, and ChrisFossFacebook.com. We have an amazing prolific author on the show. Samuel T. Wilkinson joins us on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his new book that comes out March 5th, 2024. It's called Purpose. What evolution and human nature imply about the meaning of our existence. And I think you'll be interested to see what his thoughts are on everything.

Samuel T. Wilkinson is an associate professor of psychiatry at yale school of medicine where he serves as the associate director of the yale depression research program i think the whole program is based upon my depression probably made a lot of money off that no i'm just kidding the he received his bs in mechanical engineering from brigham young university and later his medical degree from John Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his residency at Yale, where he joined the faculty following his post-graduate medical training. His primary research is focused on depression and suicide prevention and has been funded by the National Institution of Mental Health,

the National Institution of Drug Abuse, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Welcome to the show, Samuel. How are you? I'm good, Chris. Thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to speak with you today. There you go. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us your dot-coms. Where on the internet is anyone you want to find you and stalk you? So there's my Yale page. You can Google yale and samuel wilkinson i show up there or i have i do have a web page for the book samuel t wilkinson.com there you go there

you go so give us a 30 000 overview in your words if you would of your new book purpose yeah i've wanted to write this book for a long time it goes back to when i was in medical school johns hopkins And for whatever reason, I had this kind of this crisis of meaning and this existential struggle I went through when I was learning about medicine, mainly because of the way that so much of it was contextualized in the theory of evolution. And I don't know why I never bumped into this before, maybe because I came to medicine in a roundabout way. But as I read more about evolution, I had the sense that, you know, if this is true, then life has no purpose or meaning. And certainly that's kind of depressing.

And I didn't like that. So I went through this period of a couple months of reading and studying and reflecting and meditating. And I had this somewhat of an intense resolution to what was an intense kind of struggle. So that was almost 15 years ago. And I had to put this project on the back burner a little bit while I finished my medical education and got established as a faculty here and was able to return to it a few years ago and wrap up the book. And it's been a challenging process, but satisfying. There you go. Would you say it's kind of the existential crisis journey we all kind of go on,

where there's the points in their life where we have this weird thing with humans that are conscious, that we contemplate our navels and try and figure out why we're here and what does it all mean and all that sort of stuff? Yeah, I think most people at some point in their lives will bump into some of these big questions, right? What is life all about? Why am I here? Is there even a purpose to our existence or are we just intricate molecular accidents as some people do in fact believe so i think there is a commonality that most people would experience as they wrestle with with some of these questions yeah it's kind of interesting you know you look at snakes or other other animals in the in the kingdom and we're not probably totally aware if they have some sort of consciousness i think dogs

have a little bit of consciousness if you you have Huskies, they definitely have a consciousness. You give them a command and they're just like, I'll think about that. But they're kind of designed that way for running teams across ice and dangerous flows. But they, for the most part, you know, as far as we know, there's no snakes running around going, what is my place in the universe? You know, they're not sitting in a Zen garden trying to figure shit out. But, you know, maybe they're, I mean, who knows? I'm not in the mind and you know they're not sitting in a zen garden trying to figure shit out but you know maybe they're i mean who knows i'm not in the mind of a snake but i i know there's a marriage joke there somewhere anyway a divorce joke somewhere but so give us a what are some of the things that you espouse in the book or or do you do you kind of just bring questions to

people to help them kind of wander through the existential crisis of what is my meat? I do actually proffer some answers and I try to keep this based in science and what we know in the latest evidence on the most up-to-date theories of human nature and origins. I can just go through what was kind of bothering me and what I figured out. Back then, my somewhat superficial understanding of evolution was that it was a totally random process, right? And this is kind of what led me to this, it seemed to this conflict of, if it was really random, we're just a fluke. Our existence really has no purpose. There's this great quote by a professor from the 1970s who says, essentially, you know, life is of profound unimportance, a mere eddy in the primeval slime, right?

And that kind of, for me, epitomizes like... It's a little disheartening, isn't it? Yeah, that's a little bit, you know... It's a bunch of slimy human beings. A little bit of a downer. And, you know, there's a very influential professor of biology who was most active in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. His name is Stephen Jay Gould. He worked at Harvard.

