The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - David Sloan Wilson: "Chickens, Cooperation and a Pro-social World"

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

On this episode, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson joins Nate to unpack how evolution can be used to explain and understand modern human behavior, particularly with respect to cooperation and pro-social behavior. David is a leading scholar in this field, especially on the resurgence of the concept 'multi-level selection'. How can an evolutionary idea, first thought of by Darwin and subsequently ignored until recently, shed light on human's inherent balance between competition and cooperation? And how might our improved knowledge of where we come from inform our behaviors and collective governance in the decades ahead? About David Sloan Wilson: David Sloan Wilson is one of the foremost evolutionary thinkers and gifted communicators about evolution to the general public. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology Emeritus at Binghamton University and President of the nonprofit organization ProSocial World, whose mission is "To consciously evolve a world that works for all".  His most recent books are This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (with Paul Atkins and Steven C. Hayes), and his first novel, Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III. For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/56-david-sloan-wilson  

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. There are a number of important advances in evolutionary biology in the past few decades. One of these being the resurgence of multi-level selection, or the fact that organisms and humans evolve from selection pressure at multiple scales, not just the abilities, behaviors of the individual organism or human.

Today, I am very pleased to have a conversation with a leading scholar in this field, David Sloan Wilson. David is one of the foremost evolutionary thinkers and gifted communicator about evolution to the general public. David Sloan Wilson is a Sunni distinguished professor of biology and anthropology emeritus at Binghamton University in New York. He's authored several books, including Evolution for Everyone and Darwin's Cathedral. David and I share the belief that when thinking about human behavior, it's critical to consider how evolution has shaped the foundations of everything we do. How can this lens help us better plan and shape our behaviors for a materially smaller future

and how might our improved knowledge of where we came from inform our behaviors and collective governance in the decades ahead? Please welcome Professor David Sloan Wilson. Hello, David. Great to see you. Hello, Nate. Great to be here. You were long a intellectual hero of mine before, well before we ever met. That ages me. That marks me as an old guy. Well, I worked on Wall Street and I quit and went to get my PhD in ecological economics.

And one of my PhD committee members was Charles Goodnight, who has since passed away. but he was a big disciple of yours in the field that we're going to talk a little bit about, which is group selection or the modern term multi-level selection. So I've read many of your papers and books, and I use one of your books for my college students, so thank you for being on the show. Well, thank you so much. And I'm going to find a way to introduce Charles Goodnight to our audience here as we continue our talk.

He was a great friend and colleague. Okay, yeah, I miss him. So you wrote a popular book called Evolution for Everyone, which I use excerpts for that for my college course, Reality 101. You're also a co-founder of the Evolution Institute. So let's start here. Why is evolution important to understand, especially given what global human culture currently faces? So for most people, probably most people listening to this, evolution, I say evolution, they're going to hear genes. they're going to hear biology.

And evolution is best known as this great unifying theory that explains the biological world. And what that leaves out is the human world. Everything that we associate with culture and what it means to be human, including our own personal development. And what's new and what caused me to write evolution for everyone, and that was 2007, I believe, when that came out, is that this powerful theory already proven itself, the biological sciences, actually extends to everything associated with the words human culture and policy. So this is a great expansion that's taking place. And that's why everyone needs to

know about it and why most people don't. Because as far as they're concerned, evolution is still about dinosaurs and genes and human origins. All good. All exciting and interesting. But the real action is evolution in relation to everything going on about us. So we're going to get into that, but a question that I will ask you, because I have no idea what the answer is, why did you decide to be an evolutionary biologist back in the day as opposed to an investment banker or a tech developer or something? Well, Nate, I come from a novelistic background. My dad was a very famous novelist of his day, Sloan Wilson. He wrote the man in the gray flannel suit in a summer place.

And these books helped to define the 1950s. So if I were to become anyone, it would be a novelist. But I just had to escape my father's shadow. And so I became a scientist for that reason. And I loved nature, so I became an ecologist. So at first I thought I was going to be an aquatic ecologist. I was going to study zooplankton. I wasn't interested in evolution per se, but I entered the field at a time

when evolution was proving its explanatory scope within the biological sciences. There's a famous pronouncement by the geneticist Theodosius Objansky, who said in 1973, you can complete the sentence, Nate. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, he said, in an article written for biology teachers. In 1973, I did not know about that article, but I was actually, a graduate student in 1973, and I was living the dream. I was learning, and my courses at that time that the questions I might ask about zooplankton, I could ask about any creature. And it was just this

transcendent theory, not just for myself, but by everyone around us, this was a time when mathematics was coming into the field, so we were beginning to, you could construct models, for example, like optimal foraging theory. How would an organism, assemble a diet to maximize its fitness. And let's test that on any creature, birds, fish, zooplankton, lions. It was a very exciting time to be a biologist. And it was also around that time, I can't remember the exact year, that E.L. Wilson, who you recently wrote, not so recently, 12, 15 years ago, wrote an important paper on, wrote sociobiology back in the early 70s. And it was also, if I recall correctly, when something called naive group selection was

first prominent and then prominently kind of discredited. And you and the late E.O. Wilson resurrected what was originally called group selection in a paper called rethinking the theoretical foundations of sociobiology. So what was the, let's get into it here, because that's from that, we're going to jump off into the implications for society. What was the main conclusion of this paper? How was it received in the scientific community? And most importantly, what are the central findings relevant to our current human predicament? So there's a lot to unpack there. And it'll take me a few minutes, but I think I can be concise. When I look back upon it, I am an old guy. I'm proud of it. And so I can look back over 50 years. And I think that provides a certain advantage.

And one thing that is so interesting is that there's different trends taking place. So I just described one trend, this great unification taking place within the biological sciences. There was also a trend of individualism and reductionism. If you go back a century to the early 20th century into the 19th century, a lot of the thinking was holistic. It was very common to think of human society as like an organism, for example. We can think of figures like Emil Durkheim, or just about any. anybody back then took a whole, the whole field of sociology was predicated on the fact that there's something about human society, which cannot be reduced. But by the middle of the 20th century,

we really did have a feeling that actually everything social can be reduced to individual self-interest. And this manifested itself across the board. It was a tide that lifted all boats. And so this is what economics became neoclassical economics, homo-eco, that we love to hate. This was when the social sciences became methodological individualism. And in my field of evolutionary biology, it became the theory of individual selection and selfish genes, as if everything that evolved has to be explained in terms of individual self-interest. And so the idea that something might evolve for the good of the group, which was a common way of thinking back then, had become seriously.

taboo, along with Lamarckism. If you really wanted to just say something stupid, then you would support Lamarckism or the idea that something can evolve for the good of the group. That was as wrong as you could possibly be. And so that became my sort of cause-celebra to resurrect the evolution of altruism, group selection, the basic concept that groups, natural selection, place at the group level. That idea begins with Darwin. We can talk about that history. And my article with Ed in 2007, my first paper was in 2007, was in 1975. And that was my first encounter with Ed Wilson. I was a grad student, and I came up with this little model that seemed to show that group selection worked. I understood its significance immediately. And so I wrote the great E.O. Wilson

from Harvard University. And I said, Professor Wilson, I must have. talk to you. And so he sponsored that paper. I guess I was pretty bold at the time. I was also bold and emailed him like 15, 20 years ago, and he never replied to me, but go on. Well, he was actually, he could have. He was a very gracious. He was a very gracious man. And when he, when he passed two years ago now, I actually wrote quite a lengthy remembrance titled the, I think the sixth legacies of E.O. Wilson, which is available. we could provide that in the show notes. I have all his books, and there are many.

