The Joe Walker Podcast - On Ayn Rand, Cooperation, And Successful Societies - David Sloan Wilson

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist.Read the full transcript at: https://josephnoelwalker.com/atlashuggedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Hereettes, welcome to the final episode for 2020. In the closing days of 2020, an optimist has to see light at the end of the tunnel. As late as April of this year, many experts were saying that we wouldn't have a coronavirus vaccine for at least four years. And yet, right now, across the world, mRNA vaccines are being distributed. The speed with which they were developed is a triumph of our species. 2020 was a year for other technological breakthroughs, from artificial intelligence to biotech to spaceflight. There are murmurings that the great stagnation might be coming to an end. I'm also optimistic about how prosperity will be shared. In the last couple of

years, barrels of ink were spilled over why capitalism is broken and how to fix it. I have a sense that people are increasingly focusing on the question of inequality more now than ever, as well as the problems of monopoly and rent seeking. And I have hope that in America, we might soon see another FDR rather than another Trump, although I'm not entirely convinced that it will be in the form of Joe Biden. Ed Wilson once wrote that the real problem of humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. But I think that's altogether too pessimistic.

Our institutions have been updated and improved since the Enlightenment, and they've held together well. As much as we like to complain about our politicians down under, and indeed in any country in the West, Australia is a model of governance. The way we responded to the pandemic wasn't perfect, but it was pretty bloody good. And it was largely thanks to our institutions, if not to the trust that they've engendered. On this year's Human Freedom Index, we're the

fifth freest country in the world, and we have high levels of trust. So I'm optimistic about 2021 and beyond, despite the rolling clusterfuck that was 2020. To say a few more mundane words about the podcast, 2020 was kind to the JSP. Thank you all so much for supporting the show by listening, by sharing it, and by engaging with it. Using Spotify followers as a rough proxy, we grew our subscribers by about 300%. I wasn't sure what would happen there because a lot of our listeners, a not insignificant amount of our listeners, listen while commuting, which was obviously reduced by the working from home arrangements in place around so much of the world. But I suppose you all found new outlets for the show via more cooking or more exercising

or whatever you like to do while you're listening. Our most popular episode of the year was the one with Yenir Bayam, which went, as it were, viral. We also got a new logo this year to create a veneer of professionalism. 2020 was the year for repeat guests. rba governor ian mcfarlane came on the show twice as did eric weinstein vernon smith and now that this episode has been released david sloan wilson guests from previous years also returned to the show including janice varifakis kevin rod and peter singer only four of this year's episodes were recorded face-to-face, the rest were on Skype or Zoom. Skype and Zoom aren't perfect, but over the course of the year, I learned how to optimize them, and I now have a few tricks up my sleeve for audio quality

over the internet. As a rule, I prefer face-to-face, and I'm looking forward to returning to that, as well as some live events next year. It is difficult trying to keep a full-time job and do this podcast, which is why my release schedule has been so haphazard. In 2021, I'm going to push myself to aim for consistent weekly releases on Monday mornings and we'll see how that goes. I am excited for 2021, and I hope to keep serving you by digging up a mix of interesting and important, yet under-reported guests and topics, so you can learn more about the world and what matters. To say a word about this episode, our guest is David Sloan Wilson, one of the most important evolutionary biologists, perhaps of all time. If you want to learn more about Dave's life, his career and his ideas, I highly recommend the first conversation I recorded with him, which was released earlier this year.

In this episode, we discuss his new novel, Atlas Hugged, which is an update of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. We talk about Rand's influence, about selfishness and altruism, and about what makes societies successful, all from an evolutionary framework, which I find very interesting. I'm grateful to be able to release this episode on the eve of 2021. I hope it reminds you of the better angels of our nature and how we can achieve so much more when we think less about me and more about we. So without much further ado, please enjoy this chat with the great David Sloan Wilson. David Sloan Wilson, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much, Jolly Swagman.

It's great to see you again after our blockbuster episode, which was very popular despite being so academic. I think we covered a lot of ground. And today, at the end of 2020, we're going to talk about several things. We're going to touch on multi-level selection again, but we're also going to talk about your new book, Atlas Hugs, which, as people might be able to tell from the title, is your own update of Ayn Rand's famous 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. And Dave, before we start talking about your book specifically, maybe we can begin with Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. So tell me what you learned about Rand herself through this process of researching and writing your book. Well, I sense that Ayn Rand is a little bit lesser

known overseas than in America, but in America, and probably also in England. She is iconic as the person who provided a moral foundation for the greed is good neoliberal ideology that America stands for. And there are important people such as Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, who was her disciple, frankly, her disciple. And one thing that he said about her was, before Ayn Rand, I thought the free market was good, but afterwards, I thought of it as right. And we have story after story about American politicians, most recently Paul Ryan, who would assign Atlas Shrugged to his staff as a kind of a indoctrination. And Ayn Rand herself said that art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. So what she did was build a kind of a secular religion around the individual, the sanctifying the individual, the individual as their own god.

This was written in the 1950s. And so it's credited with a lot of influence. You could even say that she's had as great or greater an influence as famous economists, such as Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. At the same time, I'm always careful to point out that if Ayn Rand never existed, probably that tradition of individualism would be just the same, just as strong. So she was a vehicle for it, but was by no means, I don't

think, an essential element of it. That's a tradition that has to have its own social science or social history explanation. And then the final thing I'll say is that it illustrates the power of fiction. What is it about a story, even a very lengthy, as you've discovered by trying to read her novel, a story such as that. What is it that's different and in some ways more powerful, more compelling than the real world? A fictional world is more compelling than a real world. And so all of these things provided a great starting point for my own first foray into

fiction. Although my dad, as you know, is a famous novelist, so I kind of come by it easily. But this is my first novel. What were Wren's intellectual influences? Well, this is an important question to ask, so thank you for that. Because she really must be understood in the context of her times. She was born in Russia, experienced the worst of Russian communism and socialism. I believe her family had all of its property confiscated. And so this gave her a zeal for free enterprise that we can understand.

You got to get back to the 1950s. That was the Cold War. That was when the communist menace was spreading worldwide, all of that sort of stuff. And so you can understand her as a product of her times. And yet also, when you just proceed with history and you look at her against the background of the current times,

then you see that although socialism failed in communist Russia. In fact, socialism has failed wherever it's been tried by name. This is a very important point to make. And in my scientific work and my nonfiction writing, I have essays with people like Jeff Hodgson that really documents the two problems with socialism, when it's been tried in this kind of full-throated way, is number one, centralized planning.

That's a disaster. Always was, always will be. And number two, the concentration of power into the hands of two elites. If you have concentration of power and centralized planning, that'll never ever work. So that needs to be said. At the same time, if you look at unfettered capitalism, which is what Ayn Rand stood for, that also doesn't work. Just a different set of evils. And so that's where we are today. We don't have the threat of socialism today, really. When people talk about socialism in the first place, they don't know what they mean.

Or in the second place, they might be talking about something which is much more benign and effective, such as social democracy of the Nordic countries and so on and so forth. So finding the right style of governance is very important and is important in the novel in addition to the real world. But Ayn Rand definitely needs to be understood against the backgrounds of the world

and America in the 1950s, the middle of the world and America in the 1950s, the middle of the 20th century. Just unpack why central planning doesn't actually work on the one hand and why laissez-faire doesn't work either. Well, I have a whole series of essays, not essays, conversations, print and podcast conversations on my website, This View of Life, titled Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship. And so there, in a very extensive way, I really hope some of your listeners cross over and just type in that title, Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship, and you'll get a very comprehensive answer to that question. But the short version is that laissez-faire doesn't work because it's just not true that everyone pursuing their own interest

benefits the common good. That's the first thing you need to know about multi-level selection. Selfishness is typically disruptive. The invisible hand metaphor is profoundly untrue, except in a very different form that we can talk about. Next thing is that socialism doesn't work, centralized planning doesn't work, just because the world is too complex. The world is too complex to be comprehended by any group of experts, period. And that's not only true at the national scale, it's true at any scale. It's true for your own life. It's true for a small business. We just don't know enough, even those of us that are trained as scientists and stuff like that, to actually avoid unforeseen consequences.