He had this kind of thought experiment that if we could somehow rewind time back to the beginning and origins of life on Earth and then watch it unfold again, it will be a totally different picture. And life would be totally different. There would almost certainly be no humans. And everything was subject to contingencies, chance events along the way. And it turns out that there's a lot of evidence that has emerged in biology since then that that is probably not the case. And that there are these that despite different starting paths or different routes that there are these outcomes these results that occur over and over and over again in nature in biology and and you know there seem to be these deeper principles

we still don't know a lot about that have with that have constricted evolution to go in certain directions. From my perspective, this is not a random thing. There is some randomness. There's some room for randomness, but it seems like the overall patterns, that there are deeper structures, as one eminent biologist calls them, or higher principles that have constrained this process to go in certain directions and not others. Now, the title of your book, you talk about evolution merged with human nature. Is the human nature element or how do you weigh that in? Does it weigh in and what is the influence of that?

It definitely does. We can shift a little bit. If you want to go into how we get the sense that evolution is not random, I'm happy to do that. But another part that to me was very kind of off-putting about evolution is what it implied about human nature. And shortly after Charles Darwin published his most famous book in 1859, another biologist coined this phrase, survival of the fittest, right? And biologists don't really like that phrase today. They prefer the phrase natural selection, but there is some value to it and educational aspect to it, but it implies that we're, you know, at our core selfish, right? You think of those traits that would be helpful for survival And you think of selfishness, you think of

aggressiveness, you think of violence, and that kind of is a bleak picture, right? Richard Dawkins, his most famous book, his first book, The Selfish Genie, in the opening pages to that, he has this line where he says, look, if you're trying to build a good society, you're not going to get any help from biology because we are born selfish. I don't know if he would stand by that today, but, you know, that, that's a, you know, that, that was something that was very bothersome to me, right? If it is true that we are somehow the products of evolution, what does that, what does that imply about, about our natures? It turns out that it's, go ahead.

Finish your thought on it turns out, and let me see if my question still applies. It turns out that it's it go ahead finish your thought it turns out and let me see if my question still applies it it turns out that it's not that simple and certainly we all can think of cases and examples from humans as well as from animals of behavior that is the opposite of selfish and cooperative and altruistic and so forth you know it's it's not a you know, human nature is not just a simple monolithic one type of thing. There's lots of caveats and nuances to it. And, you know, as I dug into the literature on why and how do we think that evolution produced this, it's been enlightening to me about, you know, what really is at the root of our nature? How can we structure our lives and our societies in order to bring out the best aspects of ourselves? To quote Lincoln, the better angels of our nature. The better angels of our nature. Yeah, what a great quote. Yeah, the survival of the fittest really doesn't fit because you can, I mean, you can go to the gym, you can work out, you can be the most healthiest guy in the world and get hit by a bus yeah i joke about that guy who's spending two

million dollars a year i don't know if you've seen him but he's spending two million dollars a year to try and live forever and he's like you know fit and eating healthy and you know constantly testing himself and you know the joke is he'll get hit by a bus someday, you know, my house will fall on him. Yeah. He's, he's got his work cut out for him. That's sure. That's for sure. Some of it has to do with, you know, how, what does it mean to be fit? And it's not always necessarily physically fit, you know, having abs of steel and a six pack and that sort, you know, it's, it's being able to survive. But, you know, another reason why that phrase is a little problematic because it's not all just about survival it's about reproduction right and kind of continuing your lineage and

another part of this this is where the i think the the interesting aspects of human nature come in is what the question i would ask is survival of the fittest what okay so there are there are a number of different biological entities that can survive and reproduce because it isn't survival of the fittest gene or the fittest cell or the fittest individual, or even maybe the fittest group or family, right? I'm kind of an all of the above type of guy. I think that in our long, in the history of life and development of life, all of those, what they call different levels have played a role. But when you think about the type of social traits that would emerge when you're thinking about survival of the fittest individual versus a survival of the fittest group, you come up with opposing traits. So let me tell