Yeah, yeah, he was a giant figure, and he was never hostile to group selection. He was always giving it the best spin that he could, but along with many others, he was part of this trend, which was basically it was emphasizing kin selection, W.D. Hamilton, you're familiar with this history. and then when he converted, you might say, and he really embraced multi-level selection as a general framework for this, that's when we teamed up and we wrote an article titled Rethinking

The Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology, 2007, now is 2022. And we can say, and I'm not claiming credit for this, because I think that as individualism swept in, it's sweeping out as a tide that lifts all boats, And why is it sweeping out? It's in part because of the advent of complex systems thinking.

And the reason that that was recent was, of course, it required widespread computing. And so we didn't really have the analytic tools to think about complex systems until the advent of widespread computing. And that marks it within the last 50 years. You know, I mean, the Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984. So something I always like to impress in podcasts like this is that what's been taking place over the last 50 years is not just 10% of the scientific revolution.

There's something about the last 50 years, which is really, should be quite transformative in how we think and therefore how we act. And complex system science is half of it. And then generalized Darwinism. Darwinism generalized beyond by. biology is the other half. And if we have both of those together, then we have a new way of thinking which can alter, transform how we act. So let's unpack this for those listeners, not familiar with this 50 years of intellectual progress on this topic. So Darwin himself actually gave hints

that he was a group selectionist, that things happened at different levels, yes? Absolutely. What Darwin discovered, and it was actually gradual is that his great theory of natural selection, which seemed to explain everything that had been attributed to a designer, actually left out an important category of behavior, namely, anything that's prosocial, anything that involves benefiting others or one's group as a whole, places the pro-social individual at a disadvantage, at a relative disadvantage compared to the more selfish individual. And so there's something about prosociality inherently, which is disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense of the word. He could not explain prosocial

behaviors until he added something, and that something is not hard to understand. It's that selection operates not just among individuals within a social group. It also operates among social groups in a multi-group population. So selfishness beats altruism within groups. That's the disadvantage. But altruistic groups beat selfish groups. That's the advantage. And that was the final line of my article with Ed Wilson

and the best meme that I ever wrote. But it's that simple that natural selection operates at multiple levels. And in a minute, Nate, I'm going to describe one of Charles Goodnights experiments as an illustration of that. Okay. Let me just summarize this that we can think backward of our ancestors on the Pleistocene a couple hundred thousand years, 50,000 years. And within groups, there was competition for status, even though the resource surplus was

we didn't carry things with us. So it was respect and other things that gave status. But at the same time, those tribes that were cooperative and cohesive against a common threat, be it a predator or another tribe or something like that, they out competed. And maybe they were the only ones that survived some calamities or something. So we have within us hardwired or we come with prepared learning both to be competitive and cooperative depending on the environmental circumstances. Yeah, and to that I would add the very important element of social control. All of this is easy to

understand and easy to relate to our common life. We all know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, that when some individuals have power over others, then they're going to likely to use it to benefit themselves at the expense of others, and even at the expense of themselves over the long term. One of the stark lessons of evolution is that everything is relative. It doesn't matter how well you survive or reproduce in absolute terms, only that you do so better than others in your neighborhood, in your vicinity. And so this leads to spiteful behaviors. And I'll actually act to my own detriment as long as you suffer even more. And that's where arms races comes in and the like. And so there's the vulnerability which exists. And everyone has experience

with it, is that if you're trusting and you extend yourself to, other people, you're vulnerable, you can be taken advantage of. And so one thing that's essential in order to prevent these abuses of power is social control, basically the ability to control bullies and all other forms of self-serving behavior. So that's what evolved in our species compared to our ancestors. So in chimps societies, the bullies get their way. But isn't there example of, isn't there examples of that behavior in non-human primates? Like a guerrillas, if a subordinate male sneaks up on a silverback and does something to him and then he gets pummeled, no one will come to his aid. But if the dominant gorilla for no reason whatsoever beats up a subordinate male,

others will join together and push back and defend. So this, this reciprocity is also, in other species? It is another species. So it's not just unique to humans, but what you do find in, let's say, chimpanzees, to a lesser extent, in bonobos, you find a little bit of cooperation and a lot of competition within groups. Males, for example, are just obsessed with obtaining alpha status within the trip. Even when cooperation occurs, it's in the form of coalitions that compete against other coalitions. And what happened in humans is basically a much greater capacity for members of a group to collectively suppress self-serving individuals. And it could have been the ability to throw stones. I mean, there's specific theories about this, but one of the theories

is that we moved out in the Savannah. We evolved the ability to throw projectiles to chase away predators and scavengers and things like that. But then we could stone each other, basically. It wasn't possible so much for the strongest male to intimidate the other males as one of the specific hypotheses. So stoning, stoning as an adaptation. So I'll cue you up in a moment about the Charles Goodnight story. But if you think about it, we're 300,000 years as a species. let's just ballpark say 20 years a generation. That's 15,000 generations we have been Homo sapiens. And most of that time was on the Pleistocene in Africa, in small bands.

And can you outline for us the importance for most of our existence as a species of reciprocity and strong reciprocity in those small bands? and we still have those impulses today, and you see it in social media and people's response to world events. Can you speak to that a bit? So I think what you're queuing me up for is to emphasize the small group as a fundamental unit of human social behavior, which is true. Although we have to back away from that a little bit. It's very interesting and super interesting, actually. One thing is a tribal scale, and so small groups typically were members of tribes that spoke

the same language. There was a lot of interchange among those groups, you know, and so we have a tribal scale. And then a book titled The Dawn of Everything is establishing that human society became large scale before agriculture. That's amazing. Typically, we think small groups, agriculture, large groups, now it turns out that thanks in part to forms of habitat modification that didn't involve domesticating varieties of plants and animals, so it wasn't agriculture in that sense, but it was wide-scale modification of the environment. Human populations built up, and then you had cities and you had monumental architecture, and the societies that formed on that were not necessarily hierarchical, because part of the

received narrative is that we had egalitarian small-scale societies, and then with agriculture, we had more hierarchical societies. But some of these societies and these expansions, according to the dawn of everything, and I think according to much evidence, they actually remained egalitarian. They increased in scale, and they remained egalitarian.