And so therefore, what is required, and that's the third way, is a managed process of cultural evolution. We must have a target of selection. It must be systemic. We must orient variation around the target. And we must replicate best practices, realizing that they're sensitive to context. And so that's the thesis. And I explore that thesis with about a dozen authorities on any kind of social change that you can imagine. National governance, development efforts, entrepreneurship as we typically think of it, urban planning, the smart cities movement, you name it. If you're trying to accomplish positive

change, you cannot use laissez-faire, you cannot use centralized planning, you must employ a managed process of cultural evolution. And because that's the only thing that can work, it's the only thing that ever has. So if you review examples of positive cultural change in the past or present, then what you find is is that a convergence on the third way, a pragmatic experimental approach

to positive change. And I really had a great time fleshing out that thesis with these great authorities and making that available, both in the form of long print conversations and then more accessible podcasts. I feel like apart from the obviously egregious historical examples of central planning and laissez-faire, that today they don't really happen in practice in Western societies,

and there's sort of a long continuum in between them. And we kind of walk along that continuum between changes of government and political parties. But where would you precisely locate your third way on that continuum? Well, the best current examples are the famous Nordic countries, and it's sometimes called the Nordic model of governance, which is very much a blend, and it could be understood in evolutionary terms as similar to the social dynamics of a small group. In a small group, when it works well, when they work well, and often they don't, but when they do, it's because first and foremost, there's an equal balance of power.

Everyone has a say and insists on having a say. So that creates a kind of an egalitarianism that in the first place makes use of everyone's contributions, but also prevents being taken advantage of, because the great danger of social life at all scales is to be taken advantage of. Whenever there's a big power imbalance, then you know what's going to happen. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so social control and a balance of power and then members of the group working in a collaborative spirit. So now that you can't push me around,

I guess the only thing left is for us to do something together. And what the Nordic countries have done is they've scaled that up so that that's what operates on a national scale. Labor is strong. Capital is strong. These are capitalist societies. Government is strong.

And they all work collaboratively for the good of Norway or for the good of Denmark or Sweden or Finland. And so really what they've done is they've scaled it up. And if you look at them historically, you find, actually, that's quite accurate. When you look at them as, you know, a century or several centuries ago, you find in part because they were in the north, you know, climatically, they were

challenging and basically required cooperation at a small scale. So it's kind of baked into the culture more so than some entrepreneurial cultures. But there's your happy medium that you were talking about. We've got a good model, perfectly good model. And often when people talk about the Nordic model, especially in America, it gets dismissed as, oh, we couldn't possibly be like Norway. They're this or they're that. They're culturally homogenous and all that. But no, actually, they're a fine model. And we could say more about actually America during its own history has fluctuated

between being more and less egalitarian and democratic and was even influenced by the Nordic model during its own history. FDR was influenced by a book called The Swedish Way, and on and on. So, but yeah, you're right that pure forms of socialism and laissez-faire capitalism don't exist. But another point to make, Joe, is that it's not just a matter of splitting it down the middle. The third way, a managed process of cultural evolution, is not some kind of compromise. It's actually, you know, quite a complicated process. Those three ingredients, forming a target of selection, orienting variation around the target, replicating best practices, that's a whole complex process that needs to be orchestrated.

And it's not just something in between socialism and capitalism. It's really different. And so that's an important point to make. So I'll link to the conversations that you mentioned. And I also recommend Dave's previous book, This View of Life, for an elucidation of the third way and also the problems with central planning and laissez-faire. Dave, was the center of a cult. That made her happy, maybe. She had a, I mean, to say a little bit more about her and her movement, and also the philosophy that she formed, which she called objectivism. She regarded herself as a kind of a highbrow intellectual, a philosopher, and her philosophy was called objectivism. And it basically was, I mean, a version of humanism, really romanticized the individual thinker and the ability to make decisions on the basis of rational thought. And so the idea that you could just kind of check your premises

and decide the best thing to do, and then once you knew what that was, then you could just push that to the limit, even against opposition, knowing that it would work out well for everyone, was her philosophy of objectivism in a nutshell, the sanctity of the individual, is how I put it in Atlas Hugged. And so she became a celebrity, both as a novelist and as a philosopher. A movement formed around her, but that movement became really a cult surrounding her and a kind of a parody of what really people checking their premises might ever be. And that story is told by two people. One is by Nathaniel Brandon, who was a young man who entered her movement and became her disciple and also her lover. So she had an affair. She was married, but she had an affair

with a much younger man, member of a movement. He was also married, and so there was a kind of a scandalous sexual story there. And then later on, he wrote a sort of an expose of the movement called Judgment Day. But then Michael Shermer, of skeptic fame, in one of his books, Why People Believe in Weird Things, there's a whole chapter on Ayn Rand in which he himself gives a biography of her and shows just how much this became a cult that revolved around her, a very quixotic,

basically whatever she said went. People were either in her favor or not. And so it became really a grotesque parody of what it seemed to stand for. The movement appealed to two very different kinds of people. One were powerful people who like to be told that their intentions for themselves are morally pure. And the second was young and idealistic people who were at the dawn of their adult lives. And then that heroic portrayal of the individual operating against convention was very appealing.

And Nathaniel Brandon, as a Midwest teenager who was just kind of chafing against his provincial little social environment, was captivated by Ayn Rand. And for a period, it seemed to just be so enthralling to be part of this great movement. So it's a long book, Atlas Shrugged, and the writing isn't particularly brilliant, yet it's sold over 7 million, well, in my opinion, at least, some people might disagree with me, but it's sold over 7 million copies since it was first published. So what is it in the writing that is so memetic? well there so let's make a few points the book was widely criticized by anyone with

you know any kind of literary critic judged objectively you might say that she is a good writer in in places but um horribly turgid lengthy wooden characterizations outlandish plot. So not a good piece of literature by those standards. You can place it alongside another book, which I do in the prologue, of Walden II by B.F. Skinner. So this is another novel of the future based on science and that had a huge influence

and was very poorly written as a story. The storytelling left a lot to be desired. While we're at it, let's add some other sacred texts, such as the Book of Mormon, which Mark Twain called chloroform in print. So there's something about sacred books and novels that are conveying a moral worldview that become influential despite their flaws on the storytelling end of things.

And I think this tells us a lot about the whole nature of fiction, stories, storytelling, from an evolutionary perspective. That what stories do is that they do contain a moral worldview, so that if you become captured

by the worldview, then you will forgive flaws in the story, because the story is representing what should be right and what should be wrong for you. And that's what you incorporate, internalize, and love, basically, even if the story itself was quite clunky. And I had the real privilege, you have to know, Joe, that even though I'm, you know, experienced writer of nonfiction and all of that, just like any first-time novelist, I was like very uncertain as to

whether it was a good book, who would like it, and stuff like that. And one of the first people to read it was my colleague Brian Boyd, who's over there in New Zealand. And he's a very celebrated literary scholar. He's actually the world authority on Vladimir Nabovkov. And he just won the Rutherford Prize, which is New Zealand's highest honor for an academic. And he's one of the few literary scholars who actually thinks about literature from an evolutionary perspective.