a story if that's all right, that I think helps drive home this point. This is a remarkable story. This is actually from a colleague at Yale, Nicholas Christakis, who's a sociologist, has done some really interesting analysis. In 1864, there were two shipwrecks at the same time and place on opposite ends of what's called the Auckland Islands. This is 300 miles south of mainland New Zealand. The first ship was led by a man named Musgrave, Thomas Musgrave. And after 18 months of a harrowing ordeal and much resourcefulness and ingenuity, all of the crew members of that first ship survived. By the way, the crew members, when they were shipwrecked, they never came across each other. The islands were sufficiently large and spread apart that

they never bumped into each other. So the first ship, Musgrave, they all survived. The second ship was led by a man named George Delgarno. And unfortunately, most of the crew of his ship died and didn't make it. What was the key difference? The key difference was that the crew members of the first ship, they stuck together. They cooperated. They, you know, had each other's back. And this was epitomized within this first few minutes or hours. The captain himself, he carried an injured member of the crew on his back as he swam through the torrential waves to the safety of the shore.

The second ship, their crew members, they kind of had this every man for himself type approach. And within the first few days of shipwrecking, they left a wounded man behind to die. And so you see, it's kind of easy to think of in the distant past where altruism and looking out for each other would have been helpful for survival and perpetuation of the race and so forth. You know, selfishness may work in certain contexts, but in a group setting, altruism is better, right? And that goes for a number of different, you know, behavioral traits, cooperation and aggression, kindness, cruelty. If you have a more cohesive group, that's going to do better in the long run

than if you have a group composed of a bunch of people who are fighting and bickering and can't get along. There you go. So do you feel that our ability to pull that and not be selfish and be benevolent or altruistic, do you feel that's by a design or do you suggest it's by some sort of design of someone smarter and better than us? Or do you feel that, are there examples? This is a second question, I guess, follow up is is is that we find that in

nature don't we i know wolves have i know wolves have an interesting society that's maybe might be different than other mammals yeah i mean it it seems to be a function of just of natural principles that that you know on there's a great quote I like from two eminent biologists who say, basically, you know, selfishness beats, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary. And, you know, that's just, that's kind of like an eternal principle, right? That seems to, at least in my view, it seems to transcend, you know, our, you know, a lot of our everyday experience in the here and now, that seems to be just a principle of nature, right? That there are competing dispositions that can evolve from different levels of selection as biologists

refer to this issue. In humans, where I do think, yeah, I think there's design to that. And when you combine that with, so just to clarify, I think we have the capacity for both. When you look at human nature, human history, when you look at your own experience, every person has strengths and weaknesses. Every person has the capacity to be selfish, but also the capacity to be unselfish, to look out for the good of others. And this helps, at least for me, get us out of the quagmire of human nature that philosophers and scientists have dealt with a long time. Are we selfish or altruistic? The answer is yes.

We have the capacity to be both of these things is that but isn't there isn't there one that lies at our deepest core i mean you and i are both men we we know at our deepest core that if you and i fight we have the penchant that one of us might live and one of us might die and at that moment between you living and me, we're going to be very selfish about survival at our very core. Now, we can be benevolent and altruistic when we're awash in goodness, kindness, riddance, and sharing. But if we're fighting over the last woman on earth or the last piece of corn to feed our family and kids you know things can turn a little different but i mean in the end when it comes down to survival of the fittest if you want to call it that you may rethink survival of the fittest because i was watching george burns last night on carson i love watching carson still and you know he was smoking his like 10th cigar he said that

day and he's like 100 years old or some shit and it was a really survivor the fittest may include dna so you may rethink that you know dna and chromosomes and family lineage but to me at the very core you know when it really comes down to the the moment survival is going to take precedence over over benevolence. Some, I think most times when it comes down to personal survival, you know, I'm going to,

if it's all right, I'm going to gently push back and say, and say, I disagree. I think the other aspect that I haven't touched upon here that I think completes this circle and makes a case that there's a purpose to our existence has to do with free will. And in my book, at least, I don't try to get into how we have the natural

explanations for that. It's a bit of a mystery to me. There's been a great book since I finished my book that has come out by a guy named Kevin Mitchell about this. It's just brilliant. Don't tell my publicist I'm promoting other people's books on your podcast, but he just has a great book. And if you can get him on the show, I think that'd be worth a conversation. What's the title of the book? I think it's Free Agents. Oh, Free Agents. There you go. Subtitle. Where are you shot to? Yeah. So here's the observation that we have free will, right? There are some people who don't agree and they tend to be philosophers and neuroscientists.