And, of course, we see that today. If we fast forward to the present, and we look at books such as Why Nations Fail by Asam Aglo and Robinson, we find that nations span the range from despotic to inclusive, and the inclusive societies work the best as societies. And so society can be large, cooperative, and inclusive. They exist today, and they existed back then.

We could extend that further back into the past that we have thought. So there's quite a lot taking place in archaeology that's still consistent with the general theory. But important details are changing. The open question, of course, and maybe we'll get to this later, is can we have an open, diverse, and inclusive society of $8 billion? Yeah, and that's what we need to work towards. Nice to know and important meaning here. We're packing a lot into a short space here.

There's no alternative to that. But the principles are scale independent, and that's so important. The same principles that are needed to govern a small group are what's also needed. needed to govern the proverbial global village. And so if you look at the dynamics of small groups and what causes them to function well, and we will get to Eleanor Ostrom's core design principles, what you find is what's needed for cooperation at a small scale is inherently inclusive and equitable. That's baked in to the cultural DNA of cooperation. And it also is needed just as much at a larger scale.

So it's central. Now, how we can accomplish it and whether it can actually be accomplished, that's another matter. But it's a very important thing to be able to say that it's needed and it's what we must work for. It provides a powerful theoretical justification

for what many of us who are progressives and inclined towards that already think. But it provides a scientific foundation for it that we didn't have before. If we were all leopards, or Jaguars and there were 8 billion of us, there would be no chance of that. But because the human genome is a product of, as you point out, multi-level selection and this reciprocity and sharing

and small group dynamics that we were in the crucible of where we came from make us very social. And so this is a possibility. Well, something, one thing we need to get on the table, Nate, is our capacity for culture. And the main point to make there is that culture is a form of cooperation. You cannot maintain cooperative relations, especially you cannot maintain an inventory of symbols with shared meaning and pass them down the generations without living in a cooperative society. And so cooperation came first. First, we became a highly cooperative species, and then we became a cultural species, especially with a capacity for symbolic thought, which is either highly distinctive or unique among all the

other species. There's a long history of claiming human uniqueness for this and that, and most of them have failed. But the capacity for symbolic thought is very distinctive. I don't want it to be unique. Actually, I'd love to find it in other species. If it is found in other species, those species will also be highly cooperative. But once we had symbolic meaning systems, they truly became a cultural DNA. This is called dual inheritance theory. And what it means, two streams of inheritance in our species, the genetic stream that exists for all species. And then this cultural stream, and to think of our meaning systems, everything inside our heads as the cultural equivalent of our genes is very powerful in just the current front, basically, of scientific research. What does it

mean for everything inside our heads to be the cultural equivalent of our genes? So I haven't said this phrase in probably 10 or 15 years, but when I was getting my PhD, there was a lot of debate on nature versus nurture. And I don't know where that is in the academic debates today, but is it pretty settled of what you just said that, you know, there's no, there's no nature without nurture and vice versa. Is that like totally understood now? Or do we still kind of have the standard social science model of the 80s and 90s?

that blank slate and all that. Yes, a few minutes, discourse on that. These are huge topics that we're packing into a few minutes. I'm just curious. Give me a two-minute summary there. Yeah, give me the bottom line. I mean, the stock answer to nature versus nurture is both

and it's integrated and so on. But the two things to be said, and you alluded to the standard social science model, so let me go back there to the birth of evolutionary psychology is a very brash new science, and its thesis of massive modularity. And so, these names associated with this are Lita Cosmites and John Tooby, Steve Pinker. And the idea there was that by general intelligence is impossible.

And instead, what we have, we have many, many special purpose adaptations to solve the problems of life in the Pleistocene. So think of it as a jukebox, think of it as a Swiss Army knife. we have all these special purpose adaptations that get triggered, that evolved by genetic evolution and get triggered by the environment. So that was evolutionary psychology back then. And it was set in contrast to what you use the term, standard social science model. That was BF Skinner, that was cultural.

That was Margaret Mead. That was Clifford Geertz. That was just like, you know, anything goes. Culture is going to evolve in any direction. And what has become of that? I hated that back then, by the way, and I feel a bit vindicated because what's happened now? And the best way to do it, just stick with me here, Nick, is by analogy to the immune system. So if we look at the immune system, we see that it's divided into two components.

It's called the innate component and the adaptive component. The innate component, richly modular, evolved by genetic evolution, does not change during your lifetime as a species. this amazing, amazing collection of adaptations to fight diseases. That looks a lot like evolutionary psychology in its early days. Then there's the adaptive component, the rapid variation in selection of antibodies. So it's an evolutionary process taking place during the lifetime of an individual. That looks a lot like behaviorism. That looks a lot like the standard social science model.

And so what was wrong about back then was that evolutionary psychological, psychology, said itself as the theory of psychology, and the standard social science model was just plain wrong. Let's think of it more as like the innate and the adaptive component of the immune system. And so if you look at current authors, such as Joe Henwick, is my favorite example, one of my most respected colleagues at Harvard University. And if you look at his books of the secret of our success and the weirdest people in the world, what you find is, child development takes place in this cultural matrix. I mean, we are basically, we evolved by genetic evolution to soak up cultural traits,

and we have very sophisticated algorithms for doing that. And the result of that is pretty darn close to the black slate. I mean, that's what's so incredible. And if you look at such things as brain plasticity, neuroplasticity, it's huge. It's absolutely huge. And so the idea that there's no general purpose adaptation, it's just wrong. I mean, it's deeply wrong.