He has a book called The Origin of Stories. And so why is it that we're a storytelling animal in just about everything that we do? And he found the time to read Atlas Hogden and loved it. We have a podcast on it that's coming out on my podcast, This View of Life, which was tremendously gratifying. But it enabled us to explore these themes of what is it about a story that is so much more compelling? Why is it that we might race through a novel when in fact we have to slog through an academic piece of work or a piece of philosophy? So these are all fun things to think about

in addition to the world view represented by my book. But I'm very happy that I'm beginning to become confident that as far as the storytelling is going, I have surpassed both Ayn Rand and BF Skinner. Maybe that was a low bar, but I'm glad to have hopped over it. I think you might have leapt over it. But Dave, I remember in 2012,

you wrote an article where you compared Ayn Rand with religious texts, and you found that something striking that they had in common was that both the language about morality in both was simplified to the point where there are only two choices, to head towards glory and away from ruin, or to head towards ruin and away from glory, and there was no sense of trade-offs. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mentioned that also briefly in the epilogue of Atlas Hogged. The epilogue is titled The Science Behind Atlas Hogged,

which connects some of these dots. But of the numerous themes of the novel, and also, of course, what I study as a scientist are, of course, the nature of religion versus science, the whole concept of a meaning system. The difference between a theory and a meaning system is that a theory only tells you what is, but a meaning system informs what you do. So those are very different objectives, whether a meaning system can be secular in addition to religious, the importance of truth-telling, all of these things. But insofar as a meaning system informs what you do, basically, if you get captured by

a meaning system, then you wake up every morning brimming with purpose, and you know the righteous path, you know that you should do this and you shouldn't do that. And some of the simpler ways to accomplish that is to actually create a stylized universe, as I put it, that's actually linear that way. So in the stylized universe, this is not true of the real world. And the real world is just full of messy trade-offs. And so if you imagine some kind of two-by-two quadrant in which every way you behave might be either good or bad for you and good or bad for others. So there's your two-by-two quadrant. In the real world, all quadrants are

full. I mean, when I behave towards you, it might be good for both of us, bad for both of us, good for me, bad for you, good for you, bad for me. Those are all four quadrants. Welcome to the real world. In a stylized universe, often only two quadrants are represented. The universe is portrayed as if everything that you might do is going to be either good for me and you or bad for me and you, in which case what you've done is you've eliminated the need for any decision-making whatsoever, because within that world, the path to glory has been laid out for you.

And the signature of a meaning system like that is perfectly easy to measure and detect. You simply have to read or to basically listen or read to what's being said and just put things in those four quadrants and you see only two quadrants become filled. And so there is a sure signature of an adaptive fiction, basically. It might work well as a meaning system, but it does not correspond to the real world. And you can tell, because if it did, all four quadrants would be filled. So it turns out that when you go through that for a religious worldview, then you find that. You find that linear model.

But so also with Ayn Rand. And so there's your point. hugely depart from factual reality might be either religious, in other words, invoke supernatural agents, or secular, not invoke supernatural agents, but depart from factual reality in many, many other ways. And one reason why I'm kind of an outlier as an atheist is that I make that point strongly. And so I'm not anti-religious. I'm actually very respectful of religion. And in my

book, Atlas Hugged, the Christian community gets a very sympathetic treatment, along with the main female protagonist, Eve, Eve Eden. And then an atheist worldview, and Ayn Rand was the new atheist of her day. That was decades before Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. She might be an atheist, but she was departing from factual reality in her own way. And so the whole quest of Atlas Hugged is to find a way of telling right from wrong without peering through a tissue of lies. And the two main protagonists, John Galtree, the grandson of the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, and his lover, Eve Eden, are each trying to find a way to tell right from wrong without peering through a

tissue of lies. Her tissue of lies was Christianity. His tissue of lies was objectivism. And what they're searching for is some way that science can actually inform how we should behave in order to create a better world. And that's the holy grail of the novel. And in the novel, they succeed. Rand's epistemology relied solely on empiricism. Do you think the appeal of empiricism for rand was that it wasn't inherently individual exploit so you could be like rodin's the thinker sort of sitting there reasoning from premises whereas real science is a more collaborative enterprise yes totally yeah i just say amen to

to that um sorry yeah it wasn't really a question, was it? It's more of a statement. No, but I'll elaborate on it. And again, it's reflected in the book that, as it's put in the book, it takes a village to be a truth seeker. We can't do it as individuals. Back to complexity. The idea that people can just sit around and logically reason their way through things, there's this real hubris in that. The

world is way too complex for that. The whole apparatus of science struggles to apprehend reality. I know that you recently had Joe Henrich on your show, and he's a great example in everything that he does with weird people, or weird cultures, white-educated, industrial, rich, democratic, and how trapped they are in their own bubble, and can't even remotely understand other cultures. And so, and of course, 99% of science is done in weird societies. And because science is a process of managed evolution, a certain kind of managed cultural evolution with certain objectives, of course, cultural evolution requires variation.

And if every scientist is from a given culture, then the variation is not going to extend beyond their cultural bubble, is it? They will be collectively unable to see things which actually exist because their culture, with its own adaptive fictions, just cannot comprehend it. So that's how hard it is to apprehend factual reality. There is a world out there, apart from our own existence. You couldn't get going with the theory of evolution

without assuming that organisms exist in environments that exist apart from their existence and would shape their properties. So there is a world that exists out there. We can't apprehend that world with enough hard work, but it's real hard. And it's a very twisting path. And so the idea that you can just sit around and go down like and reason your way through things, that reasoning process is an important part of it. And that's important to acknowledge that it is. The idea that the third way, that people always have, there's always been an intentional component

to human cultural evolution. It's never been entirely blind. People just didn't do stuff at random, and then the good things got selected. People were always striving, thinking, attempting to change things. And then, of course, often they didn't really know. I mean, there were unforeseen consequences. What ended up happening, basically basically acquired huge blind components. So that means that there's a very large blind component to human cultural evolution, but there's also a very large cultural component. called The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece by a classic scholar and political scientist named Josiah Ober at Stanford University.

Basically covers this for the whole Greek period. And of course, Greece is this cradle of culture and Western culture and democracy. What exactly happened in Greece that caused this amazing efflorescence, which remains with us to this day? and democracy. What exactly happened in Greece that caused this amazing efflorescence, which remains with us to this day? And danged if his account doesn't have multi-level selection written all over it, based in part on his Stanford colleague, Deborah Gordon, who's an ant biologist.

And so evidently he's hung out with Deborah long enough to know, or long enough to think that these Greek city-states, Apollos, plural poli, were like so many ant colonies, competing against each other. Amazing. And the degree to which they were actively formulating their constitutions, their rules of governance, the whole concept of federalism, nested units.

The word deem comes from the Greek for the smallest unit, decision-making unit. They invented whole tribes that never existed before just to organize things at intermediate scales. They were just trying stuff out like crazy and explicitly trying stuff out in order so that they could actually get themselves to cooperate more than they were before. So a huge intentional component that also led to a huge blind component and kind of comprehending both of those things

as part of human cultural evolution holding them both together um is a difficult thing to do i mean i mean you can get used to it but but it's sort of challenging to think that they're both um very important to keep in mind when we think about human cultural evolution. We'll come back to cultural evolution later. Dave, you mentioned your protagonist, John Galt III, who is the grandson of Rand's protagonist. And chapter one to your book begins in the voice of John Galt III. He says,

Call me anything but John Galt. That is my name, but it is also the name of my father and grandfather. I am not like them, and the world they created is not the one I desire. The three after my name does not sufficiently set me apart. So what sets John Galt III apart? Well, he is he rebels against the evil empire of his father, grandfather, and grandmother. I need to tell you a little bit more about the plot

because I had to begin with Atlas Shrugged, but of course I had to take great liberties with it along the way. So in my novel, John Galt I is a little bit the way he was in the way in Ayn Rand's model. He's a brilliant engineer. He claims to be able to harness static electricity to create a limited source of clean energy. He becomes an outlaw. He tries to start a strike of doers going on strike. That's the metaphor of Atlas Shrugged, the doers of the world, shrugging the world from his shoulders. He ends up founding a utopian society out west, protected by his force field, powered by a static electricity engine. And so in my novel, John Galt 1 is a little bit like that,

except everything he does is a failure. The static electricity engine is a folly. The utopian community is a folly. And then I import Ayn Rand into my novel in the form of Ayn Rand, who becomes John Galt I's lover. And their son, John Galt II, becomes a social media giant. Think Rush Limbaugh, or think a little bit Donald Trump, but mostly Rush Limbaugh, who kind of popularizes the highbrow philosophy of his mother and father, and then basically ushers in the whole sort of world of extreme inequality and so on and so forth,

what's very much within us today. And so Arjon, John Galt III, rebels against all of that. And so the evil empire is basically the evil empire of neoliberalism. And John Galt III rebels against that. So there's, you know, quite a bit of Star Wars in there, the virtuous son rebelling against the evil father and so on and so forth. And I actually type in, I tap into quite a few of the familiar modern myths like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and so on and so forth, but only in a kind of a gentle way and in a way that is, I think, not so black and white. And I think a really good novel, you have sympathy for all the characters. And so I don't have, I mean, John Galt, too,