Sam Harris, I think specifically. Yep, Sam Harris. Robert Sapolsky just came out with a book about how we don't have free will. I disagree with them. I do think we have free will. The vast majority of people believe we have free will. That seems to be our everyday experience

that no one thinks of him or herself as the passive follower of the brain or body, right? To some degree, we are in control of our thoughts, attention, speech, and action. Not to say that environment and culture and biology don't point us in one direction or another, but at the crux of it, there is some realm within which we are free to act and to choose and so forth. When you combine this with this kind of what I call the dual potential of human nature, it seems like life is a test.

We have this free will. We're pulled in different directions. We're altruistic, but also selfish. It seems like one of the purposes of our existence is to choose between the good and evil inherent within us. Now, I'll circle back to your issue of when it really comes to the rubber meets the road, if we're fighting over the last morsel, everyone's going to be selfish. I'm going to push back and say, I don't think that's true. I think one of my favorite books is by this man is psychiatrists, actually, uh, someone who I'm proud of in, in, in our history of psychiatry, Victor Frankel, who wrote this book, man's search for meaning in which he

described his experience is as a prisoner of a concentration camp. And he had the observation where, you know, even in the most dreadful circumstances, when, you know, death was, you know, at your door, people would still behave in unselfish ways, and they would give away their last morsel of bread or, you know, speak kindly or reach out in kindness to others who are suffering. There were some people who chose the opposite and chose, you know, we're fighting and clawing to the very last end. But I think that at our core, we do have a choice, okay? Now, it's not free of constraint.

We are pulled, you know, we are certainly influenced by culture, by biology. But at the core, we have a choice of how to respond, even in the most dire of circumstances. Now, I can't speak for personal reasons. I've never written anything as difficult as a concentration camp, but I love that book. It continues to be a bestseller. Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl. Yeah. Let me dial back the scope though i mean even if we're not finding our last morsel there's still some benevolence there you know it's certainly if you're if you're

a provider to your family you you would see the bigger vision maybe and like okay if i maybe if i let him have the more less morsel we can team up and we can we can go hunt down some other stuff you know we can work together and that's kind of one of the great things we do tribally but really at the to me at the very core of survival is mano a mano if if you and i go against each other as men we're designed to be killers as men we're we're designed to be killers. But we're also designed to cooperate, right? I'll agree with you. I'll agree with you that we have a capacity. If you or I go mano a mano in a fight and escalates to the point of blows,

and we know that it can go to death. Most men know that if they fight each other, there is a height of death. If we go to the mano a mano with each other to the point of death where we're fighting and it becomes apparent to both of us that that we're we're in it to kill each other at least one of us is i'm in it to kill you you're not going to be benevolent and go i don't really need my wife and kids will probably respect me if i'm benevolent just let this guy win right i mean tell me if I'm wrong. You're the scientist here.

So there's lots of different ways things can play out. As you say, if we go monitor to monitor, the other thing is we can try to decide to cooperate and say, look, there's only so much resource left. Let's cooperate and make more resources one of the things that is unique about humans yeah is is the level to which we cooperate right yeah heart surgery going to the moon you know the technology that we use every day none of this is possible without cooperation right not a single person can create something like this. It takes a huge number of people with different expertise to pull something like this together. So, yes, I agree that we have that capacity to go head-to-head, mano-a-mano, and kill each other. And it doesn't take long to go back to the history of humanity to see that we can behave in terrible and unspeakably violent ways for each other.