But with the immune system analogy, we can't have both. And so at the end of the day, what BF Skinner called selection by consequences that in so many different walks of life, stuff varies. Those differences make a difference. And there's some replication processes. So something like genetic evolution takes place.

with multi-generational cultural evolution, and with our capacity to change as individual. Selection by consequences is all around us. And the mechanisms behind that do not prevent it. They enable it. So I've stepped into a trap here, David. My intent to have you on the podcast was to talk about the evolution of cooperation and why multi-level selection, your main work and what you're working on now to help our current human situation. But the curious ape inside of me remembers all the evolution books I've ever read. And now

here I'm talking to you live. And so I'm jumping the gun here and asking you questions that I'm interested in that may not be interesting as much or relevant to the audience listening to this show. So let's get back on track. But before I forget, you wanted to bring up Charles Goodnight. Yeah, such a great experiment. What he did, he studied flower beetles. These are beetles that live on flower, and so therefore you can culture them in little tiny vials, so each viald can be a group. But in his case, there were communities of two species of flower beetles. So there were two species of flower beetles in each of these little vials. And he selected them in a number of ways, but one of the ways was he selected them for the density of one of the species. So just, you know,

go figure, you have all of these vials, each has two species, and then you score them to the density of one of the species, species A. And then you select those vials and you use the whole community in those vials to breed the next generation of community. So one question is, do you get a response to selection over time, over generations of communities, do these communities actually produce more and more and more of the species that's selected? The answer to that is yes. So there was a response to community level selection. And then you go in and you look at the underlying mechanisms. And you study that. And what he showed is that genes evolved in both species that interacted with each other to increase the density of species A. That means genes evolved

in species B to decrease its density or to increase the density of species A and they interacted with each other. The fact that you selected at the level of the whole community turn the species into chromosomes, into chromosomes. I mean, it wouldn't surprise us if you studied some individual level trait, and you show that that was caused by genes and different chromosomes that were interacting with each other. And so the unit of selection, the community unit of selection, turned the species into chromosomes.

There's a wonderful example of how a community can become like an organism. So I remember those little vials with the, flower and the Beatles in his office. And that brings to mind another esoteric question, but I think it's relevant. So your work showed that humans are a product of both competition within a group and cooperation within a group versus external groups. But there's other potential levels, right? There might be some bacteria or microorganisms in our body that are helping dictate our behavior

at some scale. Or like you just said, we might be influencing another. species outside of our body and then that they are in so there's I mean how many levels are there possible within multi-level selection there is many levels and many contexts and I think Charles's experiments that I just described it anticipated preceded and anticipated microbiome research so I'm always emphasizing the recency of all of this the word microbiome I believe was coined in 2000 22 years ago but what

means is that as individuals survive and reproduce, it's not just their genes that are doing that, their microbiomes are too. And so actually, what we used to think of as individual level selection is individual slash microbiome level selection. And your microbiome includes thousands of species in numbers that are comparable to the number of cells in your body. Go figure. And they've been Are that the same in your microbiome as mine, those thousands of species, or are they different? Well, they would overlap, largely overlap. If we were part of the same community, then we'd be, say, the same family. We'd be swapping our microbiomes a lot.

But because they're complex systems, then every individual would also be different. There's a complexity piece here. But again, we're picking and choosing our conversation here, Dave. We don't want to do a... Well, there are no rules here, David. Let me segue into global cooperation and Eleanor Ostrom, but let me tell you another story that I learned from Charles. He told this story, which then I use on my students, about Michael Wade's research about the chickens. I think it was Tyson Foods or some chicken company hired Professor Wade.

And what they did is they tried to get the best egg layers. Oh, no, you stop. I got to stop you here. We got the facts They're turning into an urban legend here So I'll have to... You tell the story. The person is a colleague of us

named William Muir And he is an animal breeder At Purdue University And he indeed was trying to breed A strain of hand A productive egg laying strain of hands So you got it all right Except it wasn't Michael Wade

It was Bill Okay, got it. Bill Muir. And animal breeding, animal breeding is a very sophisticated field. And so chickens live in groups, they always have, and there were two experiments. In experiment one, you choose the most productive hand in each group to breed the next generation of hens. And in experiment two, you choose all of the hands within the most productive groups to breed the next generation of hens. And so it is within group selection, the first experiment, and between group selection, the second experiment. So it ends up being a multi-level selection experiment, although most people didn't think of it that way.

Here's a really important point that I think everyone can appreciate. Individualism encourages us to think that the properties of an individual are just the properties of an individual. If you're a good egg layer, it's because you're a good individual egg layer. Or if you're a top performer in a company, it's just because you're an amazing individual. As it turns out, in the experiment, the best egg layer within each group was the biggest. bully within each group. It was social, and so by breeding the biggest bullies, then in five generations, you had a nation of psychopaths, and they were killing each other and plucking each other's feathers. There was a nightmare. So there was still a good egg layer, but the other chickens didn't

produce much at all because they were all pecked and subordinated. Yeah, there probably was variation in just your ability as an egg layer, but it was completely overwhelmed by this social factor. And the second experiment, you're selecting the groups that did along. And that's also heritable. And so in five generations, you selected for, you had 160% increase in egg productivity because the chickens weren't messing with each, messing with each other. So the reason I bring up that story, and I had the author of it wrong, but that segues into your view of our economic system right now. Are there parallels? Of course there are. So I think what it means is that when we generalize Darwinism, we go beyond genetic evolution. And you imagine setting up a human social environment that's like the first chicken experiment, the rewards the best performer, you end up selecting for the biggest bullies. And one of the first times I used that experiment in a lecture, a professor came up to me, rushing up to me.

after my lecture. That first chicken experiment describes my department. I haven't names for those chickens. And in the business world, they have what's known as Ranking Yank, forced distribution ranking. You take your employees,

you rank them according to their performance on a belt-shaped curve. You treat the top performers as like gold nuggets. We want to keep them. You teach the bottom performers as duds. Let's get rid of them. And let's repeat that again and again and again. And we'll all have superstars that our company will work great, won't it? And what happens, of course, is a version of the first

chicken experiment. And by the way, there's a podcast, a National Geographic podcast, has elaborated on the chicken experiment. It's called The Problem with Super chickens. Put it in your liner notes. It's a beautiful production of the chicken experiment and relates it to these cultural contexts. watch out for the first chicken experiment. It's all around us. It's competition in the wrong places. So competition is fine. It's needed, but it has to be in the right places. And if it's in the wrong places, you get the first chicken experiment. Genetic evolution hasn't taken place, but selection by consequences has. And so that's what generalized Darwinism is all about, is that this logic of selection of practices based on the social environment, it happens culturally, it happens in

terms of individually, with the strategies that we employed, we're all capable of being cooperative chickens. Either the mean chickens or the cooperative chickens, and some more than others. But we all have the capacity to choose plan A or plan B. And if you put us into the first chicken experiment so that actually the only thing succeeds is to be a bully, either we'll just pull into our shell or will more actively become so much depends on our social, the environments that we construct. And we're so heedless of it that that's why this information is just priceless for constructing our social environments. There's so

much good that can take place just by seeing this the right way. I agree, which is why I invited you to have this conversation. So let's get into it here, David. The late Eleanor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner in her core design principles showed that some groups were able to manage tragedy the commons scenarios. She outlined what the key factors were that groups needed in order to manage them. And you've pointed out that these key factors that Eleanor Ostrom pointed out directly map onto multi-level selection. Can you unpack this and why it's important relevant to our current global circumstances?