the Rush Limbaugh character, actually, you end up sympathizing with him. You end up sympathizing with them all, actually, even Ayn Rand. And that's the mark of a really good fiction is that you see all perspectives, basically. It's not just good people and evil people. That's boring. So, no, this is much more interesting. And there's

one segment of the book where John's writing to Eve and he says, this is what I've learned in my short life. The evil of the world is not caused by evil people. My father is not evil. My father is a good man under the spell of a bad story. And so it's the stories that we tell each other that we have to filter and winnow and come up with the right one. And when we do, then most people will be good. That's basically it in a nutshell. What do most people not understand about the process of writing fiction? Well, I'm no expert, and that's one, I mean, I'm maybe no more than most having observed my father closely, and we had a bunch of fiction, and then tried it for myself, but what I noticed was how pleasurable it was and how engrossing it was, even more than the non-fiction writing I've done. And my non-fiction writing is typically praised for its

storytelling qualities, but the degrees of freedom that you have creating a fictional world and the degree to which you moralize it, Here again, I'm agreeing with Ayn Rand, so that as you begin to furnish the world, in the first place, that's not a deterministic process. It's highly evolutionary. I mean, things occur to you that did not just come out of nowhere, and then you fit them in or not, depending upon whether they work. And in that fashion, you build up a world that was, I mean, you selected it in a sense. It's an evolutionary process.

But time and again, something would bubble up from my consciousness and some new plot development. And I'd think to myself, of course, that's how it must be. And then it would go on like, it would go on like, like that. And it's in that sense that I think that we are, that storytelling is deeply, deeply embedded in our natures. And that means story creation, in addition to story listening, and, and so on. So I tapped into something that was just deeply, deeply pleasurable. And for that reason, I recommend it to others

as something which is pleasurable in its own right. And of course, you hope it finds an audience too. But I do think it's a form of exploration, like journal writing. I mean, there's lots of evidence showing that writing a journal and just reflecting upon your own experience is terribly, is very therapeutic, healthful, restorative. And so I think poetry, songwriting, fiction,

these are all things that are in that category in short all of the arts and I mean there's a whole as you know it's still fairly small but there's a whole community of people thinking about all of the arts from a evolutionary perspective

I mentioned Brian Boyd for literature there's also Ellen DeSinaichi who's a pioneer. She wrote a book called What is Art For? Why is it that the arts, which seemingly are not utilitarian, then why would they evolve? And the answer is that they're immensely utilitarian after all

in terms of helping us construct and color our cultures. So once you begin to take cultural evolution very, very seriously, then all the arts begin to make sense in terms of part of what it means to be inhabiting a cultural world which is embedded in the real world. Having studied Rand and her works, is there anything about her or her writing that people underrate? I'm pausing because I'm not a particular fan of her writing, but I have colleagues who were,

in the first place, heavily influenced by her. And in the second place, do admire her as a writer and thinker. And so I should also say that I'm no great Ayn Rand scholar. I didn't feel I needed to be. I mean, I've read plenty of her. I've written academic articles on her. So I suppose you could say that I'm a scholar. But by no means have I read everything she's written, not even close.

So she was disparaged by most philosophers. And I think for good reasons, because there's a distinction, for good reasons that actually reflect well upon her which might sound curious but in most academic philosophies are attempting to be sort of system building they're definitely attempting to be rigorous in terms of some standards of logic and so on and so forth.

And even though Ayn Rand pretended that that was true for objectivism and the very name objectivism, as I put it in Atlas Hogged, was the biggest deception of all, that's not really what she was about. And so judged by that standard, she deserves not to be taken seriously by philosophers. But judged by the standard of creating a worldview, and for that worldview to be very motivating to people, well, she succeeded very well, didn't she? So as long as you kind of classify it as a secular

religion, as opposed to some kind of systematic philosophy, then you can see its strength. And for those who get captured by it, then I think that they admire some aspects of their writing. But I have to tell you, I'm not among them. And also, there's a kind of a danger that by writing a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, then my book will only be compared with Ayn Rand, when in fact I'm up for something, I'm after something larger than that. So I'm attempting to communicate the evolutionary worldview. Maybe I could have done that in a different way without ever mentioning I'm grand. But the book actually conveys,

and I'd like to think that Atlas Hug, the novel, does pass muster scientifically. I've only recently encountered the phrase hard science fiction. So science fiction in which the science is so authentic that actually what takes place in the fiction could actually conceivably take place in the real world. And so having just learned about that category, I'm proud to have contributed to it, that what does take place in the novel, which is very rapid, transformative, positive cultural change, actually, it can happen. Something like this could happen. And the book is actually pretty carefully thought out in terms of the elements of that,

in terms of the track and so on and so forth. I think that there might be something worth keeping in Atlas Shrugged, and that is the importance of high agency. And maybe that's something that that people undervalue or overlook the importance of being a highly agentic individual and i think it's noteworthy that lots of silicon valley entrepreneurs have cited rand as being one of their chief inspirations or influences from you know elon musk to peter teal to potentially even steve jobs um if we believe wasniak's account of his intellectual influences um

is that something you agree with i would and i would say that um um so basically inspire people to be highly agentic. And then, yeah, that's a good thing. So let's call that a keeper. Now what do they do on the basis of that? And it's there that I think you get to the primary failing of Atlas Schrag, is that it's like individual only, individualism only. And what's needed is for highly agentic individuals to actually

subordinate themselves to something larger than themselves. That's another part of the human experience. What we associate with religion and words such as worship, sacred, even God. But let's take the word sacred, which is used all the time in secular context in addition to religious context. When you call something sacred, you place it above yourself. It dominates you. You agree by your attitude to work on its behalf. And it's at that point that agency,

agentic individuals, can actually work together for some kind of common good. If there's nothing is sacred, if everything is profane, then agentic individuals, basically, they work for their own good, and then we're back to laissez-faire, aren't we? So in order for multilevel selection to take place, So in order for multi-level selection to take place, or in order for higher-level selection to take place, for individuals to work, that's agentic,

for something more than their own welfare, then they must place themselves below something else. And in today's world, that has to be the entire Earth. And so this leads inexorably in the novel and in real life to a whole earth ethic. If you're not placing yourself underneath the whole earth

as the higher good, then you will be creating problems somewhere. So we need agency because agency is required for cultural evolution. And yet that agency must be subordinated to the global higher good. In the novel, the difference between what John Galtree calls false objectivism, the sanctity of the individual, is replaced by the true objectivism, which is the sanctity of the earth as an individual. In other words, the earth is a superorganism. So three words make the

difference. Three additional words make the difference. But agency is required at all points. And I think I've made that point myself when I said that human cultural evolution has always had an intentional component. People have always been trying to do something, basically. But what they've been trying to do often enough is to do such things as create a constitution or relative governance or punish other people for not cooperating or forming norms or so on and so forth. So it's the individualism plus the community, and that community now needing to be a multi-layered or multi-level community a multilevel community that which prevents just agentic individuals from causing harm what are brian boyd's best qualities as a proofreader

as a proofreader what do you mean or as a? Or as a reader of your fiction. I assume he gave some comments and feedback. Oh, he actually did proofread just a kind of amusing anecdote. I think anyone who publishes a book might be familiar with this. Of course, I've read the book a million times, so I was a proofreader. Then I got a professional proofreader who was really good. He caught a million things that I didn't catch. But do you know, dang, there were things that he didn't catch either. And Brian caught a bunch. And then readers will write in about, you know, stuff that's just, you know, just plain errors. And so it gives me respect for genetic editing ability, the ability of our genes to

proofread during replication and to keep those mutation rates down to such a low level. But Brian, I'm trying to think of what my podcast with Brian, I'm drawing a blank at the moment, just not recollecting much of what we talked about. Although he did say that I mixed genres in a way that sort of surprised him. That it's, on the one hand, it's a utopian novel. It's also a hero's journey. It's a love story, so on and so forth. And also that I managed to be, that it was fast-paced, that it had variety, and all of these good qualities in a story that was, of course, lovely to hear. Have you read Joseph Campbell's The Hero Has a Thousand Faces? Well, if I haven't, I've assimilated it by osmosis.