But we also have this deep capacity to cooperate. And I think, you know, I just think that speaks to that, you know, we have this dual potential of human nature. And, you know, we try to choose the better aspects of it. Certainly certain contexts, right? When these resources are low, people can turn against each other, but they can also not right. As, as Victor Frankel's experience kind of testifies to that.

Yeah. The, I, I still think at the very core, you know, I remember, I think one of the things that influences, I remember watching mash the TV show and there was an incident there where a guy kept threatening to commit suicide. He kept attempting suicide in the suicide in the hospital ward there. Finally, I forget his name, the captain. There was two different ones over the show.

The captain says, you want to die? We'll fucking help you die. He tries to kill him or attempts to try and kill him. The man fights back. He's like, see, you really don't want to die. You're full of shit. What is your real problem?

But no, honestly, you know, I don't know if you've ever met a human predator or a sociopath. Imagine you have in some of your studies. Yeah. Yeah. I've never met someone who is actively hunting you. It's a whole different level of realization of survival. And you can negotiate your way but if you've ever been someone who's been in front of someone who's a serial killer who has decided you're their mark

you're probably not going to live to know the difference and you're going to fight back and selfishly i'm sure everybody who's ever been in the presence of a serial killer and in that moment is they might try and negotiate but they're definitely going to fight back if they can. And they're going to do it for a selfish reason. They're not just going to roll over and be like, I'm going to be benevolent today and let you die. I think that reaches the core aspect of who we are when there isn't an abundance or plentiful.

And I think that's our nature really at its, because we're going to fight for survival. I mean, we're built to breed and survive and propagate the species. I don't know. I still think that breaks us down to our bottom. When you have plenty of everything, yeah, everything's negotiable and everyone's friendly. You know, I run companies and the rule is everyone's friendly until the money gets on the table. Then you kind of fight out who you're dealing with. Yep, you do.

Money can be tricky. I have no qualms with that. In some ways, I don't disagree. But again, I do think we have a choice. I think certainly there's there's variability between people and there are there is this small portion of people most of whom are men that seem to you know just fit that category of sociopath and just do things and just don't have that streak of benevolence or that that seed of benevolence in them i don't think defending yourself is

necessarily you know i don't think the benevolent thing to do is just to give up and die. There's self-interest versus selfishness, right? Self-interest is doing things for yourself. Selfishness is doing things at the expense of others for yourself. What do you think separates that, though? Those seem aligned. It's the relationship with other people right so if you go out and try to be productive and you know use natural resources to provide for yourself and your family that is

self-interest but if you go out and steal from the labor of someone else who has already you know gathered resources that then you're taking away from them and that's selfish okay so i would i would draw a distinction between self-interest and selfishness i don't think self-interest is bad obviously we have to you know work hard and provide for ourselves for families we have dependents and so forth but i i'm going to push back and say i don't think most people at their core are evil i do think at our core we're conflicted, but most people, and I don't think you would see societies like you do, you know, we are just the most, in some ways, the most cooperative of species. You wouldn't see that if we didn't have this deep core of benevolence and cooperation and altruism. And it's, you know, it's the way that these interact

that I think is fascinating. But I, you know But I guess I maintain my sense that I think that we are a mix of good and evil. And part of the purpose of life is to overcome our weaknesses and enhance our strengths. And you think that's by intelligent design of some type? Intelligent design is an interesting phrase because there's a whole movement of people who are kind of trying to fight against the basic principles of evolution say you know evolution can't explain this it can't explain that it must be god i i think i'm sympathetic to the the folks in intelligent design they are some of them are very very smart and brilliant i i kind of have a philosophical disagreement that look i i'm a theist, okay?

I believe in a God. I believe that we have a purpose to our existence. There's a lot that we can't explain, but I don't think God works in ways that at some point we're not going to all be able to understand. I think there is a mechanism to this, to the way that we were created, and that natural selection is part of that. Is a lot of the stuff that you espouse in the book, that's our ability to be benevolent and altruistic or have the good and the bad, evil and choices? Is that what you foundation on as to the fact that there might be a higher being? Or what are some other maybe examples you espouse in the book that support that? Help me make sure I understand your question.