Right. So Lynn Ostrom studied a certain kind of group, groups that are attempting to manage common pool resources. And in that context, cheating being the mean chicken, takes the form of taking more than your share. Thus the famous tragedy of the commons. And received wisdom was that cheating would always succeed. And so the tragedy would always occur. And either you needed to privatize the resource. So this is the main economic justification for privatization. Or you needed to regulate. it top down. And what Ostrom shown by compiling a worldwide database of common pool resource groups was that some, not all, very important. They varied in their ability to avoid the tragedy of the commons, but some did, and they employed certain core design principles, which is what her main contribution that earned her the Nobel Prize. So some groups were able to self-manage their resources and prevent this particular form of disruptive behavior of taking more than your share. And what we did together, I'm so lucky I got to collaborate with Ed Wilson and with Linostrom and with other amazing people, was to generalize that and to show that these core design principles

are needed basically by all groups. You could think of cooperation as itself, a common full of resource vulnerable to exploitation. And so I'll rattle off the core design principles. When I do this, I always ask my listeners to, wait before I get started, think of a group that you know well. And then think about whether these core design principles apply to your group. Your group that they're thinking of might work well or poorly. Just think about your group, how well it works, and whether these core design principles might have something to do with it. So here they go. Number one, strong sense of identity and purpose. The group must know that it's a group. It must be an important group. Must know who's in it. Who's a member? What's its boundaries? So a strong sense of what the group

is and its identity and purpose. Number two, benefits proportional to cost. If some members of the group are getting the benefits and others are doing the work, that's the first ticket experiment. So there must be some sense in which what you get from the group is proportional to what you give to the group. Number three, decision-making, fair and inclusive, but not sustainable for some members to make the decisions and for other people to be left out of that process. Number one, a recipe for unfairness. Number two, not making use of everyone's wisdom. Four, monitoring agreed-upon behavior. We need to know whether we're doing what we agreed upon to do. If we don't, all that's off. Number five, appropriately responding to helpful and unhelpful behavior. If you're not doing what you should,

that has to be corrected, but we don't have to be mean about it. Hey, brother, friendly reminder is enough most of the time, but it must be possible to escalate in cases where friendly reminders are not enough. And while we're correcting unhelpful behaviors, let's praise helpful behaviors, basically, abundant praise for good behavior, coupled with mild punishment for bad behavior. And that escalates when necessary. There's a whole little interlocking piece there. Number six, fast and fair conflict resolution. Conflicts will occur and they need to be resolved quickly and in a manner thus regarded as fair by all parties. In a dispute, most people think they have a point of view. Number seven, local autonomy. A group has to have elbow room in order to manage

its own affairs. If it's being bossed around from above, all bets are off. And finally, number eight, appropriate relations with other groups, which embody the same core design principles. So this illustrates the scale independence of the core design principles, needed to govern relations among groups, in addition to relations within groups. So there is the eight core design principles. As you were speaking, I was thinking about the groups in my life. And other than perhaps my girlfriend and our dogs, I couldn't think of any group that I'm involved in that hits all those, not remotely.

Well, when we do this with groups, we ask three questions. We introduce each principle in turn, and our three questions are, do you understand this? And everyone says, you know, of course, they're not hard to understand.

Do you think they might be important for your group? Yeah, I think so. And number three, how well does your group implement this core design principle? It's just like, oh, my God. easy to understand important and somehow somehow we missed it

so additionally I mean and you've done a lot of work on this but in one paper or research you showed that on average business groups in global businesses were deficient in all of these eight categories

meaning that people feel a lack of control and a meeting in your job so how does this contrast to the current cultural stories saying that businesses are the most efficient, best way to run in our country and such. What have you learned in that sphere? So this brings us back to our meaning systems as the cultural equivalent of our genes. How we act depends on how we think. And the idea that capitalism is great, laissez-faire is great, government can't do anything good, business sector does everything best,

this is all a big narrative, which seems to be authorized by the neoclassical economics. But if that's what's inside your head, then that will completely structure the way you think and what you do. And it's largely for that reason that business groups, because they're heavily influenced by that way of thinking, the so-called shareholder value model, Milton Piedman, all of that has been the distorting influence. So that's the short answer to that question. And as soon as you begin to adopt this other way of thinking, then these just reorienting what seems to make sense. But I want to emphasize that it's only an average difference for business groups.

So business groups, I mean, also there's a bell-shaped curve for business groups. It's displaced downward. The average is different. But you can find in the business world spectacular examples of businesses that work well because they implement the core design. principles. So there's wonderful, positive examples in the business world, and there's movements. Do you have one off the top of your mind? Well, lots. There's, of course, B-Corp is one such business movement. There's also the conscious capitalism movement associated with the Raj Sassodia,

who's written books such as firms of endearment and conscious capitalism. And one of the books, I'll give two examples. One in a book titled, Everybody, Everyone Matters, is a manufacturing manufacturing company called Barry Waymuller. You have no reason to know about it. But their CEO, Bob Chapman, mostly because he's a good Christian, by the way, and Christian values, if you really practice them, are very, they definitely implement the core design principles. And so, and so he truly built his company around and everyone matters principles, just down to the bone. I mean, amazing to read about it. Well, that's a single case. But what's amazing about that book is that Barry why Mueller began to acquire other companies, struggling companies. They don't use the word acquire.

They use the word adopt, which kind of tells you their mentality. And turns them around, not by firing people. I mean, so often, look at Elon Musk. I mean, for Christ's sake, I mean, there's your case pathological study. You buy Twitter and then you fire three quarters of its employees, and then it goes on from there. There will be perhaps fewer eggs produced in coming years. Well, in the case of Bob Chapman, acquiring these companies, not firing anybody and changing their culture, and do you know he's done it 120 times? And so something is working here. It's been replicated that we need to understand.

And we need to provide it with a solid theoretical foundation. So I'm now, I've recently started to interact with Raj Sassotiah, the author of these articles, and Bob Chapman and others, so that we can really add a strong theoretical foundation to these wonderful examples that exist in the world. But now we can understand them better by providing them with this strong theoretical framework. So that's what's coming up. That's what's coming up in the near future. going to take a further sidetrack here and just ask you a personal question. You are very erudite

an emeritus professor. You've written lots of books and lots of papers. But now you're engaging with your Evolution Institute and like you just said, you're interacting with these other people in order to affect a positive change. How much time did you used to spend and how much time do you spend now reading books and papers in the literature. I'm just curious because it doesn't seem like there's enough hours in the day to do everything on these issues. Well, it was in 2006 about that, well, let me just spin this out a little bit more. So at first I was just a professor and I was working with non-human organisms. But I did become part of this movement of going beyond. the biological sciences to the studying all things human. And that just basically energized me.