So I'm, yes, but a long time ago. But I know maybe you can pick out what you'd like from it. So go ahead. To be honest, I didn't have a specific question in mind, but it is a really good book, and I just wondered whether maybe you'd read that in preparation. But yeah, I think you've probably subsumed a lot of the ideas already by now. Well, I mean, he gets to the heart of storytelling of course

and motifs and motifs that are repeated again and again and again and Brian because I do have a go back a long way with him and he's he recommended a movie to me called the fast runner which is a movie it's it's actually based on an Inuit myth but the whole movie was produced and directed and acted by Inuits called the fast runner and so the myth involves two virtuous brothers, one of which is the fast runner, and an evil character who basically disrupts the whole social order. He takes over. He's a big bully. He kills his own father. He doesn't share food. He's just the bad guy.

And the whole story revolves around, first of all, this rupture in the social order. He rapes people. I mean, he's as bad as a person can be. So first of all, there is a rupture in the social order, and then there's a repair. And so on the one hand, the movie is completely exotic, just by virtue of the culture being exotic, exotic to us. And there's an amazing scene in which he and his brother are sleeping in a skin kind of tent. And the bad guy and his clan come to kill them. And they succeed in killing his brother. But the fast runner, and that's why he has his name, bolts out of the tent and runs away.

He's stark naked and it's springtime in the Arctic and so it's relatively warm and the ice has puddles and stuff like that. And there is a protracted scene in which the fast runner is stark naked, is running through the ice and over the fields and stuff like that, being pursued by this evil clan. And to someone for whom that's exotic, I mean, it's just like mesmerizing. And a point to make, I think, when we read fiction, for example, mystery novels, often part of their appeal is their particular setting, which might be

19th century England or Australia or any place. But the charm of the novel and much of the interest in reading it is just to soak up details of the culture, which are exotic to the reader. And I actually try to do that in my book for academic culture. So, I mean, you know, John Galtree goes to college, and he goes, there's a biological station and stuff like that. So I try to provide that kind of details for academic culture. But back to the fast runner, there what you have are these timeless stories because the purpose of stories, and this

would be back to Brian as someone who approaches literature from an evolutionary perspective, is once again to instruct. Do this, don't do that. This is the danger. So on and so forth. And so it's not surprising that there's these universal themes which get represented again and again, are timeless. That's why Star Wars could be both, you know, thoroughly mundane in terms of its use of those motifs

and at the same time new in part because of its exotic setting space and so on and so forth. I want to talk about multi-level selection just while I've got you, Dave. Sure. And then ask you a couple of questions that I've been thinking about over the last couple of months. Maybe the best way to start would be to introduce people to the idea

to the extent that there are many in the audience who are not familiar with it. And if people want the idea to the extent that there are many in the audience who are not familiar with it. And if people want like the long intellectual history, they can listen to the first podcast episode we recorded together. But let's give them like a brief overview. I'm not sure how you'd like to start. Maybe we could start with biological group selection. Well, in some ways, we have been talking about multi-level selection in the sense that when individuals just try to pursue their own interests, then that can be disruptive. And so in the most famous meme that I ever coined, selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups, everything else is commentary. What that points out, which I think everyone can relate to on the basis of their experience,

is that if you imagine the virtuous individual, what does it even mean to be moral and virtuous? It means that basically you're behaving for the benefit of others or one's group as a whole. Those behaviors are inherently vulnerable to the behaviors that we call self-serving. And so this was a problem for Darwin because obviously evolution promotes behaviors that cause individuals to survive and reproduce better than other behaviors. And it would seem that that would give selfishness the advantage, not altruism. And so Darwin realized that he actually could not explain all of the behaviors associated with virtue because of their vulnerability towards the behaviors associated with evil and wrongness and so on. And the solution that he came up with is that despite that,

groups of individuals who behave virtuously would be robustly out-compete groups of individuals who could not cohere. So there was a process of selection operating not just between individuals within a given social group, but also between social groups. And there was the force that could explain the evolution of goodness. So there you have it in a nutshell. And multilevel selection merely expands that range downwards so we can think about the interactions of genes within multicellular organisms. Upwards, we can think about ecosystems and groups of groups. But really, multilevel selection is so simple that I think I just succeeded in explaining it.

Great. So I'd like to hear what you make of a particular critique of biological group selection and the critique is that the men of you know it's it's a historical fact that the men of the conquering tribe would take the women of the vanquished tribe as mates such that the genes of the vanquished tribe would then spread through the population of the conquering tribe and there's lots of examples of this but just to give a couple from literature um to make this clear to listeners in the iliad uh the greeks are laying siege to troy and they periodically go out and sack its vassal states and when they sack a city they do two things, they kill all of the men, and then secondly, they enslave the

women and the children. A second example, in Shakespeare's account, Henry V warns a French village to surrender, or else their, quote, pure maidens will fall into the hand of hot enforcing violation, end quote. So, what do you make of this argument and does it significantly undermine biological group selection? No, it doesn't. It doesn't nearly, but the reason that it seems to is based on all sorts of unstated assumptions about the relationship between genetic variation and phenotypic variation. So this will get into the weeds a little bit, but actually it's worth doing. So I'm very happy to do it. So all of the first models, and there seems to be a cycle. Maybe it's even inevitable that first you start out with a rich appreciation of complexity,

the tapestry of nature and all that. But then when you begin to study it formally, then you have to use mathematical models. All kinds of simplifying assumptions are required to do that. And so there's a kind of a de facto denial of complexity during the first model building stages. And then some insights come from that. But then those models reveal their limitations. And then at the end of the day, you end up with an appreciation of complexity, which is on much more solid foundation than its first form, which was just purely qualitative. And so against that background, when people started to model the evolution of altruism, and it doesn't matter whether it was called kin selection or game theory or group selection,

the simplifying assumption they made was that a given behavior, let's say altruism or selfishness, was caused by a single allele, an altruistic allele and a selfish allele, a one-to-one correspondence between genes and behaviors. Okay, well, that makes sense. And if you do that, of course, then all sorts of things follow as to genetic variation within and among groups, genetic and phenotypic variation within and among groups. And so if you imagine you have a multi-group population and each group is colonized by a certain number of individuals, then the amount of genetic variation among groups will depend on the number of individuals that colonize each group. That's just sampling error.

And so if groups are colonized by many individuals, and especially if there's a lot of gene flow between groups, there's your raiding and your raping and pillaging and so on, then most of the variation will exist within groups. Not much variation will exist within groups, not much variation will exist between groups, and so group selection can't really be a very strong force under that scenario. So that's the logic that leads people to believe that unless you have groups that are genetically isolated from each other, then group selection will not be a strong force. Well, now let's just do an experiment.

And experiments like this were done starting in the 1970s when Michael Wade, my colleague working with flower beetles, he created groups of flower beetles. These are in little vials of flower. 16 beetles to a vial. Well, 16 is a pretty large number. You shouldn't have too much genetic variation between vials when there's 16 beetles in each vial.

That's a far cry from kin selection when every individual is a full sibling. And he measured, he let them breed for 30 days, and he measured group size, how many offspring were produced. Well, there was this enormous variation among groups, despite the fact that the groups were colonized by so many individuals. And when he came to study exactly why that was, without going into details,

what he found was complex interactions. Genes coded for traits, but those traits interacted with each other to produce the trait of population size that was ultimately what got selected. And so if you know a little bit about complex systems, you know about sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When you have replicate complex systems

and they differ in a small degree, those differences don't stay small, they grow larger because of their complex dynamics within each system. That's why the weather is so difficult to predict. And so in 2000, with my grad student Bill Swenson, we did this experiment. We created microbial microcosms. We did a number, but one was in aquatic environments. Basically, we had test tubes with sterilized medium, into which we put one milliliter of unsterilized pond water.

And if you know a little microbiology, you know that there's many, many millions of bacteria in one milliliter of pond water, of microbes, algae, bacteria, of all sorts. And so the variation between test tubes was just like vanishingly small. We'll incubate them for a week and then measure something about them, like pH or something else you might care to measure. Danged if they didn't vary a lot. And so the whole nature of phenotypic variation

in a complex system is different than one kind of one-to-one mapping between genes and the phenotype that you're selected for. Variation in nature is never in short supply. You can measure nature at any scale and you will find that it varies because it's some version of the butterfly effect and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Then there's the question of if you select on that variation, do you get a response to selection? And so, and the answer is, the empirical answer is you do. That's what happened in our experiments. We did. So, so it's only based on these extreme simplifying assumptions that people, and

people just think it's intuitively now, they don't even, they probably haven't even read the models. It's just kind of the intuition that they've been taught is that group selection is, or the relative power of within and between group selection is directly proportional to the genetic variation within and between groups. So you can make a statement like that. But it's not true for cultural evolution and it's not true for biological evolution either. I hope I didn't go too much into the weeds there, but there's a brief account.

That's great. Thanks, Dave. Let's talk about cultural evolution what should people know about cultural multi-level selection and gene culture co-evolution well first they should listen to some of your own podcasts. And I want to compliment you, Joe, on becoming so literate and excited about what's taking place in our field so that you're interviewing the likes of me and Joe Henrich and many others to bring this to the attention of a larger audience. Thank you. of a larger audience. And so often when I write about this, I say that almost everyone is either working towards or hoping for a cultural change, positive cultural change in their own way. They frequently use words such as evolve and adapt

in the vernacular, but they seldom think to consult the actual science of change, evolutionary science. There's a good reason for that, because the study of evolution was so confined to the study of genetic evolution until only a few decades ago. But now what's on offer is that we have a way to study and to influence cultural change based on a toolkit, conceptual toolkit, that has already proven itself in the biological sciences. So we already know that we have a transformative, nothing-makes-sense-except-in-the-light-of theory

for the rest of life. And if that toolkit can be carried over to study human cultural change, then that's a pretty darn big deal. And so that's the incentive for studying cultural evolution, cultural multilevel selection. That's what I try to convey

in This View of Life in fictional terms in Atlas Hugged. But there's a whole genre of books, more books than anybody can read is coming out on this. I could list a dozen of them right here. I won't, but I mean, there are so many great books that are based on this paradigm that the real challenge is to expand the audience for them.

Because even though it's a vibrant community, as I just said with all those books, it's still just a tiny fraction of the worldwide academic community, not to speak of everyone trying to create positive change in the real world. So on the one hand, it's present tense, not future tense. People are already doing and thinking this way in the thousands, you might say. So that's the good news. But of course, there's between seven and eight billion people on Earth. And so in terms of this becoming the common sense for everyone, the way everyone thinks. That's what's needed because, as you've already said,

how you behave depends on how you think. There's this whole, and that's the other message of dual inheritance theory, is that there's a symbolic stream of inheritance that has been first evolved by genetic evolution and has been co-evolving with it ever since. But to think of our symbolic systems as like our genes, as like our genes, then one of the things that that tells you is if you want to change the phenotype,

if you want to change how we behave at all scales from individuals to the planet, we need to change the way we think. We need to change our symbolic systems. You cannot change the outside without changing the inside. And that's pretty profound. It's not as if we can just stay the way we are on the inside and then do something different. I mean, we have a limit. The way any person is on the inside endows them with a small repertoire of behaviors for them responding to the world. Everyone's phenotypically plastic that way, but their symbolic systems gives them some if-then tree of things to do, if this, then that, whatever, in terms of how to behave. But if you want to behave substantially different on the

outside, we must change the way we think on the inside. So there's a dialectic between our internal world and our external worlds that we need to manage. Unmanaged, it will take us where we don't want to go. So it must be managed in that humble way not centralized planning but in that humble experimental way is the sense in which we need to evolve our our our futures so that's basically everything i do is predicated on that and so it So it penetrates my Atlas Hugg and Atlas Hugg itself co-evolved with my real world change approach. So those are joined at the head. Can I suggest two popular-ish books for people who want to get their heads around dual inheritance

theory? And then you can add or subtract from my recommendations, Dave. So one would be Not By Jeans Alone by Boyd and Richardson, and the other would be The Secret of Our Success by Joe Henrich. Yeah, sure. Not By Jeans Alone was published in 2006. And The Secret of Our Success. And Henrik was a student of Richardson and Boyd,

so there's an academic lineage there. His 2014 or 2015, as I recall, I think, not by genes alone, that's definitely an academic book. And so not every one of your readers is going to easily assimilate that book. I recommend it to them. But Joe's book is beautifully written in addition to being authoritative, and I think his new book is needed as much. So if there were only two books, it seems strange that they should be by the same author, but that is an indication of my esteem for Joe Henrich. Then to add other books onto that,

I would list Peter Turchin's Ultra Society, which talks about cultural multi-level selection, basically the last 10,000 years of history from a cultural evolutionary perspective. And then again, Peter has a book called Ages of Discord, which is an amazing analysis of American history from the same perspective. And if you want to understand America today, then Ages of Discord.

Peter actually, and he's now widely credited for this, he predicted this mess 10 or 15 years ago based on his knowledge of American history. This is our second age of discord. I mean when we compare today with the first Gilded Age, there's a lot to that. And when we compare what we need to do now with what was done for the New Deal, there's a lot to that. So, and again, we could go on, but yeah, those are great picks. so in the age of discord and in secular cycles peter peter turchin that is finds that cycles of inequality and cooperation are inversely correlated and that closely mirrors bob putnam's finding in his new book the upswing which tracks how inequality is corrosive of social capital.

Question for you, Dave, why do you think that's the case? And does a multi-level selection framework predict that? It does predict that, and it gives it a generality that is, I think, awe-inspiring when you think of it, that the same set of principles can account for everything from current events to 10,000 years of human history, to the genetic evolution of our species as a highly cooperative species, to the genetic evolution of other highly cooperative species. So it even, not only does it transcend, or you should say explain cultural variation within humans, but it also explains interspecies variation in non-human

species. It's all the way back to the origin of life, for heaven's sakes. I mean, when you think when people talk about, when political scientists talk about democracy and stuff like that, they typically provide very shallow cultural explanations like, you know, Greek democracy or American democracy, the democratic movements in Europe, and so on and so forth, when the true explanation is basically that something like democratic governance is required for life. Cooperation is inherently egalitarian and is inherently vulnerable, as we have already

said. And so when within-group selection takes place, then it inherently is corrosive of cooperative efforts. You don't cooperate with a bully. You don't cooperate with someone who is using. You resist that person. And sometimes you fail, and so you must because you're forced to. But those groups actually do have their days. So if you actually look at history, you find it's full of despotic

regimes and empires which were predatory on other cultures. There's slavery, there's all these things which we recognize as highly immoral, although not by the people who practice them. But what you'll find again and again, it's in this history of classical Greece that I'm reading now. It's in books such as Why Nations Fail by Asimoglu and Robinson, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett, books of recent books of Douglas Fukuyama, is that when societies are inclusive, then they tend to work well as societies. When they become despotic and authoritarian, they only work for the elites. And the elites cannot really bully people into cooperating with them.

I mean, they can to a degree, but for the most part, those social groups end up succumbing in between-group competition, which is warfare mostly, but also economics. Warfare and economic productivity are joined at the hip. You can't wage war if you're not economically productive.

So there's your higher-level competition favoring internal egalitarianism. Of course, that's just expanding the scale of conflict in addition to cooperation. And so we have to ask the question, is worldwide cooperation possible without a process of between-planet selection, which is science fiction? And the answer to that question is yes, but only by a very mindful process of cultural evolution. We have to have worldwide cooperation as the target of selection, and then we have to orchestrate all lower-level activities with that in mind. In other words, everyone, including nations, must regard the earth as sacred, And they must work towards it. And if they want to distinguish themselves as nations,

then it's in setting exemplars and models. That's what the whole concept of reputation is. One of Joe Henry's contributions to all of this is to make the distinction between basically dominance and prestige. Two ways to become high status in a group. One is just to be powerful and take it, like a bully would, or an autocrat would. The other is to earn it by doing something that's so valuable to others that they bestow their reputation upon you.

And so societies that are based on reputation, often they're very hierarchical, but the criterion for becoming powerful is actually to be a responsible agent with respect to the larger entity. So that's how nations should be competing with each other and have in the past. So when you look at people that for example were advocates of the League of Nations or the United Nations and so on, that's how they saw themselves. The way to be patriotic, the way to be a great nation was to be a leader among nations in establishing a cooperative world order. That's not even new, but it's something that we can understand better than we did before.

And then we can say, that's how we make America great again, that way. And any nation can then compete on that field, and then it becomes more like an organized sport. There are some beacons of hope in the historical record which shine out as examples of the fact that inequality doesn't have to lead to dominance and that the elite can be noble and self-sacrificial. And the one to me that perhaps shines brightest is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I've recently, I haven't finished it yet, but I've been reading the biography, which is called,

interestingly enough, A Traitor to His Class. Yeah, I've read that book too. It's a great book. How concerned are you for American society at the moment? Well, to first of all dwell on that book a little bit, things got so bad during the first Gilded Age that some of the elites, and a lot of what Peter Turchin writes about is competition among elites. It's really fascinating, elite overproduction,

competition among the elites. When there are too many elites and none of them want to give up their life cycle, they start competing with each other. That means that if there's a constituency that will support them, then they'll become revolutionaries, even though they're elites. I mean, the whole business with Donald Trump,

I mean, it's just there for everyone to see. But when things get bad enough, then... Dave, sorry. Can we just dwell on that for a moment? Because I think it's a super interesting point. I think what most people think when they think of the relationship between inequality and social unrest is that you have the masses setting off some kind of like uprising where they overthrow the elite. But Peter's insight is the conflict actually arises within the elite itself because, know for example there are only so many senate seats or so many seats in the heart of house of congress yet we have a multiple of you know more

lawyers than we did in the past and so the elite is fighting amongst itself for the same amount of spoils they're able to enlist the masses to join their cause because obviously there is some like smoldering unrest among the masses and that's actually the source or the genesis of conflicts yeah and even when you um look at the new deal as as good as it was for some people it was terrible for others i mean there's some people that have been cut out of it all all the time forever i mean none of this is truly egalitarian never never has been. We hope that it will be in the future. But even among the elites, I mean, something that's enough in the past so that young people might find it curious is prejudice against not only Jews, but against Catholics in America. And so basically, there was ethnic groups at that time, including Catholics.

Yeah. Peter uses the number of lawyers as a percentage of the general population, I think, as a proxy for elite overproduction. I actually tried to find some data on this in the Australian context recently. I couldn't really find anything, but there's a study that URBIS did for the national... They looked at the number of solicitors practicing in Australia nationally and that number increased by 33%, so a third between 2011 and 2018 whereas i think the general population grew by about half that rate so well the amount basically

college education is um is part of this it's lower down but basically yeah peter will say that you're trying to grant everyone a college education sounds good, but now you have everyone that wants to basically live like a college, what they think a college-educated person should look like, and there's just not enough of that kind of job to go around. And so you have all these people that are sort of in despair because they're not succeeding according to their expectations, and that becomes a kind of a breeding ground for one kind of conflict or another.

Well, in any case, so things can get so bad that some of the elites will say, I mean, this whole ship's going down, folks. We really have to make decisions on behalf of the whole ship, not just my class, my aristocratic class. And FDR was among them. And so he was a traitor to his class because he was now making decisions

on behalf of the whole nations. And thank heavens that he was somewhat successful at doing so. And that's of course what's needed for today. And it's needed not only at the national scale, but at the worldwide scale. This is the moment, I think, for people to decide that their primary social identity should be citizen of the earth and that all their other identities don't go away but need to be subordinated to being a citizen of the earth. That's not at all new. It's what the Pope is calling for.

It's what the Dalai Lama is calling for. It's what environmentalists call for. It's what economists like Kate Raworth call for. It just only makes sense that all of us are first and foremost human beings sharing much more in common than their cultural differences. Although those cultural differences can be huge, as Joe Henrich will tell us, and citizens of the earth, we have to be stewards of the earth, all of that. That has to be the primary social identity. And then other things below that will fall into place or need to. All the way down to the local level,

a point to make here when we talk in highfalutin terms about global welfare and so on, that doesn't nearly substitute for the need to exist in small, nurturing, cooperative, meaningful groups. And that's another theme of Robert Putnam, who you mentioned with his most recent book, his earlier book Bowling Alone, mourning the decline of small groups of all sorts. And so a big part of this, which we haven't talked about is the need to create a cellular level of human society with the cells being small, functionally oriented groups. And that's a strong theme in Atlas Hugged, where village-sized societies are described as close to a utopia as we'll get, are small groups of people

that are appropriately structured, doing meaningful things together. Yeah, I mean, without that, we can't really be happy and live satisfied and meaningful lives, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's there that the pandemic, I think, can have a silver lining if it results in the permanent establishment of electronic communication for long distance and person-to-person communications locally. Wouldn't that be great if we decided that we're not going to globetrot anymore, any more than we have to?

We're going to have our conferences online. That's something that's worked out amazingly well by the way. All of these national and international conferences that could not take place as physical conferences. People thought, oh my god what'll happen. So they were taught up so they took place online and do you know that they were really great and that the attendance was like three, four, ten times the attendance. All the meetings were recorded. You could visit them at any time. Clever ways for interactions were developed, the kind of side talk that conferences are so good for. I never want to go back to and think of the climate footprint, the carbon footprint

that was saved with all that travel that didn't take place. Let's continue that. And then let's nourish ourselves with our face-to-face interactions locally. Locally. Where we don't have to travel to do that. So that would be a double benefit. And I. So that would be a double benefit. And I think that that would be a great outcome, I think, of the pandemic. Dave, one last evolutionary question. You can answer this as extensively or as briefly as you like.

Did Ed Wilson make a mistake in trying to dismiss kin selection? Yes and no. There is this thing called equivalence, which is that all these theories of social evolution, which sprung up mostly as alternatives to group selection. So here's a bit of history that's not often told. Group selection came first. The theory of group selection came first,

beginning with Darwin. Those other theories. In the descent of man. In the descent of man. And then there's a long history. I tell it with Elliot Sober in my book, Undo Others. There's the fathers of population genetics. There's Sewell Wright, Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, so on. And even G.C. Williams

wrote an article on group selection. And then that came under criticism. And then these other theories, kin selection, inclusive fitness theory, game theory, were all advanced in the 1960s for the most part as alternatives to group selection. And Ed Wilson, although he was as sympathetic to, as anyone could be, to group selection at the time, did in that time sort of favor kin selection, so on, and reciprocity, so on, and so forth. What we know now is that these other theories, actually, the various theories of social evolution have a lot more in common than was known at first. In fact, they all require the same basic logic of multi-level selection. Social interactions in all cases take place in groups that are small compared to the

total evolving population. Cooperative behaviors are vulnerable to selfish behaviors within each and every one of those groups. Therefore, there has to be some differential contribution of those groups in order for cooperative and altruistic behaviors to evolve. That's true for all of them. And so that's called equivalence, basically. The idea that these theories are somehow intertranslatable. They might still be useful for the perspective that they provide. So you might still continue to have more than one,

but you must recognize them as like speaking different languages and so on and so forth. So I think Ed was starting with me in our 2007 article, Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology, and then with his collaboration with Martin Nowak and I'm not pronouncing her name right. Carnita, what's the co-author of Ed's paper with apologies. I basically reasserted this logic of multi-level selection as basically reasserted this logic of multilevel selection as the appropriate theoretical foundation for sociobiology. But on top of that, he never was comfortable,

and to this day is not comfortable, with the idea of equivalence. And so he wants to say that there's something about kin selection that's just plain wrong and misguided. And that's a little bit unfortunate. And a bit like Ayn Rand, you have to go back and realize that Ed, now in his 90s, I believe, in his late 80s or 90s, you know, was present through the whole period. And if you go back to the very beginning, for example, kin selection, what was new about it was that it explained altruism towards collateral relatives. The idea that parents would benefit their offspring,

well, that was just natural selection. It was benefiting siblings or other relatives. That's the part that was new. And also, it was about genealogical relatedness. Kind selection, at first, was about identity by descent. But then it became generalized, and that coefficient of relatedness, for example, became any correlation between the phenotype of the actor and the phenotype of the recipient for any reason. It became a correlation coefficient.

But not to Ed. Ed was saying there's something more than genealogical relatedness. And so it was at this point that I think there's a lot of confusion. And it remains very, very confusing all the way at the top. It's been a source of frustration for me. It's not the case that there's like some uneducated people and then the experts are all on the same page.

It's not like that at all. And perhaps a final thought, although never say never in a conversation like this, but something that I've come to appreciate is that, and it brings us back to individualism, which began this conversation, that when we think of it as an intellectual tradition that has long roots, but really became dominant in the middle of the 20th century, and dominated most economics, the social sciences, everyday life, and my field of evolutionary biology, it begins to make sense of this zeal with which group selection was rejected in favor of individualistic explanations. The answer to

that, I think, is not just what was taking place within evolutionary theory. It was what was taking place much more broadly across the board. And so evolution's individualistic swing, explaining everything in terms of individual self-interest and their selfish genes, was really part of this broader tradition of individualism. And just as we're, I think, exiting from individualism across the board and should be, then that explains, I think, why multilevel selection is now being revived. Again, that's something that has to be seen more systemically. So it gives me more insight into why group selection was rejected with the zeal that it was. The final sentence of G.C. Williams' book, Adaptation to Natural Selection, published in 1966, was,

I believe it is the light and the way. So something's going on there. Yeah, that's a red flag yeah i have three three michael gisland during the same period said scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed so there was uh richard alexander caused the selfish gene movement to be the greatest intellectual revolution of the 20th century. So there was this feeling of triumphalism that was mirrored in economics and the like. So seeing all this in a very broad context, I think, is important for all of us. Yes. all this in a very broad context I think is important for all of us Yes Dave I have three final

questions because I want to be respectful of your time but you're well known as the champion who resurrected group selection back in the 1970s did you have

a sense of yourself as an outsider? And what's it like championing an unpopular idea for so long? Well, in the first place, I wasn't alone. It wasn't as if I was a lone ranger. It was a heretical position, that's for sure. For me, it was an opportunity. I was ambitious. I thought I could make my name and did. So I rushed towards it in that sense while other people were running away from it. And for the most part, I had a pretty good time in the process. So I think that science should be a process of constructive disagreement. And for the most part, it was. I got good jobs. I got grants. I got publications. I mean, I got rejections also, but it wasn't as if I was

like, you know, being persecuted or anything like that. So that might be my personality, but for the most part, it was the good fight. And it was a positive experience. Glad to hear it. So it wasn't particularly traumatic then? No. That's good. What has 2020 been like for david sloan wilson and has all of the have all of the events of this tumultuous year done anything to either change or affirm your priors

well um Well, I think personally, I've weathered 2020 embarrassingly well. I used to do a lot of globetrotting, and it was like, you know, over 30 trips a year. And when I didn't do that, I just stayed at home, I realized how lovely that was, and how much I could do. And also, I'm very lucky that almost all of my major projects have been able to continue. Almost none of my projects were actually terminated by the pandemic because so much can be done online. So on all of those ways, I'm blessed.

I'm getting very tired of it as well as everyone else. And of course, it's surging everywhere, so I could get it at any time. And here in upstate New York, it's been a pretty low incidence until recently, but now, you know, my neighbors have it. And so I'm at as much risk as anyone else. There's much to reflect upon,

and I think that the main thing is that what the pandemic has done is it's revealed all the other inequities and problems that existed beforehand. And so I hope that, as they say,

a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, that this is a kind of a wake-up call and that as we work together as they say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, that this is a kind of a wake-up call, and that as we work together at a worldwide scale to solve one thing, we can work to solve all of these things. And so, in a sense, because everyone is so desperate for change, that that is an opportunity for better change methods,

which is the fundamental message that we're, what I'm working towards both in all my work, fiction and plus nonfiction. So in the book, there's actually worldwide transformational change that takes place in 100 days, and that's not going to happen. But I do have a sense of catalysis. The concept of chemical catalysis is that there can be a substance that when you add it to a chemical reaction, it increases the rate of that reaction by

orders of magnitude, that something like that can take place for cultural evolution so that positive change can take place in a matter of years, not decades, at a large scale in addition to a small scale. All of that, for me, is in the realm of the possible. And all of the things taking place around us creates a receptivity for that, as well it should. So I think that the message, not just the method, but the practice has a better chance of being implemented. And so in all those ways, I remain motivated, highly motivated. And despite the everything that's terrible about the pandemic.

So Dave, I might be a bit biased here, but I think I have the best audience in Australia. Although I do have a lot of listeners in the United States in the United Kingdom and around the world as well they're an audience of doers they're optimistic they're altruistic at the dawn of 2021 what what final piece of advice would you give them Well, it's going to sound self-serving, but I do think that there are... Actually not, because what I'm doing through ProSocial World, which is a new organization that spun off from my previous organization, Evolution Institute, is in partnership with many, many other positive change movements. We talk about a collaborative landscape, not a competitive landscape. And as part of the Third Way series that we talked about earlier, is that best practices have been converged upon again and again and again. So

actually, there's many successful change efforts. Their problem is that they're all encapsulated within some island of an archipelago of knowledge and practice. And so what's new, what's genuinely new is to have some kind of general formulation that can be something that can be useful for any group, any size, any place, any context. A set of tools that can be used for them not only to function better internally, but also to hook up with other groups to build that worldwide superorganism. And however they want to enter that, whatever their entry point is to it, then that's what I hope that they will do, that they will do it, basically go into action mode in a way which is not encapsulated, but which is part of this general framework. And the two entry points that I would suggest would be, I'll suggest three. The one that's not my own is Kate Raworth's Donut Economics, because she has a real vision of what economics should be and a multi-level way of getting there.

So with donut economics, what you'll see is that there's the outer edge of the donut is the planetary boundaries. The inner edge is the social equity issues. We have to remain within the donut. And then, of course, all of that is global, but it must also be local.

And she's in the process now of implementing that amsterdam is a donut city you could be the donut neighborhood so on and so forth so i love that and i work with kate um that's complementary with pro-social so i'm very happy to to encourage your listeners to get involved in that. And then my own two entry points are ProSocial World. Type in ProSocial World and you'll get there. That provides opportunities to get involved with any group that you're currently working with, any group that's doing good work.

Then we can help you work better and we can connect you to other groups. So please contact us at ProSocialWorld. You could get trained to be a facilitator. So you could work with groups. Over 500 have been trained in 34 countries. Australia is a hotspot. Thanks to my colleagues such as Paul Atkins and Robert Stiles. Awesome people. So actually, I would love for there to be a strong branch of pro-social in Australia, and that could happen like that. Paul knows other organizations that are like-minded, so that would be a great outcome.

And then finally, maybe your easiest entry point is through a novel and not through a nonfiction. And I think that if you do read Atlas Hug, then hopefully the storytelling will be good. And then it's written to cross over. The very last sentence, let me read it, and this will be probably the end of our interview, in the epilogue is, I hope that my excursion into the world of fiction has given this sense of possibility to readers of Atlas Hugged. I now invite you to cross over to the world of nonfiction

to make the vision of Atlas Hugged. I now invite you to cross over to the world of nonfiction to make the vision of Atlas Hugged a reality. So your entry point could be a story. Or if you want the nonfiction version, then This View of Life. Links to ProSocial World and Dave's new novel, Atlas Hugged, will be in the show notes. David Sloan Wilson, it is always a pleasure speaking with you. Happy New Year and thanks for joining me. Okay, great.

Keep it up. Until the next time. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Thank you so much for being a listener of this show during 2020. If you're enjoying what we do, I would hugely appreciate a rating and a five-star review on iTunes. I know everybody asks, but it does help people find us

and it does help us reach hard-to-reach guests. So if you leave a rating, we will be forever in your debt. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our very thirsty video editor is Al Fetty. I'm Joe Walker. Until we speak again, thank you so much for listening. Ciao.