Sure. I run a lot of theories, so I'm always evolving in what I think. So basically, I think what I'm asking is what else in your book supports this theory so we can flesh out your book for readers? Yeah. Is the foundation of what you believe in that there's a higher being the fact that we can be good and evil and we can make those free will choices? Or what are some other foundations maybe in the book that you've theorized that support that? Yeah, that's a big part of it, right? So one is this notion that evolution wasn't't random we're not just intricate molecular axes the other is

that we have you know we have this dual potential human nature and when you combine that with with the notion that we have free will life is a test and and it seems like that's one of the purposes of our existence you know another part has to do with relationships. Okay. And, you know, relationships are interesting and important. More and more, we just have overwhelming evidence that the most important factor for happiness, for wellbeing and so forth is relationships. Right. And one of the interests that I have is trying to explain the origins of that. Where does that come from? Why are relationships so important for well-being and happiness and so forth?

And I promise I will try to circle back to your original question. The deepest form of love, of goodness, of altruism has to do with how nature shaped our relationships, mainly with our children. And this has to do with the fact that our offspring are so immature when they are born. Of necessity, parents have had to develop a deep love and concern and care for them to survive. Right. You know, giraffes can walk within a few days of being born. a deep love and concern and care for them to survive, right? So, you know, giraffes can walk within a few days of being born. Foals can gallop, I think, within a few hours. But, you know, some scholars who study infant development, they refer to the first, you know, say six months of life as the fourth trimester because our babies are born half baked, right?

And they depend on us not just for the first year or so, but for, you know, essentially until they're teenagers. And in modern society, they're still kind of, you know, they're still dependent on you as teenagers. There's some that are 30 that are still living at home. The kind of delayed maturation

of teenagers and adults is, there's a relationship there with the internet and social media that we can get into. But, you know, there's a relationship there with the internet and social media that we can get into but you know there's there's just this interesting to me it's very interesting um that the deepest forms of love if you believe that evolution is responsible for human beings deepest forms of love were created by nature in relationship to how we interact with with our children and our family members and you know another interesting aspect of that is, you know, you ask parents, I'm

a parent, you know, what is the most challenging thing you've done? Oh, clearly it's raising kids. What is the most rewarding thing you've done? Oh, you know, raising kids. And those things seem to be inextricably linked, right? Yeah. Because like to drive this point home, try to imagine what our social lives would be like if we were seahorses. OK, so in addition to the fact that seahorses have male pregnancy, which would probably make for some different parental leave policies.

They, you know, they give birth to 2000 seahorses at once, you know, give or take probably a couple hundred. But they give birth all, you know, to all these seahorses at once. And then it's like kind of like, OK, bye, you're off on your own. There's no parental support and you don't know human being knows exactly what it's like to be a seahorse, but I bet it's, it's a good bet that they don't feel deep love and concern for their kids because it's just kind of like, okay, you're off. Good luck. You know, most of you are going to get eaten, but you know,

for those who pass on our genes, I'm proud of you. Obviously, there's a little bit of, I'm taking a little bit of liberty there, but it seems to be this deep connection, this, you know, in the confluence of biology and psychology, this inextricable connection between deep love and compelling sacrifice. Yeah. And you can't really separate those, which to me is, you know, is interesting, you know, to get back to your question, is there more evidence I have, you know, that, that maybe there's more to the existence than we can see and feel. And is there an afterlife and so forth? You know, I can't prove necessarily on a science in the same way that we can prove that, you know,

the COVID vaccines in their first round were safe and effective. I have personal experiences, and a lot of people have personal experiences, that also lead me to go in this direction that I feel like there's more to life than when we die, that we cease to exist. I believe that our family relationships can continue to exist beyond our existence here. And that is where people draw their deepest forms of meaning and reward is in relationships. And I think that we were designed that way. All right. Yeah, I just want to flush out other parts of the book because we kind of got hung up there for a little while on one topic.