It was at that point that I wanted to teach much more than I did before. Before I was like so many professors, I preferred to do my research. But now I just wanted to reach people with this message that this theory was so important for all things human. And so it's at that point that I started to teach evolution for everyone. I was teaching. an upper level course before. And I said, no, I want to teach for non-majors, lower level, of course. Few professors do that, but I was really moved to do that. That was the basis of my book that you've used evolution for everyone. And I wanted to teach evolution across the curriculum. And so I started the first program for teaching evolution across the curriculum. And then right

away, I wanted to take it outside the ivory tower. And for altruism and prosociality, for heaven's sakes, of course I want to study it in the real world. And so I started to work with my school system. I did beautiful work there studying and in my city. And that became the basis of my book, The Neighborhood Project. I had an opportunity to form a think tank, the Evolution Institute. And I managed to do both and still managed to do both. So I'm still writing academic publications. And they reinforce each other. That's the most important point to make, is that they reinforce each other. You can do just spectacular basic scientific research and improving life in the real world. They go better together than apart, is the way I would put it. Are you still learning

about evolution and human behavior? Of course. I mean, there's so much to learn. It's all early days, totally early days. And I think that the, and so many fronts to move along. Yeah, it's very early days. So, I mean, historians are going to look back and they're going to say, the 20, First century was a period of synthesis for all things human from an evolutionary perspective. It was amazing, just the way the 20th century was amazing for the biological sciences. And we're, you know, we're a fifth through the 21st century. So it's a very exciting time to be present. No doubt about that.

Okay. So getting back to the core of this, David, in your writing, can you define what is a tight society versus a loose society? and segue from that into what type of governing system might be best for our current situation, is democracy compatible with it? Well, the tight, loose distinction brings in a wonderful colleague named Michelle Galvan. I'll get to her in a minute. But before then, what's important to grasp is that a human cultural diversity is like biological diversity. There's the bushy tree of biological life, and there's the bushy tree of cultural

life. There's so many different cultures out there and that we can understand their diversity in the same way that we understand biological diversity. And when we do that, sometimes we can construct sort of axes, environmental axes. And one of those axes is existential security. Some cultures have a great need for collective action. It might be warfare, it might be disease pandemics, or it might be intensive forms of agriculture. So rice agriculture, for example, calls for much more coordination than wheat farming for examples. And so cultures that have evolved to be really good at collective action are called tight cultures. And what that means is they have very strong norms, what you should do as a member of that culture, which are enforced.

And so if you don't do them, then there are consequences. So that's what a tight culture is. A loose culture is better adapted to a safe and secure environment. There, we don't have to do everything in lockstep. We can relax a little bit. We can follow our own dramas. And actually, that could be good because that's innovative. That's experimental and innovative.

And so tight and loose cultures exist based on their pass. And then that, at all scales, by the way. So you could look at this at the national scale. You can shrink down, and you could look at it for the 50 states in the United States. You could look at China. You could compare rice-growing regions of China and wheat-growing regions of China. And when something like a pandemic hits with COVID, it's a natural experiment. And you can ask, as Michel Gelfin did, how did tight and loose cultures respond?

You know, what were the consequences? At this point, tightness was needed by everyone. everyone needed to coordinate their behavior. But there was, her research shows, a, I believe, a seven-fold difference in deaths between loose and tight cultures. And, of course, United States is a loose culture on hold. So the United States was not a good track record, of course,

as we know, in responding to the pandemic. I wonder how much being a tighter, loose culture, correlates with energy surplus, that super wealthy countries that energy is too cheap to meter might naturally default to being more loose. Just a question. Well, she will tell you,

so there's quite a lot of variation among which Western nations, Germany is a tight culture, Norway is a trite culture, Italy is a loose culture. I mean, we're ignoring a lot of heterogeneity. If you look within Italy, books such as Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work, you know that there's

a lot of variation within Italy and also as context dependent. So any culture can be tight in some context and loose and others. Airport security is tight no matter what your culture is. When you go through an airport security, you're having a tight moment. So from a cultural perspective

is tight versus loose, kind of like multi-level selection, that both are necessary or helpful or relevant at different times and at different scales? I mean, it's not exactly. I mean, tightness and looseness can be adaptive at the group level, depending on the circumstances. And loose cultures, perhaps there's more opportunity for cheating and so on.

So that maps in kind of a complicated fashion. But the tight society would have more of your, what was the acronym that you used, the CDPs, core design principles? Again, I would want to say that they just implement them in different ways. In loose societies, for example, there's really strong norms for inclusion. You know, if you're a racist in a loose society, watch out. So it's in that sense that I think that, and here's where Michelle and I have a high-level conversation as to whether you can actually type a society as tight or loose, or whether

all societies are sufficiently contextual so that they're tied in some respects and loose in others. What's really needed in all cases, I mean, we have this concept, called mismatch, that we haven't used the word yet, but basically evolutionary mismatch is when your existing system is adapted to some other environment, but not the present environment. And mismatch can occur for cultures in addition to species. And in today's world, mismatches is everywhere. Thanks to the Anthropocene, we've made, created mismatches for most of the species on Earth. And there's no culture really on Earth. It's

well adapted to its current environment. We really need to perfect methods of rapid conscious cultural evolution in order to keep up with that. And if we don't, then evolution still takes place, but it results in pathologies and not in solution. How can we affect rapid cultural evolution that doesn't result in pathologies? Well, thanks to scale independence, we could first answer that at a small scale. So just imagine now those groups that you were imagining, which are not working as well as they could, and then imagine some process whereby we might, first of all, think about the KordaZan principles, implement them better, but more so increase our flexibility. And there's a whole piece of this having to do with whether or not you're adaptable or flexible,

which brings in therapeutic methods at the small scale, mindfulness-based therapies, which are all about becoming adaptable and very successful. I mean, the way people think about therapy or training is variable. Often we think that it's, you know, it's woo-woo or not well-documented or that it takes a long time or something like that. But the fact is, is that there's proven methods, you might say, for aligning our ability to change with our valued goals. And what we've done in our practical method is we have two pillars. One is the core design principles, which we've discussed, but then the other pillar are based on these adaptability methods, which have been developed primarily at the individual level, think therapy or training, but can also be applied to the group level.