And I want to make sure we tease out all the different aspects of your book. Let me offer something because I want to hear your thoughts on it. You're the scientist here. Now, when it comes to relationships, we're built to breed. I mean, whatever you want to believe, it seems like the design of the universe is everybody's got to breed snakes everyone's got to you got to try and propagate the species because if you don't then you know it sends you the way of the dodo and when it comes to our so it's important for us in relationships and our design to have what we have a woman is designed a certain way and a man is designed a certain way to provide and protect. We're giving up our body strength for that mode.

You know, everything goes back to human nature, at least in my mind, to caveman times. You know, you've got the hunter-gatherer sort of mechanism that a lot of us still operate from today. You can point to it everywhere, at least in a biased, I suppose, sense. But when we see our children, and I believe the same chemical things are hit on us, when we see a baby's face, we're hit with dopamine.

And I think serotonin for women or one of the two. And there's a pair bonding effect chemical for women that binds themselves to their children, unless it's broken. That's why you don't wife up the town whore. So there's pair bonding chemicals that go on through that. Yeah, another important one is oxytocin. Oxytocin, yeah, you are correct. That's the other thing.

This is why you're the scientist and I'm not. But I know that those chemicals bind us and give us that attachment and that desire. I mean, if you show any baby face to a woman, no matter how ugly that damn baby is, and I've seen some ugly babies. I've seen my childhood photos. I was a fat, ugly-ass baby, and nothing's changed in 56 years.

But I'll take it for the team. But it doesn't matter. That person will still, you know, and part of it is our penchant to, and you're right, we're really fucking weirdly, I believe, evolved, you would say, designed. But, you know, the fact that we have this giant brain and this giant head that we can't really hold up. And so you're right, we come out as a fourth trimester where a horse, you know, can fairly defend itself or maybe run off.

A baby can't really do that if it's if it's if it's sound offendable and yeah we really have to part of it has to do with the size of our brains i believe oh yeah yep and our heads because we can't hold our head up where most animals i think kind of can you know and at least if they experience danger they could at least run off or have a sense of it i don't think babies can even get a sense of it and you can see that you know there's a there's a famous baby experiment where they took a boy they took a child and this i forget what it's called but that you may you may have i'm sure you've heard of it but they took a baby and the mother you know would be interacting with it and facial features and human are you know the

stuff that goes on metaphysically in our brain or whatever it's called. And then they did an experiment where the mother just goes dead face and doesn't either look at the child or show any emotion or any sort of facial recognition of emotion. And the child starts freaking the hell out, you know, starts losing his mind. It's really amazing to watch. And, you know know we're designed to have those chemical reactions to each other they're very important for those chemicals we talked about in our brain when you say those chemicals i mean might not be there for design maybe they're biologically put there for that purpose to to to propagate the species i i guess i'm saying that yes so i would

say yes they're by design and yes they're by there is a mechanism by which we were created and I think evolution is that mechanism natural selection is that mechanism so I don't think those are I don't think those are two different things

you we were talking a little bit earlier you may not think it was by design it was just biology i think it's biology and yes i think it was design um that their natural mechanism by by which this happened i i'm happy to go through i mean it is also really interesting right this thing this connection between babies can't hold up their heads and and and so forth and this has to do with you know i think what you were starting to go down right is is you know we're designed to to breed you know, I think what you were starting to go down, right, is, you know, we're designed to breed. You know, what is human nature on that?

And, again, I think there's this duality to it, right? We have a capacity to have multiple partners, but there's also a part of us that can lean towards monogamy. And, you know, it's a bit of a mystery. Not a mystery. There are good theories as to how we develop the capacity for monogamy. And, you know, it's a bit of a mystery, not a mystery. There are good theories as to how, how we develop the capacity for monogamy, but you know, it's clear that it's not, it's not only that, right. We all, there's plenty of cases where, you know, human beings, especially men are looking to have multiple, you know, multiple sexual partners, but any, anyway, I'll, I'll stop there and see if you want to drive us in one direction or another. There you go. We want to tease out your book.