And the combination of both of them can cause a group to adapt to its environment, conscious evolution. And then that can be scaled up. Can you give some examples of what some of the hands-on things that you might do? You mentioned meditation. Is that a core one? Well, the process, which is, I don't want to make it sound simpler than it is, although there's wonderful examples of this acting quickly. Again, if you think about the comparison between, think of our meaning systems as like our genes, think of what gene therapy is. So with gene therapy, you make a genetic change and you expect a phenotypic change, a change in who you are, just as soon as you make the genetic change. So the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype,

to use a bit of jargon, doesn't take a long time after you change the genes for your phenotype. So now think of your, the way you think as like your genes, and we change the way you think. Well, why shouldn't that change the way you act right away? Why should that take a long time? And so in a very quick exercise, you can basically, you can examine your values. You could think about how you would act on the basis of those values. There's your target of selection. You can think about what's inside your head that's taking you away from that, how they cause you to act counterproductively,

and then you can see the world through that lens. And then as things happen, you can locate them. You can say, that's a toward move, that's in a way move, and there's an obstacle I need to get around and so on and so forth. then you could actually, by seeing things that way and aligning your efforts at improvements, you could actually succeed at that goal, and there's many studies to demonstrate it. Are you doing this in real time with people and communities around the world? Are you working on that now?

Yeah, that's what we're doing. And my new organization, spinoff from the Evolution Institute is prosocial world. That's what we do. And so get in touch. And how's it going? Going great, Nate. I mean, it's more complicated than that. Change can often be difficult, but for the most part, there's just tremendous energy around this. And there I would invite our listeners basically to learn a little bit more. And then so we could provide them with some links and then we could engage our listeners. Well, we will have copious notes and links in the show notes that Lizzie will provide. Let me ask you something. So I don't know if you've read my academic paper on the superorganism or know much about my work, but I pretend that we have energy, finance, disconnect, and we're headed towards what I refer to as the great simplification, and we're going to have to live differently with a less material intensive footprint.

And so I'm describing that, and that's our current situation. And then I have a vision for the future where we have more local and regional communities because energy is going to be too costly to have this level of globalization and consumption. And there's different infrastructure and all that. But the middle piece, I am increasingly confident there is not going to be a top down solution that gets us there. We're going to have to meet the future halfway. And a big component of that is inner development.

and maybe it really aligned with the changing your values and changing your meaning and that has the shift. But you said that a genotype can quickly change the phenotype if we change how we think and our values and meaning. And we do that at scale, that then that allows our culture to have a softer landing in these events of coming decades. What do you think about all that? Well, I think we need to talk more. Based on what you said, there is. 95% agreement. And so definitely the glasses have full there, mostly full. I have looked at that particular paper that you read. And I think we might have some terminological quibbles about

what we mean by superorganism. But that's a detail. That's a true detail. I think most of what you said, I think, is exactly driving in the same direction as I would. First, we have to emphasize the global. The target of selection must be the global good, but we also be local. Top down, absolutely not. So I talk about bottom-up meets enlightened top-down. Oh, that reminds me. The other example which illustrates this, and I wanted to add in addition to the Bob Chapman example, is, Derekly, Microsoft, under the leadership of its third CEO, Sachin Adela. And so, So the first CEO, Bill Gates, hard driving, competitive, wanting to corner the market. Second CEO, Steve Ballmer, even more hard driving.

And while he, during his tenure, a humorous orc chart appeared on the Internet that showed kind of a hierarchical pyramid for Microsoft. And at every node, there were these little hands with revolvers pointing at each other, which was illustrating basically competition up and down the line, up and down the line. Nothing so nuanced as multi-level selection. But the new CEO is different based on his personal history. He's much more empathic, much more global

than what he thinks Microsoft should be doing. Basically, Microsoft should earn its reputation as a provider of solutions on a worldwide basis and should be cooperating with some of the agents with whom it was competing before. and thanks to that attitude change, what was in his head, the way he saw the world, and his position, which was a top-down position, okay, but it could become enlightened top-down. And at that point, what you want to do is you want to implement something which removes power from you.

And so enlightened top-down should actually self-destruct in a sense by creating a framework in which there's enough bottom-up control. so that you can control the not-so-enlighten. And his book is called Hit Represh, and I recommend it to everyone to show just what can be done when people have the right things inside their heads. If only that perspective change could take place, then the current Leviathans of the world

could become part of the solutions. It's so that far away in terms of just perspective change. Except the current corporate goals, which society set long ago, are optimizing maximization of monetary profits, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon energy. Well, that's, of course, all that has to go. So, I mean, basically, that's the part of the perspective changes. You realize how deeply erroneous that is. That's the paradigm that we have to abandon. And then we have to gravitate to another basin of attraction.

to use complex systems terminology. And now we're operating in a completely different space in which we don't do that anymore. We still succeed in another sense, but not that way. But the shareholder value model is out the door. Okay, so let me ask a tangential question to that. So you've written that we cannot implement those core design principles without equity at all levels.

So how does this apply? And then you can bring in your recent comment on corporations. How does this apply to large global issues that are inherently unequal, like climate change, resource distribution, historical inequalities? It seems impossible to me to create a globally equal playing field. So how would it be possible to truly accomplish those core to design principles on a new sort of system, adaptive system like you just mentioned? I do not want to come across as a naive optimist, although I'm almost certain that I have. because I am hopeful, and I do think that there is a blueprint to follow.

What you've said... This whole podcast is Overton Windows sort of thing. We don't have the answers. We're just trying to understand the core structures of what got us here, who we are, where we might be able to go. Yeah. I mean, what you've said is that the current world is deeply inequitable, which, of course, is true.

Also, powerful people's interest do not go lightly into the night. The reason that the core design principles often are not implemented is because people are getting something out of their failures of implementation. There has to be control, just as in the early days when we said that there has to be a way to control the bullies of the world. That has to be something that's established. And, of course, it's not necessarily easy, but it is possible. It takes place all the time at a small scale.

It even takes place all the time at a mezzo scale. At any scale, such as the national scale, for example, or returning to work like why nations fail, you see nations that are much more equitable than other nations. They've managed to do it at the scale of millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people. And if you can do it at that scale, then doing it at the global scale is surely possible.

But of course, we have to address the issues of equity and so on. And because it is multi-level and multi-context, no matter where you start, no matter what your starting point, there are improvements that could be made. At the bottom-up level, you might be just a single group or something like that. Well, that's actually the most important scale for improvement is to get individuals functioning in the context of small and appropriately structured groups, meaningful groups. So here's a thought. And I will, I will agree with you that we need to talk more because we are pushing an hour and a half and I still have my typical closing questions for you. But there's been a

sentence floated around. I forgot who said it that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But let me, let me take that a step further. I think to highlight your work on multi-level selection and then look at a global. organism, which is modern humanity, I think it's really difficult to imagine how 8 billion of us in all these nations could cooperate together towards some more desirable than the default future. It's difficult to imagine that. And yet, we could all imagine that if there was an armada of alien ships all of a sudden surrounding the Earth, threatening our planet, that we would cooperate as a global group of nations, and we would sacrifice, and we would, no, we wouldn't. Okay, please

unpack this. Look at any warfare situation or emergency situation, first of all, you get this collective response, cooperation, and then the profiteering begins immediately. If the aliens were to come, there'd be this big collective response, and then a group of people would approach the aliens and said, let us be your lapdogs, and we will hand you the rest of the human race. And so, And so it is just simply not the case that collective threat all by itself results in any kind of sustaining cooperation. The profiteering begins immediately. And multi-level selection actually enables you to predict that. So the alien scenario, forget about that.

Let's return to the first one. If that wouldn't work, what would work? I'm going to stop using that as an example in my public presentation. So thank you for that. Yeah, I've got a great subject to go back. that. That just never, ever, you wouldn't expect it to run. Look at any, any warfare situation, any collective threat. I think, Nate, that the idea of global cooperation was beyond the human imagination until the 18th, the 19th century, I think you could say that accurately. Up until then,

nobody could imagine the whole world. The first religion that was for all creeds, all nations, was the Baha'i faith, which originated in Persia in the mid-1800s. First war to be called a World War was the first World War. First attempt at international governance was the League of Nations following the First World War. Before that, it was beyond the human imagination. But now, given the globalization that's taken place, not always leading to good outcomes, but nevertheless, I mean, we are so bound up in a global system, that it's very natural to think of the whole world

and the need for it to be a cooperative unit. Every day we're interacting with people around the globe. I'm interacting with you right now. In my city of Binghamton, a little town in upstate New York, over 20 first languages are spoken in the public school. So the kids that are attending public school in Binghamton, New York, are face-to-face with people speaking 20 first. languages. And so the idea that we're first and foremost human beings as far as my primary identity

and evolution helps with this, I am a human being is who I am, first and foremost, and a citizen of the world that's no more difficult to wrap your head around nowadays than I'm an American or I'm a Christian or I'm a male. I'm a female. It's not hard to do that. And then it's a matter of actually coordination of all your other identities. Your other identities don't go away. They're there too. So it's a matter of coordination. So it's possible.

It's imaginable. Quite so. So that's where we stand. Well, I do increasingly think of myself as a human being for better or worse and as a citizen of the world. I am an American and other things. But I do feel that bubbling up in me at this time when give or take time. 10% of all humans who have ever lived are alive right now. So yeah, let me ask you a few closing questions, David.

And I think we will have to agree to have, you know, on 23, a follow-up conversation on a deeper dive on your work. So given your lifetime of scholarship and reflection on these issues, do you have any personal advice for the watchers or listeners of this program at a time of global polycrisis and tumult and anxiety about the future? Well, this, what we've been discussing, which I call generalized Darwinism, very little known. And so I would just encourage everyone to learn more about it. I think that people know about complex system science. Now, that's entered the vocabulary. We talk about attractors and third attractors and things like that, interdependence. So we have a good intuition about complex system science.

But generalized Darwinism, that's still very little known. And so my advice is just learn more about what we have been talking about. And just follow up on this. However, it might interest you. It might be through my work. It might be through others. Just learn about this view of evolution, which is so relevant. If you don't know about it already, or anybody should learn more.

Okay, subset of that. You are a college teacher who has outlined challenges of our brains, behavior, and environmental situation for a long time. Do you have any specific recommendations to young humans who are aware of our economic, climate, resource, global conflicts? What recommendations do you tell 18, 19, 20-year-olds? I feel that emphasizing age is a bit distracting, in my opinion. I mean, young people are at a certain stage of their lives. They might be more flexible.

they might be capable of doing things and so on compared to old people. But I just feel that all people, when we say that we're first and foremost human beings and citizens of the world, then that goes for all ages. So I would encourage young people along with everyone else to learn about this. And then, of course, since most of their lives are ahead of them, then to make our career choices on this basis. and there really is a change in values. And so in terms of what counts as success,

then I think that there's a different vision of success, even as you described at night, in terms of scaling down, becoming more local and so on and so forth, becoming more cooperative. There's great joy and success in that, much more so than in a ranking competitive society. And so consider that. Well, I would imagine that changing your values at a young age probably leads to a more meaningful life than changing that I'm at an older age.

I'm just hypothesizing. What do you care most about in the world, David? Well, as anyone can see, I've adopted a very pro-social motivation. And throughout my career, I've asked the question, how can altruism or an other-oriented way of thinking in life succeed in a Darwinian? succeed in a Darwinian world. Is it possible for you to be genuinely other-oriented and still thrive in competition with more selfish forms of being? And the answer is, yes, you can, but only under certain conditions.

So first you create those conditions and then to thrive within those conditions is what drives me. What issue of many are you most concerned? about in the coming 10 years or so in the world? Well, since they're so intertwined, I would not want to single out a single one other than we need to solve them all collectively, basically, and we need to realize. And I think this in some ways is a scientific expression

of Buddhist thought that we need to be really systemic in our thinking and see everything is interconnected there, but then we need to evolve those. complex system. So we need to be holistic and systemic in everything that we do because interconnectedness does exist. I mean, that is a fact of life. You were like the ninth or tenth guest I've had that has mentioned both Buddhism and meditation in the same conversation. So in contrast to what you're most concerned about, what are you most hopeful about in the next decade or so? I feel like I'm being repetitive at this point, but I think that the idea that global cooperation is possible,

and this entire fact, the word hope comes up again and again when I speak with people and when people enter this world, this is hopeful. My heavens, this is hopeful. And so the perspective is hopeful. And so isn't that wonderful to have a perspective that's hopeful and and realistic at the same time. There are solutions, and we can achieve them. We can achieve them in our lives, and we can achieve them for the world. And do you have on your website and such pro-social world, are there listings of these solutions or responses and direction?

Yeah, the two websites are my website, davidstonewilson.world and the pro-social world website, which is currently under total renovation, but within weeks, I mean, visit it now, but within weeks it'll provide a much more comprehensive. And then the third website, this viewoflife.com, is an online journal on anything and everything from an evolutionary perspective. We are providing an outlet for all of this. And so if you visit those or if you contact me in any way at all,

we are creating opportunities for engagement. So we are providing ways for you to learn more. Final question. If you were benevolent dictator, hypothetically, of course, and there was no personal recourse to your decision. What is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? One policy or one act? One policy, one act. I would act like such a Nadella for my own position. I'd use my power to implement a world where power is constrained. Thank you so much for your lifetime of work

on stuff that I find fascinating and for your time today to be. continued, sir. Thank you very much. And thank you for providing an outlet for all of this. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit thegreatsimplification.com for more information on future releases.