We don't want to flush the whole book out for everybody. You got to buy the book, damn it, people, and read this stuff so that you understand what all of it is. But I just want to make sure we teased out all the different principles. I mean, we can go back and forth in these to try and flush them out. But the main thing I want is for people to, you know, know what's in your book and give it a read. Everything's a theory, and I believe everyone should educate themselves on everything. Is there anything you want to tease out? Because we're kind of rounding out the hour.

Is there anything you want to tease out in the book that maybe we haven't talked about? We've gone along on a couple topics, so I want to make sure we tease out whatever we want to tease out to get people to pick up the book. Yeah, going back to the relationships part um the and and the way that you know i mentioned how the deepest forms of love and cooperation and so forth in my view and i i think most behavioral scientists would agree that that those were formed in the way that nature shaped our relationships with our children. And I think there's also this

notion that when we can, because of this, because the root of the best aspects are the better angels of our nature, again, quoting Lincoln, because they have the root in the way that we relate to our children, that as much as we can create communities and societies in which parents and also aunts and uncles and so forth are involved in rearing their children, that people are going to be happier. They're going to find life more meaningful, rewarding, and they're also going to be able to overcome their weaknesses better. There's really interesting biology about how men specifically who have a more tenuous link to their children than women for biological reasons, for a lot of us are obvious, when they are involved in rearing their children,

their testosterone levels go down. They become less aggressive. They become more cooperative. And so trying to help men be involved in rearing their children, I think is going to pay dividends for society. It's also going to help them find more meaning in life. And I think, again, you may disagree, I think that's by design. Fatherhood is really important. That's another part of my book that hopefully people will find interesting and compelling and compelling. Yeah. And father is important too.

And the, I mean, I think most researchers will agree this and the data supports it. You know, a father being in the home is really important too. And in their rearing of a child, the raising of a child. And you know, I,

I, I want to agree on this time, but this is, I mean, you're here to promote your book. I, the, the fact that that father is important but this is, I mean, you're here to promote your book. The fact that

that father is important, you know, I'm a guy who's dated all of his life from 56 and I can tell you the difference between a father being in the home and having a valuable blueprint imprint makes all the difference. And I can quote you all the data of what happens when it's not. In fact, 90, I think 96% of our prisons come from fatherless homes. The data is incomprehensible, indisputable, really, when it comes down to it. And I can tell you from my social research of dating all my life, I can tell you there's a distinct difference in the quality of life. And I'm at the point where now I'm seeing the end result of it. And I can tell you there's a huge difference between dating someone who had a father in the home,

who's a good father, made a good imprint to being a father's home. So, yeah, it's really important in society, I think. I think that, and it doesn't matter, I think we're, so we can go all day. It does matter. It does matter. These are really interesting topics. We could go all day. We want to have another conversation.

And we want people to buy your book and read it. I mean, I believe one thing, but I believe everyone should read all of this stuff because that's how I think both of us got to our theories. And to me, I operate on theory. I may tell you something tomorrow. Maybe I'll tell you I discovered, I don't know, Scientology tomorrow. That's not going to happen, people. But I don't know. You never know.

If I do, please check me into the house. I care. But Samuel, give us your.com so people can find you on the book and the final pitch out to people to order up your book wherever fine books are sold sure my the book web page is samuel t wilkinson dot com the book is about evolution human nature and how in my view it provides a framework that we have a purpose to our existence and how we can find meaning in our lives. There you go. There you go.

And then do we get your dot coms? Samuel T. Wilkinson dot com. There you go. There you go. And thanks for entertaining my banter back and forth. Sure. That's for a lot of context. So there you go.

Folks, order up the book where refined books are sold. And it is called Purpose. What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence. Available March 5th, 2024, wherever fine books are sold. Thanks to Samuel for coming on the show with us. And please come back for your next book, Samuel. We'd love to have you. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschrisfosslinkedin.com, fortuneschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTokity,

and chrisfossfacebook.com. Youortuness, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortuness, Chris Foss, Chris Foss1, the TikTokity, and Chris Foss, Facebook.com. You know, we're all over the place. Just go to wherever that is and tell your friends to do it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys.