The Joe Walker Podcast - The Evolution Of A Renegade - David Sloan Wilson

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist.This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Freelancer.com and by Blinkist. You can find the Blinkist deal exclusive to listeners of this podcast at www.blinkist.com/swagman.Show notesSelected links •Follow David: Website | Twitter •The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins •River Out Of Eden, by Richard Dawkins •The Descent Of Man, by Charles Darwin •Animal Dispersion In Relation To Social Behavior, by Vero Wynne-Edwards •Adaptation And Natural Selection, by George C Williams •'Reintroducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences', 1994 paper by David Sloan Wilson & Eliot Sober •The Meaning Of Human Existence, by E O Wilson •'Gender and Politics Among Anthropologists in the Units of Selection Debate', 2014 survey by Yaworsky, Horowitz & Kickham •The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson •Sociobiology, by E O Wilson •Governing The Commons, by Elinor Ostrom •Animal Species And Evolution, by Ernst Mayr •Simpson's paradox •'The False Allure of Group Selection', Steven Pinker's Edge.org article •'Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition', 2005 article by Mike Tomasello et al •Dave's conversation with Jonathan Birch •Darwin's Cathedral, by David Sloan...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, welcome back to the show. This episode of the Jolly Swagman podcast is brought to you by Freelancer.com. Freelancer.com is the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace, both by number of users and projects posted with over 40 million users and 17 million projects posted. Full disclaimer, I know the CEO, Matt Barry. He's a great guy, a very uncorrelated thinker who's appeared on this podcast before and Matt has produced a true Aussie startup success story. Freelancer.com is where you go if you want to start a business or take an existing one to the next level. It does this by connecting entrepreneurs aka you with entrepreneurs around the world aka freelancers. Here are some of the things they can get you help

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get 25% off an annual subscription and one week's free premium trial by going to my landing page, www.blinkist.com slash swagman. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes. Welcome back to the show. Why is gossip the typical topic of conversation from campsites to the halls of parliaments? Why is antisocial a pejorative term? Why do returned soldiers often report that their love for their brothers in arms was more intense than for their own wives. Why are English soccer fans almost as passionate? Why do religions exist? Why are we

so groupish? I recently ran a Twitter poll where I asked people the question, which scientist has most directly influenced your understanding of evolution. There were 131 respondents, 46% said Charles Darwin, 31% said Richard Dawkins, and 2% said David Sloan Wilson, my guest for this episode. Now that shouldn't really surprise you. Darwin obviously founded the theory of evolution by natural selection, and Dawkins is influential due to his popular writings. In fact, my impression is that most well-read people get their understanding of evolution mostly from Dawkins' best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, which first hit shelves in 1976 and has since sold over a million copies. The Selfish Gene eloquently crystallized the notion that genes,

or combinations of genes, because of their immortality were the unit of natural selection. Genes were replicators, and we organisms were their vehicles. Despite the book's ambiguous title, Dawkins did not mean to say that selfish genes make thoroughly selfish people. As he explained it in his later book, River Out of Eden, quote, there are occasions when genes may maximize their selfish welfare at their level by programming unselfish cooperation or even self-sacrifice by the organism at its level. But group welfare is always a fortuitous consequence, not a primary drive. This is the meaning of the selfish gene, end quote. I think the prevalence

of selfish gene theory owes at least in part to the celebrity and literary flair of some of its major proponents, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley. But you may be surprised to know that it no longer represents the consensus view among evolutionary biologists. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I've been champing at the bit to share this podcast episode with you. You see, there's a new idea as to how we got here. Actually, it's not so much a new idea as a revival. The new consensus comes from an unlikely place, an idea that was considered dead and buried only a few decades ago, group selection. Group selection says that groups or tribes can be and were units of natural selection too.

Now, nobody doubts that some groups survive better than others, but the relevant question here is, can differential group survival drive evolution in the same way as differential individual survival does? This wasn't always such a controversial question. In fact, in his book, The Descent of Man, in chapter 5, Charles Darwin himself made a first nascent pass at the idea of group selection. I quote, a tribe, including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection, end quote. But after Darwin's exposition, things started to go off the rails. Biologists began to see, for the good of the species, behaviours everywhere in the natural world. Fuzzy thinking predominated and rigour fell apart. This all culminated publicly in a 1962 book called Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour by Vero Wynne Edwards. In the book,

Wynne Edwards argued that populations of animals, for example, rookeries, can be self-calibrating to protect their habitats or food sources from over-exploitation. In Wynne Edwards' words, quote, the interests of the individual are actually submerged or subordinated to the interests of the community as a whole, end quote. This fuzzy for the good of the species thinking was finally slapped down by George C. Williams, the great evolutionary biologist, in 1966 in his famous book Adaptation and Natural Selection. There are two common objections to group selection. The first is that groups can't be replicators in the same way that genes are.

It's incoherent to think of them as such. And the second is known as the free rider problem. The free rider problem says that selfless groups would be relentlessly undermined by selfish members, and those members would eventually have more offspring and perpetuate their selfish genes. The free rider problem therefore implies that group selection is inherently self-defeating. By the 1960s, group selection had been, it seemed, irredeemably discredited. And so, when the final triumphant nail in the coffin came in the form of the selfish gene in 1976, Dawkins could announce that, quote, the group selection theory now commands little support within the ranks of those professional biologists who understand evolution.

By the 1980s, one evolutionary bigwig said to a graduate student that There are three ideas that you do not invoke in biology. Lamarckism, the Phlogiston theory, and group selection. And then along came our guest, David Sloan Wilson. Actually, David argued in 1994, group selection is not a dichotomous alternative to gene or individual level selection, but sits on top of it in a framework

known as multilevel selection. During our evolutionary history, natural selection happened on multiple levels, in different ratios, depending on the circumstances. So there's a tug of war between different levels of selection. For example, during a famine bottleneck or during a bloodthirsty intertribal conflict, more cooperative groups probably fared better, and so natural selection was stronger at the group level. The group was a vehicle, to use Dawkins's language, for pro-social genes. Multi-level selection is well summarized by the maxim of Edward Wilson's

exposed in his book, The Meaning of Human Existence, that, quote, selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members, end quote. Today, the tide of opinion has turned on the question of group selection. To be sure, the old guard seems determined to go down with their ship. Steven Pinker calls group selection a scientific dust bunny. Matt Ridley, in his book The Origins of Virtue, said it was an edifice without foundation. And Dawkins, reviewing Edward Wilson's book, The Social Conquest of Earth, which relies on group selection, said,

this is not a book to be tossed lightly aside, it should be thrown with great force, end quote. But a 2014 survey by William Jaworski and two co-authors found that 175 evolutionary anthropologists were receptive to group selection, and while a majority said their mentors leaned towards kin selection, 55% regarded multi-level selection as superior to the theory of kin selection as an explanation of human sociality. If this uprising happened without your knowledge, it can all be traced back to one man, my guest, David Sloan Wilson, probably the most important evolutionary biologist you have never heard of. Dave is the guy who almost single-handedly revived a dead theory. Dave is the guy who burst into George C. Williams' office as a graduate student and said, I'm going to change your mind on group selection. That was the George C. Williams, the guy Dawkins said he was heavily influenced by,

the guy who wrote Adaptation and Natural Selection. He offered Dave a postdoc on the spot. Dave is also the guy who then went to convince Edward Wilson, the towering Harvard professor and world's foremost expert on ants, to sponsor a paper titled A Theory of Group Selection and eventually converted Ed to the cause. Dave is the guy who moral psychologist John Haidt called one of the most important evolutionary biologists of all time. Haidt also had this to say about Dave, quote, It's rare for an academic to be able to look at a major field like biology

and point to its history and say, you see that major turning point there? I did that. And that's what David did. That's what David can say. End quote. Dave is the guy who's probably most directly influenced my understanding of evolution. So how did he achieve this major coup in this major field of biology?

Well, this episode tells Dave's story. Of course, groupishness and pro-sociality don't require group selection as an explanation, but we humans are oddly groupish. Sometimes we do things for the good of the group, even when they're not seen or witnessed. We're probably what biologists call a eusocial species that's spelt E-U-S-O-C-I-A-L and includes bees and termites, naked mole rats. We are, to use John Hite's metaphor, 90% chimp and 10% bee. And once you understand multi-level selection, a lot of our odd groupish behaviors are suddenly rendered in a new light. It changes how you view human nature and it changes how you think we should structure our

societies. So if your learning of evolution stopped when you put down the selfish gene, this podcast is for you. Alternatively, if you're new to the topic, this episode is as good a place as any to start because Dave indulges me by running through some foundational concepts at the beginning of the conversation. Without much further ado, please enjoy my chat with David Sloan Wilson. David Sloan Wilson, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Happy to be here. I'm very excited to speak with you because of your monumental achievements in the field of evolutionary biology. And for a while there, you were like a lone voice clamoring in the wilderness. 70s when it was almost token to announce your group loyalty, I suppose, at the beginning of an evolutionary biology paper and say that, no, I'm not invoking group selection here.

Yes, that's right. Group loyalty to not invoking group selection. Exactly. Very ironic. But fast forwarding 40 or so years, and it's now commonplace to acknowledge your ideas and multi-level selection or at least the principle of equivalence which we'll speak about later. So, in this conversation, I want to learn how a somewhat un or under-appreciated profit morphed into an appreciated one and we're going to start with your background before moving into your career. And then we'll weave in some of your ideas on how humans evolved, how we should think about religion, and what all this means for how we structure our societies and our economies moving

into the 21st century. So, I'm very much looking forward to this. And the first question I want to ask relates to your childhood. Your father was a famous novelist, Sloane Wilson. He wrote two very popular books, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which was published in 1956, and A Summer Place, which was published in 1958. I read The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit in preparation for this interview. Well, not the whole book, just parts of it um which was probably his most famous novel and it was just so engrossing it's describing a suburban family um probably borrows from parts of his own life but it just sucks you in you know the the trials and tribulations and vicissitudes of this family

the vase thrown against the wall that leaves the question mark the question mark yeah shaped crack that our friends are sort of inquiring about at a dinner party and it just reminded me how much i miss fiction um since i've been reading non-fiction exclusively for the last four years um which uh which of his books do you like the most or do you even like his books well i do like his books um i mean he was uh he put his pulse his finger on the pulse twice uh with the man in the gray flannel suit that was uh after world war ii and all those soldiers coming back and joining this weird corporate army, basically. That's what the gray flannel suit is. And so he put his pulse on that.

And then with A Summer Place, he put his pulse on changing sexual mores in the 1960s. That story is about two adults who had a romance when they were teenagers and went their separate ways, married separate people, both became unhappy in marriage, and then meet again when they both have teenage children, and they resume their affair. And back then, that was shocking. I mean, that could be just destroy your reputation if you had an extramarital affair back then. And then their two children have an affair. So that is the narrative of Summer Place. So yeah, and he wrote other books. And among my favorites, there was one called Ice Brothers, which relates his experience in World War II as a captain of a Coast Guard supply ship in the Greenland patrol. So my dad was a great novelist.

And he achieved fame in 1956 with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which would have put you at about seven years old. How did his fame affect you as a child? The story I tell about myself is that, well, he was like, both by his personality and by his stature as a bestseller novelist, he was the center of attention wherever he went. He trumped everything. He trumped pedigree. He trumped wealth. Wherever he went, he was the center of attention. And I could not help but notice that. And I think that all offspring, maybe sons more than daughters, I don't know, but

your relationship to your parent, you see yourself basically as this is something you have to match. It's like a benchmark. And in my case, that was like climbing Mount Everest or being asked to. So that was intimidating. And I think kids solve that problem in a number of ways. In my case, the story I tell about myself is that I decided to do something that he could respect but could not understand. That would be a scientist. And do you know I succeeded admirably. He respected what I did, very proud of me, and actually never really understood very well what I did. But I think that I certainly inherited, maybe culturally, not genetically, or maybe both, a love of writing. And so I take writing very seriously. And as soon as I

saw that evolution could say something about the human condition, then that, in some ways, brought out the novelist in me, because what novelists do, of course, is they try to understand the human condition. My father did it through the lens of his personal experience. And now I saw that I could do it through the lens of a theory, evolutionary theory. But I could reflect upon the length and breadth of humanity. And so that was very attractive to me. And so I think that I came of age as a graduate student just when E.O. Wilson, we'll be talking about him, published Sociobiology. And Sociobiology was celebrated as a triumph for the study of animal behavior, but the final chapter

on humans created a storm of controversy. Basically, that's a place marker that in 1975, it was not acceptable, it was taboo to study humans from an evolutionary perspective, to say that somehow we can take the same theory that applies to all other species and apply it to our own species was not allowed back then, at least among many people in the humanities. So that was actually the same year I got my PhD. But for me, it was alluring, not threatening. So in some ways, I was at the vanguard of the post-sociobiology generation. Yeah. And I want to ask you about that in more

detail. I've asked you about your father. What was your mother like? My mom was a housewife and a very nurturing person. Both my mom and dad were not religious at all. My mom would call herself agnostic. My dad was a skeptic. He loved to poke fun at religion and its hypocrisy. But they were nevertheless very highly moral. And so if you read my father's books, you'll see that all the characters are trying to do well by each other. They might be failing at that, but they're trying to do well by each other. And I think that also explains perhaps why

when I became a graduate student and I started to encounter this idea that everything that evolves must be selfish. The idea that something is genuinely nice, genuinely altruistic. Why can't that be a product of evolution? So I think the selfish gene concept was something that offended my sensibilities. I thought it was important to be nice, and surely it should be possible to explain niceness at face value without calling it selfish. So there was another case in which when many people were running away from group selection, I ran towards it. And another story I tell about myself is that because my father was very famous, then I wanted to be famous too. What better way to make your reputation than to show that that theory of group selection, which everyone had rejected, in fact, could be revived.

I ran towards group selection rather than away from it in part because I wanted to make my name. So you were raised agnostic and you would now describe yourself as atheist? I was raised agnostic slash atheist. My dad would call himself an atheist. And now I certainly do describe myself as an atheist. I'm a true blue methodological naturalist, you might say. I feel that everything about religion can be explained as a human construction, as a human construction. And so, yes, I am an atheist. Yeah. So I was raised Catholic, but I'm now an atheist.

So we had probably radically different experiences in that regard. And that actually leads me to another question I want to ask about your childhood, the final kind of childhood background question. And that is you were sent to boarding school for high school. And that must have been a very formative experience. I went to boarding school as well for my last two years of high school. And for me, it fostered a love of being in and living in communities. We would, you know, would cheer as a whole school at the sport on the weekend, sing in the choir. And when you do communal activities like that, you really feel a part of something larger than yourself. Did you have a similar experience at boarding school? Did it inform your appreciation of human communities? Absolutely. So to elaborate on that, it's an important point. So to elaborate on it a little

bit, my folks were not happy in their marriage. And so they got divorced when I was 11. And before that, when I was 13, when I was 11 is when I got sent to boarding school. And my mom said, I don't remember it myself, but my mom said that I was following my father around saying, I'm sorry saying i'm sorry i'm sorry so evidently i was taking uh taking the problems of their marriage onto my little shoulder onto my little shoulders and so um uh she thought it was time to that wasn't very healthy and so she sent me to this boarding school which by luck or by her wisdom was the most amazing boarding school you have ever seen.

It was located in the Adirondack Mountains, which is a wilderness area of New York State. And it had the principles of basically a small village-like community. And so it offered this community that you're talking about to an extraordinary degree. And there was just saturated with the outdoors. There was a working farm. So, you know, horses and cows and pigs and chickens that the students took care of. The students did all the maintenance. So there we were sweeping the floors and doing kitchen duty in addition to our studies. Adults were called by their first name. It just went on and on. So it was the living embodiment of a small, nurturing, egalitarian community. And it was absolutely transformative. I feel blessed. And when you say that you had a great experience,

I'm happy about that. I think boarding schools are a mixed bag that way. And that many boarding schools actually are very problematic because they don't offer that community. You might say they're hierarchical. Think of the British boarding school model, which can be very nasty places. And as it turned out, that school only went to the eighth grade. And so I needed to go to another school in the ninth grade. I picked one that I thought was just like the first one. But no, possibly because there was just adolescentscence rather than younger kids, and also because it had a lack of structure. And this points out, I think, another general point,

is that in order for a community to be strong and nurturing, it cannot lack structure. There has to be some sense in which misbehavior is prohibited, monitored, and something is done about it if you misbehave. If a community lacks that, then you're going to get multiple forms of disruptive self-serving behaviors. And so that second school, because it lacked that kind of structure, they came into a kind of a Lord of the Flies society with cliques that were, you know, there wasn't physical violence, but there was lots of psychological violence, lots of drugs and stuff like that. So when it comes to communities, then they must have the right ingredients to offer that nurturing environment. So I'm happy to know that yours did. It did, yeah, and I agree.

I think boarding school, it can kind of either be Swiss Family Robinson or Lord of the Flies. It's a fine line, but it all depends on the way they're structured and controlled. But really, there's a take-home message here because that applies to all groups of all kinds. So what we just said about boarding schools applies to any kind of group. We'll get back to that. All groups, in order to be cooperative units, must have certain design features. And when they lack them, then they become like the Lord of the Flies.

Yeah. We'll get back to that. And that refers, I guess, to Eleanor Ostrom's core design principles. Yep. Now, Dave, I want to ask you about how you first encountered the theory of natural selection. And for me, natural selection is one of those elegantly tautological ideas that has so much explanatory power. I often think, I can't remember where I first heard this,

but you can think of the power of an idea as being how much it explains divided by how much it assumes. And Dan Dennett once called natural selection the best idea that anyone ever had. Maybe that's going slightly too far, but I certainly wouldn't call it hyperbole either. And I'd love to know, do you remember the moment you first fell in love with the idea such that you decided it was worthy of building an intellectual career around? Was it a moment or was it a gradual process? Well, it happened in a way it happened in my sophomore year in college.

Throughout my upbringing, because I did have a lot of outdoors, then I love being outdoors. I love studying animals and things like that. And so I did that even before I went to college. By the time I got to college, I was undecided as to whether I should go into philosophy, music, or biology. And by the first year of college, I swung in the direction of biology. And it was at that point that evolution just came very naturally to me. I've written elsewhere that I read Ernst Maher's Animal Species and Evolution, which is an 800-page tome, in a week. So it was just an idea that I took to like a duck to water. I was not a good student. All of my schools were my safeties, basically. I applied to the best schools and

was rejected by all of them and then went to my so-called safety schools, although those turned out to be very good. And at the University of Rochester, I I did poorly in my lecture classes, but I was lucky to to to work in the laboratory of a professor named Conrad Istok. And once I was basically in somebody's laboratory and operating in graduate student mode, there's such a difference between undergraduate education and graduate education. There's a night and day difference. And actually, undergraduate education should be like graduate education. There's no excuse for undergraduate education other than just the need to teach students in mass numbers. But once I was in a lab capable of doing my own inquiry, that's where I thrived and just began soaking up evolution and basically functioning like a graduate student starting in my sophomore year in college. For people who aren't familiar with the theory,

tell us the three conditions required for natural selection. Well, you said it nicely that the ratio of what it assumes and what it explains, is that how you put it? Yeah. Yeah, so three ingredients to the theory of natural selection. First, organisms vary in just about everything that could be measured. Number two, those differences make a difference in terms of survival and reproduction. And number three, offspring tend to resemble their parents.

Darwin didn't know why, but he did know that. And so put those three ingredients together, and you have your conclusion that populations do not remain constant over time. They change, and traits that adapt them, contribute to their survival and reproduction, accumulate in the population. And so it's by this process that organisms become well adapted to their environments. It's that simple. And should we think about natural selection and evolution as synonymous terms?

There is a big difference. Evolution you can define broadly as change change and natural selection is one process of change, but there are others. So drift is also a process of change. You can have differences. Let's say that you had differences, things that you can measure that don't stay the same. Just chance will cause them to, to, um, uh, change in their, in their, uh, frequency. Then there's a whole bag of other things, byproducts and, and, um, you know, a trade is not an atomistic, um, entity. A trade is a, is a result of development. It's, it's linked to other traits.

And so it's not as if each and every thing you can measure in an organism has or requires a separate adaptive explanation. So natural selection is certainly the centerpiece of Darwin's theory of evolution, but evolution will always be a broader category than natural selection. So evolution evolves by a number of mutual processes like random drift, byproducts like spandrels, but the most important one for us to understand, at least for this conversation, is evolution by natural selection. The reason that it has a special status is because you can reason on the basis of natural selection

in a way that doesn't require any knowledge of the physical makeup of the organism. The way I often state this is in a class, works every time. So picture a desert, a standard desert, and I'm going to ask you the question, what color are most of the species in the desert? And of course, everyone says brown. And then why would that be? Why would that be? Well, unless you're a creationist, then when you unpack that, actually, individuals in the desert vary in their coloration, but the ones that blend in are the ones that survive and reproduce. How about a white desert?

Some deserts have white sand. How about a black desert? Some deserts have black sand. So what are you doing is you are actually making a very intelligent guess, which turns out to be true, about the properties of organisms without needing to know anything about their physical makeup. Not their genes, not their molded by environmental forces. So it's on the basis of the environment that you predict the properties of the organism, not the basis of their physical makeup. So this provides what I call a third way of thinking. Before natural selection thinking, you only had two ways to explain something. It's physical makeup or some theological explanation. And so I think the true significance of natural selection is just that, is that it provides a way of understanding the properties of organisms without needing to know anything about their physical makeup. And that makes it a holistic explanation. I hope we actually

get to the distinction between reductionism and holism. Reductionism says the only way to understand something is to take it apart and to study its parts. Holism says the parts permit the whole to have its properties, but they do not cause the whole to have its properties. That's the quintessential holistic statement. And do you don't, natural selection thinking says exactly that, is that basically natural selection, where the properties of organisms are molded not by the parts, the physical makeup of the organism permits the organism to have its properties, but those properties are caused by the environmental forces. This is sometimes called downward causation, downward causation. So it really

maps very nicely onto the reductionism-holism distinction and provides a basis for holistic thinking, which is rock solid, scientifically justifiable. I want to ask you another question about your time as a student, Dave. You've mentioned Ernst Maher's book, Animal Species and Evolution, and you mentioned Ed Wilson's book, Sociobiology. Were there any other life-changing books you read while you were at college, or are those the only two in that sort of category? Well, I did enter school even as an undergraduate student when, at the moment, the group selection had been rejected. And so, I actually don't remember whether I read Wynne Edwards' book,

Animal Dispersion and Evolution, cover to cover. But it was definitely in the air. So even as an undergraduate student, I had encountered Wynne Edwards and his rejection. I also am not sure. I don't think i read gc williams adaptation and natural selection which came out in 1966 um so but these things were also in the air so my first encounter with with group selection was uh um and when edwards was when I was an undergraduate student. And my first kind of effort to show how group selection could work was actually my undergraduate thesis.

Let me just elaborate a little bit, actually. Please. Get a little bit more specific. So when Edwards speculated many times about group selection, for one of them was he tried to explain vertical migration in zooplankton. So zooplankton, the adults migrate diurnally. They go down into the depths during the day. This is probably to avoid predation. So the young zooplankton, because they're small, stay up in the surface. The adults go down deep. When Edwards interpreted this as a kind of form of mass parental care, that the adults were collectively leaving the

food rich zone in order to provide food for their offspring. This probably isn't true, but I took it as my challenge. And what's so interesting about zooplankton, as I learned, is that even though you'd think that in an aquatic or marine environment like that, surely everything should be well mixed, right? What could be better mixed than an ocean? But as it turns out, the distributions of plankton in the ocean are amazingly patchy. Patchy. If you actually sample zooplankton, either vertically or horizontally, you find that they're patchy. And this is because the many currents and the waves

and so on actually have a way of aggregating. They don't just disperse. And of course, group selection is all about, there has to be groups. But basically, there has to be multiple groups and they have to vary. And damned if, when you think about patchiness in the ocean, the ocean provides perhaps the kind of patchiness that might enable a group selection process. down into the deeper water. And when they come up again, probably they're horizontally separated from their own offspring, right? Because of all the different waves, the currents at different levels and stuff like that.

So if the adults want to segregate themselves horizontally from their offspring, all they'd have to do is migrate vertically and that would be accomplished. So there was actually a logic to Wynne Edwards' theory and that's what I worked out as an undergraduate student with very primitive computer simulations and stuff like that. And that was in your second year at college, right? My third or fourth year in college, yeah.

Okay, fascinating. my third or fourth year in college okay fascinating well now now you've brought up group selection we we probably should speak about it because there's some people who who who won't be following what it actually means and i'm actually gonna define it very carefully with you with your help dave and i thought we could we could start by actually discussing what group selection is not, then move to the intellectual history of group selection, and then finally get your sort of elevator pitch for multi-level selection. So let's begin by discussing what group selection is not. And I can think of at least three misconceptions. I'll go into each and get your comment and then you can add anything I've missed. The first and most casually incorrect idea of group selection is the one that George C. Williams picked up on in the book you just mentioned,

Adaptation and Natural Selection, the one published in 1966. And he highlighted the fact that sometimes the term is redundantly used to refer to an individual trait that just happens to be shared by members of a group. And he famously gives the example of the original quote is a fleet herd of deer, but let's just say a fast herd of deer. And a fast herd of deer is really just a herd of fast deer. What did he mean by that? So yeah, that's an important distinction. So imagine that there's no social behaviors at all. There's just slow deer and fast deer. There's no social behavior. And nevertheless, they're clustered into different groups. And so that means that some of these groups are faster than others just by virtue of their composition. William said correctly,

no group selection is going on here. There's a difference between groups, but that's not group selection. Now, let's contrast that to something that is group selection. Okay. Let's say, for example, that when adults, a predator comes, adults form a circle, and they protect their young within the circle, okay? Now we have something where if you're, or I'll give you a better one, which is a real example, a territorial defense in lions. So imagine a lion pride, females, you know, six or seven females, there's a territorial threat, another pride is trying to infringe on their territory. You have to fight, right?

And so what happens if there's some individuals that hang back, then their fitness is going to be greater than the ones that fight, at least within the pride. So now you have a social behavior. The difference between a social behavior and a non-social behavior is a non-social behavior like running fast only influences your fitness. It doesn't influence anyone else's fitness. A social behavior influences not only your own fitness, but the fitness of others around you, the fitness of others around you. And so bravery in a fight versus cowardice in a fight, that's consequential, not just for you, but for the others in your vicinity.

And so group selection is about social behaviors. It's not about non-social behaviors. Group selection makes no sense for non-social behavior so that was the distinction that that um williams was uh uh was making and uh in that distinction between the herd of fleet deer and the fleet herd of deer so a trait shared by a group did not evolve by group selection if the trait only affects individuals and it's not a social trait right okay next thing group selection is not talk about for the good of the group thinking and animals that people might perceive to be sacrificing themselves for their species? Well, I want to say, in fact, I do say that group selection is about traits that are for the good of the group.

That's the quintessential group selection question. Sorry to interrupt. Naive group selection is a little bit than than what you think to be the correct form of for the good of the group thinking am i right well i want to say that naive group selection is like a um um um you know they say that you know, history gets told by the victors. And so in the rejection of group selection, then they started to talk about naive group selection. So I think we should first talk about, you know, what group selection is and then talk about what might qualify as naive group selection. Is that OK?

Go for it. So I think that group selection begins with Darwin, and Darwin at the beginning thought that his theory of natural selection could explain all aspects of design that had been attributed to a creator. But gradually, he realized that that was not the case. And the exception were all of the traits associated with morality and virtue. Everything that we regard as morally virtuous. I play this game with audiences all the time. I ask them, and I'll ask you, just describe for me the morally perfect individual. What are the adjectives that would be used to describe the morally perfect individual? Altruistic, pro-social, doesn't lie,

sacrifices for the group, kind, generous. Yeah, that's right. 100% of the time you get that answer. Now, if you think of those social behaviors from an evolutionary perspective, of course, what's the alternative to these things? So what's the opposite of the morally perfect individual? Spit out some adjectives for evil incarnate. Selfish, thieving, lying, stealing, cheating.

Yeah, okay. So just imagine a Darwinian contest between these two classes of traits. And what you find is that the virtuous traits do not have the advantage. They are inherently vulnerable to the traits that we associate with evil. And if we just state that a little more formally, is that doing something for others or for a group as a whole, inherently requires time, energy, and risk on the part of the individual actor. And for those individuals that are not virtuous, they accept those social benefits without providing them. And so therefore, in any group that contains more proocial and less prosocial individuals, the advantage goes to the less prosocial individual. Darwin said it is true that the morally virtuous individual

does not more fit compared to someone else within their own group. And so Darwin's theory did not have the capacity to explain all of the behaviors that we associate as virtuous. And those behaviors, of course, are for the good of the group, for the good of others, and for the good of the group. It's those traits that Darwin could not explain on the basis of competition among individuals that are socially interacting with each other. And so this was a dilemma of the first rank for him. How could he explain these behaviors? And the answer was not far to seek.

It is actually pretty obvious that although at the most local level, at the level of the group of individuals that are socially interacting with each other, that selfishness beats altruism, but a group of altruists will robustly outcompete a group of selfish individuals. And so as soon as you imagine that the evolving population consists of multiple social groups, tribes, as Darwin put it, or he also used the word community. But as soon as we begin to think of the evolving population of consisting of multiple groups, then we can explain the evolution of altruism and all of its forms. Any trait that's for the good of the group will be positively

selected by between-group competition. So that was why Darwin needed the theory of group selection in order to explain this very important class of traits that are for the good of the group. That was the origin of group selection theory and the thread that continued through the whole history of the subject. We could follow that thread all the way through to the first, the birth of population genetics, so the fathers of population genetics were Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewell Wright. These were the people that put the theory of evolution on a mathematical foundation, basically building models of Mendelian inheritance. And they had a lot of work to do just to build the whole mathematical framework for studying evolution. Against that background, this particular problem of altruism, as strange as it might seem, did not loom very large. It was not like a central issue.

There was too much else that they had to do. But nevertheless, each one considered the problem briefly. And in all cases, they basically recapitulated Darwin's thinking. How do we explain a trait that is good for the group, but selectively disadvantageous within groups? The only way we can do it is by positing a multi-group population and some sense in which the more altruistic groups contribute more to the gene pool than the less altruistic groups. Each did so in a different way with different specific conceptions of groups. Now, against that background, now we can get to naive group selection because not all biologists were as discerning as Darwin. And many of them didn't know much about population genetics. So you have to understand that the kind of the integration of the different branches of biology.

Today, we have like ecology, evolution, behavior. Those are fused. We call that EEB. Obviously, population genetics is part of this integration and so on. But back then, in the first decades of the 20th century, when population genetics was just getting started and was mathematical, then there were all kinds of naturalists and biologists who studied nature, which didn't know anything about that. And quite a few of them thought that behaviors could evolve for the good of the group without requiring special circumstances. That basically natural selection produces adaptations at all levels for the individual, for the group, for the ecosystem. So they were not very discerning

about the special conditions that were required. In retrospect, we can call that naive group selection. And yes, there were naive group selectionists. And really what the contribution of G.C. Williams, here's the story of how he wrote Adaptation and Natural Selection. He got his PhD at UC Berkeley, and he did receive training in population genetics. So he was well trained for his time. And then he did a postdoc at the University of Chicago. This was before when Edwards wrote his book. And he went into a lecture by a termite biologist named Alfred Emerson, a very well-known biologist, a termite biologist. And of course, termites

are the quintessential superorganism. Today, we know that the eusocial insect colonies are definitely units of selection. But Emerson generalized beyond that. He explained, you know, he thought about all of nature as like a termite colony. And this disgusted George Williams. He said he loved that lecture. And he said, if this is biology, I want to do something else, like become a car salesman. And so George set about writing a book that critiqued, basically basically this kind of sloppy thinking that behaviors evolve for the good of the group. And it was only while he was writing that book that Wynne Edwards published his book. So George's book was not a response to Wynne Edwards' book they're still spaced four years apart.

When Edwards was published in 1962, Williams in 1966. So Williams had plenty of time to kind of add with Edwin Edwards to the list of of naive group selectionists. But so George quite properly, what he was doing, and he himself thought of it this way, was he was kind of trying to educate biologists in population genetics theory and to cause them to think more rigorously about lots of things, not just group selection. And in the process, he also came to the conclusion that not only does group selection require special conditions, but those conditions are so special that it hardly exists at all. It could exist in principle, but in practice, he claimed almost everything could be explained

as a product of within-group selection. Lower-level selection is almost invariably stronger than higher-level selection, was the empirical conclusion that he came to. Got it. So that's really what I wanted to bring out in terms of what group selection is not. It's not that sloppy thinking that George Williams reacted to that between group selection easily trumps within group selection. But you gave us

some necessary background. So thank you for that. And I think that also leads to another thing group selection is not, which I want to highlight and underscore here, which has been implicit in everything you've said, Dave. But I think for people who aren't familiar with evolutionary biology, it's important to point this out. And that is that group selection isn't mutually exclusive with or some sort of alternative framework to gene level selection or individual level selection. And really what you mean when you say group selection is multi-level selection. Do you just want to make a comment on that? If you think about what we've already said, group selection is a series of nested comparisons. First, you compare the

fitness of individuals within groups, and it's at that level that selfishness beats altruism. Then you compare the fitness differences between groups in a multi-group population. That's where altruism beats selfishness. But you're always comparing the fitness of units within the next higher unit, okay? Now, we can frame shift downward, and we can compare the fitness of genes within individuals. And we have cases such as meiotic drive and certainly cancer, in which genes can be more fit than other genes within the same individual. So that would be now extending this nested fitness comparisons. Units within higher units.

What are the fitness of genes within individuals? What's the fitness of individuals within groups? What's the fitness of groups within a multi-group population? It's in this sense that gene level selection and individual level selection and group level selection are distinct from each other. They're non-overlapping, okay? Now, but there's another sense of gene level selection and individual level selection. Let's say, take a gene that's not a selfish gene in the first sense. Let's take a gene that basically just makes you more fit as an individual and all the other genes within you. Okay. So there's no difference in the fitness of genes

in this scenario. The gene is benefiting everyone, okay? And nevertheless, it evolves by virtue of the fact that the individual is more fit than other individuals. Now you can still say that that gene is more fit than other genes, all things considered, not within the individual, but all things considered. It evolves. And anything that evolves is more fit than what doesn't evolve. And so there's a second meaning of selfish genes,

not selfish in the sense of more fit than other genes within the same individual, but selfish in the sense of more fit than other genes within the same individual, but selfish in the sense of more fit all things considered. And it's here where that concept of gene selfishness, which is Dawkins' concept, overlaps with group selection and with individual level selection. In other words, a trait can evolve by group selection. A gene for altruism can evolve by group selection. But when it does, that gene is more fit than the genes that didn't evolve. And so you can call it selfish just by virtue of the fact that it evolved. So here's where we get into these like

different frames of comparison. And it introduces us to the concept of equivalence. There seems to be different ways of accounting for evolutionary change. And they're both correct. I mean, they both correctly predict what evolves in the total population. But you can erroneously treat one as an argument against the other. And that's where all the trouble begins. That's where the confusion starts and was endemic in the 19, with the whole rejection of group selection was a confusion basically of this sort. I don't know if that's going to be clear to your readers, to your listeners.

It's a very important point to establish, however. I agree. And I think it will be clear, if not now, then momentarily. Let's turn now to when group selection fell out of favor. Tell us about how that happened. The main thing I want to say about that is to situate it in very broad cultural terms with what I think is the advent of individualism as a broad cultural phenomenon. So let me set the stage for this a little bit.

If you go back to the first half of the 20th century and the 19th century, of course, the idea of society as something which is an entity in its own right, which cannot be reduced to lower level processes, not biology, not even psychology was a very, very common idea. Also, the idea that society is an organism in its own right. And Durkheim is somebody that's associated with this. The birth of the whole field of sociology established itself as that basically we need to study society on its own terms. It just can't be reduced. That led to a tradition called functionalism, which basically explained cultures and societies on the basis of how well they worked for the group, basically. That was the primary explanation.

And you could find it in social psychology and anthropology and so on. It actually was the dominant tradition, but then it fell out of favor for a good reason. What was that reason? It was too axiomatic. It was as if like every feature of a society or culture had to be explained as for the good of the group. And so it deserved to be rejected as too axiomatic, but what replaced it? So what replaced it was often called individualism, and it basically is a commitment to the idea that the most fundamental explanation is at the individual level. You do not understand something unless you understand it in terms of individual thoughts and actions. And so this became prominent across disciplines. In economics, it's called rational choice theory, homo economicus, the rational actor, basically. The economic profession is penetrated by individualism.

We're going to explain economic phenomenon in terms of individual self-interest. It's called methodological individualism in the social sciences. And in everyday life, we have people like Margaret Thatcher saying there's no such thing of society, only individuals and their families. So there actually is nothing social other than a consequence of what individuals do in order to maximize their utilities or their self-interest. Well, isn't it curious that at the same time these things were happening across the board, then that also is when evolution had its individualistic swing, and that evolutionists decided that really everything has to be explained as a form of lower level selection. Williams called it the theory of individual selection.

And then Dawkins notched it still further down to a theory of gene level selection. So in some ways, it seems that what took place in evolution was marching in lockstep with broader cultural trends. And I think that's a very important point to make. We cannot explain what happened in the field of evolution in isolation from what was happening elsewhere. And social historians are needed to explain in detail just what was going on and what was causing what. So this normative worldview of radical individualism, the sort of Ayn Rand view of the world, permeated the sciences, including evolutionary biology, and struck a deep resonance with the idea of individual-level selection. Absolutely. Sorry, Dave, is there anything in the writings of the Genes Eye view

or the individual selectionists that would be evidence for that theory? I think some of these have, you might say, I don't think this is necessarily ideologically driven. Right. I think part of it is the advent of mathematical models. And because mathematical models, almost by definition, are reductionistic and simplifying and are going to be individualistic in how they are constructed. There's a cycle that I think, I don't think it's inevitable, but it happens more often than not,

that as soon as you think of things mathematically, there's a simplification stage where you build these really simple models. You try to explain as much as you can with them. And then gradually, there's things that you cannot explain with those models, and those models become more and more complex. So you begin, like, appreciating complexity. You know, nature is a big tapestry. Then you try to understand it with mathematical models, and that becomes like simple Locke-Voltaire equations and things like that.

And then gradually that explains some stuff, but then there's lots left over. And then at the end of the day, you're appreciating complexity again. I mean, just think that the whole study of complex systems, complexity theory, didn't really begin until the 60s or the 70s, required computer simulation models, which in turn required, you know, the advent of desktop computing and stuff like that. You couldn't actually study complexity until you had widespread access to computers. So we have these things going on. But I mean, I was there. So I can remember, let me quote, let me give you two quotes. And one of them is from Brett Weinstein's mentor, Richard Alexander. But just to give you the tenor of the times. Yeah, here's two quotes. One is from Michael Gislin and his book, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex.

And so what you have here is that theorists, the evolutionary theorists, were actively looking to economics. You know, first came economics, rational choice theory, and then came the evolutionists emulating the economists. That was true for John Maynard Smith, for example, with evolutionary game theory, emulating economic game theory. And so, and at the time, people were so excited because isn't it exciting that our evolutionary models are kind of mapping on to economic models? I mean, the main difference is that economic models talk about utility and we talk about fitness maximization, but other than that, they're the same. That was the kind of the zeitgeist. And so here's a quote from, a notorious quote from Gislin. This was published, I think, in 1974. The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. The impulses that lead one

animal to sacrifice himself for another turn out to have their ultimate rationale and gaining an advantage over the third where it is in his own interest every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows yet given a full chance to act in his own interest nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing from maiming from murdering his brother his mate his parent or his child scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed. Wow. Now talk about dispassionate science. Yeah, scientists, they don't have an extra grind.

And here's a quote from Brett Weinstein's mentor, Richard Alexander, who, by the way, was a great scientist. I think that although he insisted on seeing things through an individualistic lens, including all of morality, it's not to say that he didn't make contributions, but in any case, here is Alexander, 1987, it's a long time past, in his book, The Biology of Moral Systems. I suspect that nearly all humans believe it is a normal part of the functioning of every human individual now and then to assist someone else in the realization of that person's own interest to the actual net expense of those of the altruist. What this greatest intellectual revolution of the century, in other words, the individualistic perspective in evolutionary biology, tells us is that despite our intuitions, there is not a shred of evidence to support this view of beneficence. And a great deal of convincing theories suggest that any such view will eventually be judged false.

So the message here is that although we think that we act on behalf of others and that that could be accepted at face value, actually, that's not true. And that the greatest intellectual revolution of the century is to tell us that everything that we associate with morality can be understood as a form of self-interest. So there you have the individualistic perspective in full swing. And what I find so remarkable is that if we place that against functionalism, if we rejected functionalism for being axiomatic, as we should, then individualism of this sort is also axiomatic. We must explain everything as a form of individual self-interest. And I think that what's special about what's happening now with multi-level selection theory and other theories, because we have to acknowledge equivalence, is that we now have something which is not axiomatic.

We could actually, on a case-by-case basis, we could look at some product of evolution and we can say, for example, in this case, it evolved by within-group selection, and so it deserves to be called an individual-level adaptation. In that case, it evolved by group selection. It deserves to be called a group level adaptation. You can call it on a case-by-case basis. That means it's no longer axiomatic. And that is, I think, a very important point to make. It's incredible the parallels between where evolutionary theory went wrong and where neoclassical economics went wrong. Like taking macroeconomics, for example, it's not just that it assumes all the units or the

individual agents in the economy are selfish utility maximizing machines, but also it overlooks the emergent phenomena of how they act and interact in groups. You know, things like conformity, herding. That's the psychology of bubbles, which neoclassical economics was just blind to for so long. Yep, totally, totally. And that's why this parallel history of economics and, well, again, it goes beyond even those two fields.

It extends to the social sciences and so on. And social psychology, completely taken over by the individualistic perspective. So it's broader than any of those. But you're absolutely right that, and in this sense, I think evolutionary biology has advanced beyond economic theory. Economic theory is still stuck, very much stuck with individualism, even like behavioral economics, which is certainly an advance over rational choice theory, but it's still individualistic. It's still talking about individuals as now basically being guided by heuristics and biases rather than rational choice. But it's still very much an individual level of description.

Whereas evolution, to the extent that it embraces multilevel selection theory, now has really started to explain phenomenon as a group level adaptation, including such things as religion, which we'll be getting to. Yeah, I think you make a good point about how even behavioral economics is still grounded in an individualistic paradigm. You know, Daniel Kahneman has the metaphor or the two characters of system one and system two, system one being the fast intuitive thinking, which results in the biases and system two being the slower, more effortful thinking. I often like to hijack that metaphor and talk about system three, which is, you know, the social influences between people.

That's a totally different category altogether exactly exactly the idea that we're more like ant colonies than we than we have imagined in the past that's the degree to which the our individual brains evolved in the context of groups so much yeah so much that we're to a degree it's a very careful comparison that you have to make, we're like an ant in an ant colony. That is true in its own special way to a remarkable degree. And that is beyond the imagination of many people. Yeah.

Or to borrow John Haidt's metaphor, when 90% chimp and 10% bee. Yeah. Yeah. I'd quibble with the proportions, but... Oh, you'd make it more in favor of the bees? Yeah. Wow. What percentages would you put on it?

I mean, obviously it's just a metaphor but no we'll talk about i think uh it's on our agenda to talk about jim cohen's work yeah and social social baseline uh theory but i mean we can do it now if you want or we can do it later but uh let's let's do it later then because i want to uh in in this story this intellectual history of group selection now swaying back to individual level selection and inclusive fitness beginning with uh you know jbs haldane and wd hamilton and george c williams i want to rejoin the story where where you kind of enter the picture dave and you published your first academic article on group selection in 1975 and it was titled a theory of group selection but there's actually kind of a cool story around that

uh because you in 1974 you got ed wilson the you know preeminent, towering man at Harvard, the world expert on insects and ants. And you had him sponsor the paper. And I want to ask you about that. And I want you to tell us the story of when you burst into George C. Williams' office at Stony Brook. And what happened there? Well, so I told you that I kind of tinkered with group selection as an undergraduate student and that was on zooplankton. I went to graduate school, once again my safety, I didn't get into any other college but my safety, Michigan State, which turned out to be a great choice. And I was intending to be a zooplankton ecologist, not studying group selection or vertical migration.

I was actually studying issues relating to feeding and the like. I actually met Ed Wilson the first time at Woods Hole, which is a great marine biological laboratory. I was taking a course in marine ecology, and he was one of the teachers of that course. And so this has nothing to do with group selection. I was studying feeding and copepods, but that was my first encounter with Ed Wilson was there. Anyhow, I was most of the way through my thesis on not group selection when a paper on vertical migration came out, and it just caused me to dust off my old ideas. And by then, I'd become a modeler. Not only was I studying zooplankton, but I had become a little bit proficient at building mathematical

models, very simple algebraic models, nothing sophisticated. Nevertheless, I started to build a model of group selection that suddenly became very general, way beyond zooplankton and it was like i immediately understood its significance that here was a quite a general explanation of how group selection could actually be a strong evolutionary force so i must have been a bold person because I just contacted Ed Wilson on the spot and said I wanted to speak with him. And he said, yes, he's a very gallant Southern gentleman and is nurturing of students. And then on my way, I did visit George Williams at Stony Brook, and I did burst into his office and said, I want to convince you about, I'm going to convince you about group selection. And he did offer me a postdoc on the spot, which says something very nice about George.

And that actually was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with George C. Williams. This is how science should work at all times, where intellectual adversaries are actually can be the best of friends. And I was already had cultivated a postdoc with someone else at Harvard named Tom Shaner. So I was not about to do a postdoc with George Williams. And then I went to Ed Wilson. And Ed is, of course, a very busy person. And so he had allotted me like a fixed amount of time. And he always shows people his ant lab and stuff like that. So we took a tour of his ant lab at the museum of comparative zoology and then he sat down in a chair and put me in front of a blackboard and he said you have 20 minutes and so i uh i've talked like an auctioneer he's a hard man that's right and uh and so he agreed to

to look at my paper and he sent it out to review and that it ended up being published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science. And then that created a dilemma for my PhD advisor because this paper on group selection had nothing to do with the rest of my thesis. And my PhD advisor, a pre-spirited man named Don Hall, decided that if my PNAS paper was good enough for PNAS and Ed Wilson, it was good enough for a PhD thesis. So that became my entire thesis. Yeah. How old were you when that paper was published i would have been 24 wow that's crazy well done i mean a lot of a lot of a lot of people i mean that was in part because it was a really generative uh time this was the 1973 this was the year. This was the decade where, of course, sociobiology was published. This was the decade where Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. This was the decade that Tinbergen, Lorenz and von Frisch

got the Nobel Prize for their work. And so what was happening was these historically separate fields of ecology, evolution, and behavior were fusing. And it was like the beginning of rock and roll, you might say. I mean, mathematical models were just coming into their own. And so it meant that

if a graduate student was like in the middle of this, then there were so many things to discover, so many models to build, so many studies to do. The concept of optimal foraging theory, that you can study foraging in terms of fitness maximization. How would a predator forage for prey if it was attempting to maximize its energy intake? Let's build an economic model of that. And this led to predictions that you could test.

And so the whole kind of transformation of biology biology whole organism biology from a sort of a natural history descriptive typological phase to a predictive phase with models and testing and so that's what i was lucky enough to to um to be present for so i think that you know we know that in many cases there's times when when something big starts, like rock and roll, and the people that are there, they, they become the classics. And then what follows, it becomes a little bit derivative. So I attribute some of this to, to those times, basically. Quite a few, in fact, many people made foundational contributions as graduate students. Yeah. At this point, Dave, I want to quote a couple of sentences from your famous 2007 paper with Ed Wilson, who you eventually converted to the cause and co-authored some

influential papers with. And I just want to quote the way you and Ed define multi-level selection, just to solidify the concept for people before asking you about altruism. Would that be okay? Sure. I just think this is a really neat quote. So, you and Ed write that, quote, natural selection takes place at more than one level of the biological hierarchy. Selfish individuals might out-compete altruists within groups, but internally altruistic groups out-compete selfish groups. This is the essential logic of what has become known as multilevel selection theory, end quote. So that in a very tight nutshell is multilevel selection.

But of course, the quintessential battlegrounds for gene level selection versus multilevel selection is altruistic behavior. And I want to ask you a few questions about this. And I thought maybe we should begin by briefly defining what altruism is. And the person who actually coined the term altruism was Auguste Comte. How did he define altruism? Isn't it strange that the word altruism didn't even exist until the mid-1800s? That seems shocking. Do you know what word they used before that? I think there were words for community and things like that, German words for community, but not um um altruism and what uh what comte was was trying to do

he was one of the first big thinkers trying to create a whole cosmology that was not religious he called it the religion of man uh herbert sp Spencer was another person that was trying to basically create a cosmology that was not a religious cosmology. And Comte coined the word altruism in part to contrast it with Catholic thought. And, I mean, if you're a Catholic or a Christian, then you do good deeds to go to heaven. It's like a selfish motive to be altruistic. And so a lot of the motive, and this is true with most religious systems, if you ask how does the religious cosmology motivate people to be other-oriented,

it's in part with individual incentives, not just an afterlife, but other benefits, including worldly benefits. And so Comte coined altruism as something that was like a more pure motivation, something that was more genuinely other-oriented, as an end in itself. So that was roughly the context for the word to be coined. Got it. Now, how have evolutionary biologists co-opted and defined this word? Well, one point to make is that there's two major definitions of altruism,

which very much need to be distinguished, and were not originally. The first from multilevel selection is based on comparison within groups. It's a relative fitness comparison. If I do something that benefits others or the group as a whole, and that places me at a relative fitness disadvantage, that's altruistic. Just let's say this. Let's say I do something that's good for everyone in my group, including me. It gives a fitness benefit of one, and it costs me

a little bit, 0.1. And so that means that my fitness is 0.9, and everyone else's fitness is one. So I've increased my absolute fitness, but I've decreased my relative fitness. That makes me an altruist, because when altruism is defined in terms of relative fitness. Now, the other definition of altruism is based on absolute fitness. I'm not an altruist unless I actually benefit someone at some net absolute cost to myself. And so there you have two definitions of altruism. And in the example I gave, that example counts as altruistic according to the first definition, but not according to the second definition. And when Hamilton constructed inclusive fitness theory, it was based on absolute fitness. So the distinction between inclusive fitness theory and multi-level selection theory,

it's hard to compare them because they actually employ different definitions of altruism. We can say that now, but at the time, that was like not at all understood. You can call that naive. I mean, if we're going to call group selectionists naive for not being sufficiently nuanced about the special conditions, then we're getting into territory here that we're like genuine confusions that required many years, actually, for smart people to sort out. I want to make the point that there's something about group selection that's very subtle. The idea that a trait can be selectively disadvantageous in every group where it exists, but still evolve seems impossible it's actually called a it's a statistical paradox called the simpson simpson's paradox and it has applications outside of of evolutionary theory so there's something genuinely subtle about about some of these

distinctions that required very smart people quite a lot of time in order to work through. But in retrospect, we can look back and we could say, these folks were genuinely confused. That's a crucial distinction, relative and absolute fitness. Absolutely crucial. Yeah. absolutely crucial yeah what i want to do now dave is briefly canvas some of the individual selectionist explanations of altruism and i can identify three i think this covers the field we have kin selection reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity does that does that covers the field. We have kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and indirect reciprocity. Does that cover the field? Let's say so, and then I might add some more later on, but those are certainly, when you think of the main frameworks that passes alternatives to

group selection, then those are the main ones, yes. Great. So just so we know what we're up against, can you give us a brief outline of each of those? Let's start with kin selection. Well, in its original formulation, kin selection refers to genealogical kin. Genes that are identical by descent and so Hamilton created a model which calculated something called inclusive fitness it was the effect of an action not just on the individual but on all of the genes that are identical by descent in the individual and in the recipient of the action.

So let's say that I'm an altruist. I do something. It's negative for me, so I have a cost. It's beneficial for the recipient, okay, but what's the probability that the recipient has the same gene identical by descent. If it's a non-relative, that probability is zero. If it's a relative, then there is some probability of sharing the gene, which is basically proportional to the degree of relatedness. So if it's a cousin, it's less than a brother. If it's a brother, it's less than an identical twin. If it's an identical twin, you know that the recipient has

the same gene as the actor. And so Hamilton's rule basically calculates the effect of the behavior on the actor plus the recipient, weighted by the probability. That's what the R coefficient is, the coefficient of relatedness. And it asks the question, when is there a net increase in the altruistic allele? Now, here we have, again, an absolute fitness criteria. When does this behavior increase the net increase of the altruistic allele? That's not comparative, is it? So, nevertheless, given certain other assumptions, then that does predict what evolves in the total population. And so now we can say that altruism evolves.

Altruism is a form of inclusive fitness maximization. Altruism is actually the individual maximizing its own inclusive fitness. So you have permuted altruism to a form of selfishness. Got it. So RB is greater than C is kind of like the little, the slogan. Yep. That is the, uh, that is the, uh, slogan and it created a sensation and was, uh, and was regarded as a, uh, uh, as an alternative explanation. We don't need group selection now, uh, because we can explain altruism with inclusive fitness. And at that time, it was confined to genealogical relatives. An important corollary was that in some insects with a haplodiploid genetic system where the females are diploid and the males are haploid, then that creates an extra high degree of relatedness among sisters. And Hamilton used

this to explain why it is that most, but not all, because the termites are an exception, eusocial insects are hymenoptera, have this haplodiploid genetic system. So kin selection explains why altruistic behaviors towards relatives would evolve by gene level selection. But of course, humans are altruistic towards people who aren't related to them in the gene pool. But the individual selectionists had an answer to that too. Bob Trivers came along with reciprocal altruism. How did that theory work? And so once again, the idea there is I scratch your back, you scratch mine, is that altruism can pay if there's a return benefit. So in the case of kin selection, that's not required.

A single altruistic act evolves. It's not reciprocated. But the reason it evolves is that the recipient shares the altruistic gene. So a single act increases the copies of the altruistic gene. Now, if that's not the case, if you're interacting with a non-relative, then the only way for an altruistic act to evolve is for it to be reciprocated basically it leads the recipient to um um to repay the kindness is at that point that you can explain the evolution of altruism among non-relatives uh-huh now next we're going to get to indirect reciprocity.

Yeah. So that was Dick Alexander in 1987, Brett Weinstein's mentor. Yep, that's right. That's right. And, I mean, we know that indirect reciprocity exists in human life. It's kind of an intuitive idea. It's just like, you're nice to me, and I'm not nice directly back to you. I'm nice to somebody else. But somehow, some kind of circle exists so that through an indirect route rather than a direct route, if I'm nice to you,

somebody's nice to me, not you, but somebody, because everyone's paying it forward. That's the idea of indirect reciprocity. So that's describing it in words. It's here where we can make the point that when you actually model any of these carefully and explicit models, you are making assumptions about groups. With kin selection, you're making assumptions that social interactions are confined to genetic relatives. With direct reciprocity, you're making assumptions that a pair of individuals is interacting with each other. A pair is a group. A pair is a, why shouldn't we call a pair a small group? With indirect reciprocity, we're assuming that the group is larger than two.

And then if you imagine actually building that model, just imagine it, how are you going to model indirect reciprocity? You're going to have to assume that social interactions take place in groups. And then there's some individuals are indirect reciprocators. So when somebody is nice to them, then they're nice to somebody else. So you have to throw in some cheaters in the model to make it interesting. And so now there's cheaters. If you're nice to them, they don't pay it forward, so they get the advantage. How does that go? And as soon as you build those models, then what happens in each and every case is that the logic of multi-level selection emerges in these models. They have to assume the existence of groups, if only groups of size two.

They have to assume the existence of non-cooperators in addition to cooperators. And dang if the non-cooperators don't have the advantage within the socially interacting groups. For example, tit for tat, the famous reciprocal strategy, basically says start out nice. And then if your partner is nice, then you continue to be nice. If your partner is not nice, then you just marry your partner. So imagine tit for tat with a non-cooperator. They form a pair. First time around, tit for tat's nice. Non-cooperator's not nice. Next time around, tit for tat's not nice. And that's how it continues until the end of the relationship. Well, who has the highest relative fitness? It's not tit-for-tat because tit-for-tat lost the first round

and after that it was parity. And so tit-for-tat can never beat its partner. Tit-for-tat always loses or draws in its interactions with its social partners. The only way tit-for-tat evolved is when it's paired up with another tit-for-tat. And then that pairing does better than the next pairing or the pairing of two non-cooperators. So the entire logic of a multi-level selection model is contained within two-person game theory. Isn't that interesting? Wow.

Because it's like a one-shot-two-player sort of problem. So it's inherently group selectionist. Yeah, except now if you read the current literature, including my recent long, long conversation with Jonathan Birch, which was on this year of Life the Magazine, and then still you get people saying how can you say that a that a pair and a one-shot game theory is a group how can you do that how the fuck why wouldn't you do that it just makes no sense to me why isn't a pair of group no matter how long the duration. But there's still a lot of pushback, even among experts, on the idea that the pairs of two-person game theory

might be considered a social group, the social group of a group selection model. Like, I mean, if a pair isn't a group, then what is it? Yeah. So a lot of the current discourse which is intelligent discourse i mean these are not stupid no people but uh smart people like uh jonathan birch uh think that um groups need to be defined in some ways that's actually quite restrictive. Unless it has a boundary and, you know, a clear boundary,

then it doesn't count as a group. And here's where pluralism comes in. It turns out that that matters less than you might think. That if I have my very general definition of groups and they have a more restrictive definition of groups, there's still a kind of a multifactorial parameter space that we all need to face. We're carving it up with our words in different ways, but actually we're confronted with the same very complex world. We feel the need to carve it up in different ways, and that's why we need a translation manual in order to understand each other, basically.

It's like speaking different languages. And that's okay, because different perspectives can be a good thing. So to a degree, it's okay that we have theories that are basically confronting the same complex world and parsing it in different ways, but only if we have a translation manual. If we don't, then we run the risk of a person who speaks English declaring other languages as wrong and confusing. So, Dave, we've mentioned kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and indirect reciprocity as selfish gene accounts for altruistic behavior. Is there anything we've left out in the selfish gene worldview as far as explaining altruistic behavior is concerned?

Sure there is. And I'll give two examples that really go beyond either of those. One example is microbiomes. And microbiomes didn't really burst on the scene until 2000, I think, is when the word was coined. Before then, we kind of thought of an individual as just a genotype, genetically homogenous. Now we know that every individual is a planet inhabited by trillions of bacterial and other small species, thousands of species numbering in the trillions of individuals. But do you know that microbiomes vary? And of course, those differences make a difference. And that microbiomes are thoroughly integrated with our genotypes. And so if you think of

selection at the level of ecosystems, in this case, microbiomes, you're not going to explain that by kin selection, direct reciprocity, or indirect reciprocity. These are very, very complex systems. Nevertheless, they vary. Those differences make a difference. And dang if there's not enough replication for it to complete the three ingredients of an evolutionary process. I've actually done experiments in the lab at the ecosystem level. So this can be duplicated in the laboratory.

So now let's look at large human systems at the level of nations, for example. That goes way beyond kin selection, direct reciprocity, or indirect reciprocity. But do you know that large human groups differ? Sure they do. And do you know if those differences make a difference and there's some degree of replication? And so when the units of selection are complex systems, then different rules are at play that result in the three ingredients of an evolutionary process. This is still a pretty new territory of multilevel selection in complex systems. And here, the idea of multiple local equilibrium, multiple basins of attraction. We know with complex interactions,

that complex systems, that there's many locally stable zones that the system can exist in. And each system, because it's locally stable, it's locally stable. But they differ in their group level properties. To be stable is not to say that you're functioning well as a group. Think of human regimes. A human regime is stable, but it can be despotic. Some of the worst human societies are stable. We wish they were less stable.

They work terribly as societies, but they're still stable. And so, in this case, multi-level selection takes the form of selection among equilibria, the selection of the equilibria that work best compared to those that don't work so well. That's a whole new ballgame. That cannot be imagined in terms of kin selection, reciprocity, or indirect reciprocity. But it's definitely what's going on all around us. So I want to ask you now, Dave, why multilevel selection provides the better explanation of altruistic behavior. And we've already covered some reasons. But first, you better tell us how you define groups because you have a rather fluid definition

of what groups are. So first, in the spirit of equivalence, I won't claim that it provides a better explanation because I'm happy to acknowledge that even the selfish gene perspective is insightful. So if we're really going to acknowledge the benefits of multiple perspectives, then all uh, then all perspectives basically are that there's a limit to the number of these things you want. Um, I covered that in my conversation with, uh, with, um, uh, Jonathan Birch. So anyhow, let's be, let's be true to the concept of, uh, of, um, of equivalence. And what was the second part of your question? How do you define groups? Right. So, and here's where we have differences of opinion among the

cognoscenti. But I feel quite strongly that a group can be meaningfully defined as the set of individuals that are socially interacting with each other. And that is always with respect to a particular trade. Evolutionists are typically studying one trait at a time. We study aggression or we study altruism or we study sex ratio. Basically, we're studying a single aspect of a species and we want to know how did that evolve. We're not studying the species as a whole.

We're studying a particular trait of a species. And if it's a social trait, then here's how I often put it. Back to the idea of a non-social trait. If it's a trait that just influences your fitness, then I know your fitness if I know your trait. But if it's a social behavior, I don't know your fitness if I know your trade. If I know that you're an altruist or a selfish individual, I do not know your fitness. I need to know who you're interacting with. Only then can I determine your fitness as an individual.

Now, who are you interacting with? That depends on the trade. That's why in game theory, we call it N-person game theory. N is the number of individuals that are socially interacting with each other. If the biological situation is such that when I behave, then I'm influencing the fitness of six other individuals, well, it's got to be six-person game theory. Five-person or seven-person won't do. So the value of N is determined by the biological situation. So the idea that, and this is true for any theory of social evolution,

in order to calculate the fitness of an individual, you must know the other individuals with whom it is interacting. Otherwise, you cannot get started. And that's my definition of group. Right then and there, that's my definition of group. It's the set of individuals that are influencing each other's fitness. Now, for me, that is appealingly general. In the first place, it's information that's required by any model. And in the second place, it intuitively corresponds to what we mean as a group. It happens to be a very general definition and even includes, for example,

ephemeral groups of small numbers of individuals. But I'm fine with that. That's my definition of group. Fantastic. And I think there's one other thing we should talk about while we're on the topic of altruism, Dave, and that is the averaging fallacy. Are you happy to explain that to us? In a sense, we already have. It's when you average the – well, I'll give a technical definition and then try to unpack it. It's when you average the fitness of lower-level units across higher-level units.

It's actually derived from the concept of average effects in population genetics theory. So let's say that in a standard population genetics model, the kind of thing you learned in high school, you want to know the fitness of two alleles, big A and little a. Well, big A exists in two forms. It exists in the homozygote form and in the heterozygote form. If you want to know the fitness of big A, you take a weighted average, basically. So also for little a. So you calculate the fitness of the two alleles as a weighted average of its fitness in its two genotypic combination. It's a very useful thing to do because it predicts what ultimately is going to evolve. We want to know when is one allele going

to evolve against the other allele, all things considered. So you average across all of its genotypic combination. Likewise, in a game theory model, we don't have genes typically. We're just talking about individual strategies. But if you want to know whether tit-for-tat evolves compared to non-cooperate, you want to average the fitness of tit-for-tat across all combinations. Tit-for-tat exists and sometimes it's paired with other tit-for-tats, sometimes it's paired with non-cooperators. What's the average? What's its average fitness? So averaging the fitness of the lower-level units across the higher-level units,

it's what you need to do in order to know what evolves all things considered, but just don't call it an argument against group selection. If you want to evaluate group selection, you must compare the fitness of units within the next higher unit. And so it's a fallacy to use this averaging approach and call it an argument against group selection. It's not a bad thing to do, but it's not an argument against group selection. That's the averaging fallacy. Fantastic. I have only a few more group selection-related questions here.

One of them is in relation to a common critique you hear of group selection, which I've heard advanced by both Dawkins and Steven Pinker. And that is to describe this distinction between what Dawkins originally called replicators, which are the genes, and their vehicles, which are the phenotypes or the bodies that they occupy. And to then sort of pillory group selection by saying that groups can't be replicators. You know, I think Pinker once wrote in his Edge.org article,

the false allure of group selection. It's not like the Roman Empire produced a lineage of baby roman empires so it's incoherent to think of groups as being able to be selected because they're not replicators in the same way that genes are i know you have a very good response to that uh what what is your response well basically it's the averaging fallacy to to um to um group selection never envision groups as as replicators it's an envision groups as as vehicles if you i mean the vehicle concept is basically is basically giving back with one hand what it took away with the other selfish gene theory takes away groups as units of selection as as replicators, and then gives back groups as vehicles of selection.

Group selection has always been a question about how genes evolve. Genes are the replicators in all group selection models. Genes are the replicators. The question is, how do they evolve? Do they evolve by virtue of an advantage within groups or by virtue of advantage between groups? So it is an elementary error to use. It is. I can't help but say that it is. And shame on Steve Pinker for making such an elementary error. And shame on the rest of the world for following him off the cliff.

That's the best example of prestige bias I know. Steve Pinker says it and everyone follows him like sheep. I think even people like other smart people like Michael Shermer, there are so many people who follow Steve off this cliff just because he's Steve Pinker who don't actually do their own research. Don't get me started. I mean, Steve's a smart man. I'm sure you've spoken to him about this.

What's his response when you lay it out for him? Well, if you read that essay and then read the comments following the essay, there's one by myself, among others. I read Yeah. There's one by myself, among others. I read it, yeah. There's one by Joe Henrich. But what I want to know is what was his response to your response? Was it enough to change his mind?

No, it certainly was not. And then those commentaries are not read by anyone. It's just the great Steve Pinker says it, and so we'll believe it. I mean, it's just so discouraging, basically, because as scientists, we're supposed to be discerning. And the amount of followership that takes place is discouraging. I found his critique incredibly rhetorical. I think that's probably the best word to describe it. Yes, yes.

Now, I mean, a lot of the confusion, which is shared by people that are better informed, so I think it's a legitimate... Point of contention. Okay, right. Yeah, zone of inquiry is just what we mean by groups. There's actually two major topics that need to be distinguished. One is altruism, which we've been talking about.

The other is the idea of major evolutionary transitions, the idea that when a group becomes sufficiently cooperative, it actually becomes a higher level organism. At this point, it takes on a boundary of skin and really becomes, you know, compartmentalized. And it certainly becomes a group in a sense that's different than these much looser groups. And so many people have that kind of group in mind for group selection as a whole. What they lose sight of is the other major question about group selection, how do altruistic traits evolve? And the groups that are required for that need not have that kind of coherence at all. They can be fuzzy. They need not be discrete. They can dissolve. But they have enough coherence so that they provide that counterforce that basically compensates for the local selective disadvantage. And if you have a good understanding of the history of the subject, then you would not make that mistake.

But many people don't. Yeah. Another error I think Dawkins and Pinker seem to commit is just overlooking or ignoring evidence of behaviors which are incredibly groupish. Just to pick one example to illustrate what i mean i wanted to ask you about shared intentionality and in his book the righteous mind john height gives a very lucid defense of group selection and he presents it as like a criminal trial where uh he argues we should reopen the trial against group selection and presents four major exhibits in defense of group selection. And the second one is shared intentionality, which the concept was advanced by Mike Tomasello

in his study of chimps versus toddlers, for example. And I find shared intentionality so interesting. It's also interesting to me because it really seems to be the first, as Haidt says, major Rubicon crossing for our species. You know, Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens is very famous for holding up language, the development of language, about 70,000 years ago as the first major Rubicon crossing and describes it as the cognitive revolution,

the first of sort of the four major thresholds in his book, Sapiens. But shared intentionality is interesting because you could argue that that was really the first major turning point for our species, which occurred about 130,000 years before the development of language. And that it's more important because what is language if not an agreement as to what sounds mean in relation to their meaning. So shared intentionality is quite an important concept. It forms the bedrock of a lot of important aspects of our modern lives. For example, conformity is rooted in shared intentionality. And I wanted to ask you, how do you think about shared intentionality and do you treat it as a strong piece of evidence in favor of group selection and humanity uh so my answer is yes and no um if you're if you're operating within the framework of multi-level selection theory, then

shared intentionality is everything that you say. Basically, individuals are now merging their intentions, okay, in a way that's providing a joint benefit. They're not generating fitness differences within groups, quite the opposite. So shared intentionality is a form of cooperation. But really, when you flip to the other framework, there's nothing that you cannot explain as individualistic. So if shared intentionality evolves, then those who engage in it are more fit than those who didn't, all things considered. And so it's easy to provide a kind of a individualistic rationale that, yeah, just imagine that you're an individual that's suitably omniscient,

and you're evaluating your options. You're going to merge your intentionality or you're not. And it turns out it's better to merge your intentionality. So you do. So it's selfish to be, to merge your intentionality. I mean, look at the way Dawkins talks about selfish genes. In actual fact, gene action is thoroughly merged with other genes. Genes don't have isolated defects. Genes are thoroughly melded with other genes, but that doesn't prevent Dawkins from describing them as selfish. So by the same reasoning, no matter how groupish humans become in their intentionality or their cognition, no matter how much they merge

their minds with other individuals, you can still describe that as selfish whenever it works, basically. So that's where I think that you won't find anything that you can explain in terms of group selection that cannot be explained from this other perspective that's another another uh implication of of uh equivalence it's kind of futile even even to look because we're describing the same thing in different in different ways yeah what's your relationship like with Dawkins? No relationship. Is it hostile?

Well, I mean, it's been extremely minimal. I mean, it consists of pot shots in the literature. Right. And we've actually been in the same room only a few times. So it's, yeah, not an interesting story to tell. I mean, whatever relationship exists is actually preserved in our respective publications. But I do think that people should think seriously about why is it that a small number of people achieve iconic status? That's not the way science works at all. And Dawkins, in particular, has not contributed to the peer-reviewed literature in many, many decades. And so why is it that he looms so large in the public imagination when in fact he has not contributed to the scientific literature in a long, long time?

So let's think about that. What's your explanation? mission? Why do we personify things, for example? I mean, we always, I mean, so on. I think there is a need to kind of hinge ideas onto people. And if the ideas are important, then that kind of gives everlasting life to the people that they're associated with. Something along those lines. Can't do much better than that. Yeah. Max Planck famously observed that science progresses one funeral at a time.

Do you think the group selection debate is a strong example of that? Only for some people, but not others. There's no differences that way. Compare Dawkins. Dawkins is definitely that sort, but look at Hamilton. Hamilton very freely changed his mind in the 1970s about group selection when he was influenced by Price. So Hamilton had a flexible mind. Dawkins, not so much.

So it's not invariable by any means. And there's young people with inflexible minds. But it certainly is the case that people go to their graves without changing their mind. Do you think it might be relatively harder to change your mind if you write an international bestseller? You're sort of building a prison for yourself with your own words, aren't you? It's hard to do an about face after that.

Yeah, although, yes, true, of course, but I'm trying to search for deeper explanations. And I think that one interesting point to make is that there are people outside of science have worldviews that are very difficult to change. Really, if we think about this in terms of people in general and cultures in general, then the idea of stasis and getting stuck, I think, and having certain temperaments makes a lot more sense. And then what goes on in science is just a manifestation of what goes on much more much more generally and i think all of us know people that are very individualistic in their perspective they do see everything through the lens of of individual self-interest and in each and every case anyone who thinks of selfishness as some grand explanatory principle must distinguish good from bad types of selfishness. Take Ayn Rand, for example. Everything for her was selfish, but she still distinguished between good forms of selfishness and bad forms of selfishness.

Tocqueville said, you know, selfishness properly, rightly understood. There's enlightened self-interest, and then some other kind of self-interest. So if you're going to use self-interest as a grand explanatory principle, then you must split them somewhere down the line. There's other people that want to think about selfishness is not something that explains. Basically, you reserve that word for the way you shouldn't behave, and then you use other words for the way that you should behave. So you can say something like don't be selfish, you'll be better off if you're not selfish, which is a contradiction of terms for someone who treats selfishness as a grand

explanatory principle. Well, there is a mental polymorphism, a cognitive polymorphism that exists in everyday life. Why is that? Why does that polymorphism exist? It's a good question to ask. How are they maintained in a population? So let's talk about religion. How do you define religion? Well, it's really interesting that not me, but in the literature, there are two major definitions of religions, and they are completely different from each other. That is so interesting. One, of course, defines religions in terms of belief in supernatural agents. And the other is Durkheim's definition, which is religion is a, oh, basically, it's a systems of beliefs organized around the sacred that form into one single community called

a church. So Durkheim defined religions as a systems of thought that basically helped organize communities. And he pinpointed the concept of sacredness as fundamental. He actually didn't say a thing in that definition about supernatural agents. So there are your two definitions of religion. Now, why do religions exist in your view? So I, the first move I make is to say that we should be thinking not about religions per se, but about meaning systems. And the fact that, and this actually gets back to tomasello and the idea of shared intentions and that something that's truly distinctive about our our species is our capacity for symbolic thought um when i write about that now i say that uh that each and every

one of us has a set of genes, that's our genotype, but we also have a set of symbols. Let's call it our symbotype. And our behaviors are based at least as much as our symbotypes as our genotypes. And a symbotype, the symbolic system that we have, might or might not count as religious. So let's first ask, what can we say about our symbotypes, our meaning systems, and then we can think about religion as a type of meaning systems. That to me is the most instructive thing for us to do. So thinking about meaning systems in general, what they do is they basically receive and process information leading to action. That's what a meaning system does. It organizes the way we see the world, how we process information, and ultimately how we act. So that makes a meaning system like a brain.

A brain who sees information, processes it, and results in action. So does a meaning system. So you can call a meaning system the brain of a culture. Isn't that interesting? And then you can ask the question, for any element of the meaning system, let's evaluate it in two ways. First of all, how well does this belief reflect what's actually out there? Is it factual in the scientific sense of the word? And what does that belief cause people to do? So I call this factual realism and practical realism. And any belief could be scored on both bases. Okay, that's interesting enough. And now let's ask the question, how do meaning systems evolve? Well, it's on the basis of practical realism.

Evolution is only sensitive to what we do. And so we can predict that meaning systems evolve basically on the strength of what they cause people to do. They're much more sensitive to practical realism than factual realism. How do we ever perceive the world the way it is? Well, that depends on the relationship between practical realism and factual realism. When is it advantageous to see the world the way it really is? And when is it advantageous to basically believe in departures of factual reality? What's the trade-off between factual realism and practical realism? And we can immediately see that that's a complex trade-off. Sometimes it's a positive trade-off, sometimes

it's a negative trade-off. So the idea of adaptive fictions, the idea that we're built and designed to invent, believe, and defend falsehoods is something that makes perfect sense for all meaning systems, not just religions. And so now we get to the idea that what strikes people as so odd about religions is two things. First of all, why do religious believers believe all that stuff that's not out there? And then why does it cause them to do such impractical things? Why would Abraham sacrifice his son for an imaginary God, for example. And so that's why religion more or less cries out for an explanation. But when you look at it

as one kind of meaning system, then that problem exists for all meaning systems, not just religious meaning systems. All meaning systems should have adaptive fictions. We originally got in touch with each other after my interview with Brett Weinstein. And in that interview, I spoke with Brett about his view on religion and how it evolved. He also spoke with Dawkins at the end of 2018 and confronted him on stage by turning two of his ideas against each other the idea of a meme a meme being a unit of cultural evolution

and dawkins idea of the extended phenotype and brett argues that religion is an extended phenotype. He argued that to Dawkins. And when I first heard him making that argument, when I was watching the video of the debate, I assumed that he was invoking group selection to explain how religion evolved. Because he was arguing religion was an adaptation. And as I researched further in preparation for my interview with him, I realized that wasn't what he was saying at all. In fact, I think I might have stumbled upon a Twitter thread, a conversation between you and Brett, where you asked him, were you invoking group selection? And he replied that he wasn't. And I tried to dig deeper with him on this question in my interview with him. But I have to confess that I still don't understand how he gets to religion is extended phenotype

without invoking group selection. And I couldn't deduce it from my conversation with him i thought maybe he was keeping his his cards close his chest uh to to save his his idea for the debate uh that that he's going to have with you at some point in the future about this question and still i've been trying to think through intuitively how does brett uh come to his conclusion without using group selection. And I can't think of a way. Let's kind of freestyle here. If you had a gun pointed to your head and you had to do it, how would you prosecute the argument?

What do you think the best version of Brett's argument would be? Well, there's a number of threads to disentangle. Let's begin with Dawkins on religion. Yeah, we should explain that first. Sorry. Thank you. And this actually goes back to the very beginning of our conversation. If we asked, you know, is there more to evolution than natural selection?

And the answer to that was yes. There are such things as byproducts. You know, why is a moth attracted to flame? It's not good for it. Turns out that moths are navigated by the stars, and that causes them to spiral towards light and all that. So often organisms do things that are destructive, and that could be explained as a byproduct. I think that Dawkins and other of the so-called new atheists start out with a commitment to the idea that religions are bad, bad, bad. They're hostile towards religion. Because they're working off that definition of religion is a set of

ontological claims, not the idea that religion is some sort of moral community. Well, I think first and foremost they're hostile towards religion and then they assemble their arguments in order to defend that claim. That means when they try to come up with an evolutionary argument, they're going to say religion is a toxic byproduct. Or maybe it's a mismatch. Maybe it was adaptive in the past, but not the present. Whatever it is, it's bad, bad, bad. If you look at the titles of those books, The God Delusion, God is Not Great, so on and so forth, there's a real commitment to the idea that

religion is bad, and if it ceased to exist altogether, then we'd all be better for it. Now, Dawkins certainly could, certainly within his intellectual framework, to think of religion as an extended phenotype. After all, he wrote the book. But he's not going to go there, because he just does not want to think about religion as an adaptation in any sense at all. And so he's stuck. He's stuck with calling it a mind virus. In a sense then, is he not committing the naturalistic fallacy? I mean, either he thinks that if he calls religion an adaptation,

he's therefore somehow saying that it's good. That would be the naturalistic fallacy. Dawkins is very smart. Maybe he's not committing the naturalistic fallacy. Dawkins is very smart. Maybe he's not committing the naturalistic fallacy. He just thinks that it's going to be more difficult to rid the world of religion if he admits that it is an adaptation. Maybe so, but, you know, it is so... I guess I'm speculating, aren't I?

Well, let me just point out that as someone who's been studying religion as a scholar for 20 years now, I know the community of people that are doing the serious study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. And the new atheists are not among them. Not among them at all. They don't even care about that literature. The disconnect between Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, and the deceased Hitchens, who are actually using the mantle of science and evolution when they don't care a fig about the actual serious study of religion from

an evolutionary perspective is plain for anyone to see and any citation analysis would demonstrate it. So there's that. And it doesn't matter how intelligent somebody is. Very intelligent people are climate deniers and so on, and evolution deniers. It's not a matter of their intelligence. It's a matter of their commitment. But to return to the difference between Dawkins and Okay? Now we come to how does Brett explain religion as an adaptation? He's drawn to the idea that it's an extended phenotype. And in his mind, that's like not a group selection explanation. I'm in my own personal conversation with Brett, who I admire in many respects, by the way. I feel like I have more in common with Brett

than I have not in common. If you just hold group selection aside, then I think that we're more or less on the same page. Anyhow, in my actually quite brief conversations with Brett, he says, no, it's not group selection. It's something called lineage selection. What's lineage selection, I ask him. Oh, well, actually, that's something he's kind of invented for himself, it seems. There's not much of a literature on it, which by itself

is just like, please, this is not how scholarship takes place. So what we have, I think, is another manifestation of the tendency to want to explain what are, in fact, what in terms of multilevel selection should be called a group-level adaptation in more individualistic terms. At the end of the day, it's going to be some version of equivalence. We're going to be talking about the same goddamn thing using different words. The fact is that religions, most enduring religions, succeed by creating strong communities. If you want to think of that in individualistic terms, we'll then go for it. But a proper understanding will show some version of equivalence. Do you know much about the content of Brett's lineage selection idea? No, because he hasn't published anything on it and he hasn't talked about it.

What I know is his pedigree. And I know, I mean, the most detailed information is his conversation with you. You have to understand, let's talk about this a little bit because it's quite interesting. And I'm not being disparaging because again, I admire Brett, especially given what happened to him. And you did a great job of summarizing his experience at Evergreen College. And now one reason that he is so influential is because he stands for someone who's been abused and is now making a go as a public intellectual. And I admire him for that. But the fact is, is that as a professor at a very small college,

mostly it was a teaching position, he has a very thin publication record. He's written exactly one paper with somebody else that even touches upon the topic of group selection. He's a very smart man. But nevertheless, he's not some kind of a sage on the topic of multi-level selection. I know his pedigree, and when he talked about it to you, then it was pretty obvious to me that, although he's courageous in many ways, he's a

seed that has not fallen far from the tree of his mentor, Richard Alexander. Dick Alexander managed to think of all of morality in terms of self-interest. And I wrote a whole paper on Alexander's views and how it's yet another case of redescribing group selection in other terms. And so now here we go again as far as I'm concerned. There is a small literature on lineage selection, but it's not what Brett has in mind. I don't know what he has in mind. Whatever it is, it's going to be some new construction. And I hope that he takes the care to relate it to what came before. This whole field is plagued by independent inventions, reinventing the wheel, you might say.

So, again, I feel a lot in common with Brett. He thinks evolution is important. He thinks religion is an adaptation. He thinks it's important to have respectful discourse, to be able to tackle difficult subjects. I admire all of that. On the topic of group selection, I'm not waiting with bated breath to hear what Brett has to say. So to summarize your position, you suspect that group selection is a dirty word for Brett

and that he has coined a new theory, lineage selection, which is probably group selection by another name. Yes. And at the end of my long conversation with Jonathan Birch on this Year of Life magazine, Birch being a real scholar on the topic. So actually, let me just, to your listeners, describe this. I mean, who's really worthy to talk about? Not Dawkins, not Brad, somebody that's actually very well respected in the peer review literature. That person is named Jonathan Birch. He does not have a lot of name recognition. Perhaps he should, but he really knows his stuff. And so we went to have a long, long conversation. And at the end of it, I made this comparison. Lately,

I've become fascinated by open source software development as an amazing example of cooperation, large-scale cooperation in modern human life. And when you look at the development of software such as Linux, where many, many people are contributing code, there is a very strong need to keep that code consistent. Everyone has to be speaking the same computer language. Now, when that doesn't happen, then what happens is separate lineages of code develop that are incompatible with each other.

And for the most part, you don't want this to happen. It's called forking. And so sometimes forking is okay when these separate lineages become adapted to different purposes. They don't need to communicate. But for the most part, elaborate measures are taken to eliminate forking. Forking is a bad thing. Now, the point of that that I made to Jonathan Birch is that in some respects, all of these different theories of social evolution are like forking. Somebody comes up with a new formulation. They haven't related it to other formulations. The peer review process acts against this a little bit, but not nearly as

much as the oversight process with open source software development. And so what you get is forking in a way that is unhelpful. Somebody has reinvented the wheel, and this is a kind of pluralism that's not worth wanting. And Jonathan more or less agreed with me that in addition to different perspectives that are useful, then there's also ones that are actually unhelpful. There's too many of them. And we need to have more quality control in terms of these reinventing the wheel. And so if Brett wants to come up with some concept of lineage selection, be my guest. But let's not have unhelpful forking let's have real quality control where he relates that idea to what came what came uh before it really bogs down the analysis and almost forces

evolutionary biologists to become philosophers of language because now you need to pass the different terms the different names for the various theories. Say this one is actually equivalent to this one. And it's incredibly inefficient. Yeah, that's why it's important not to have too many of these. But it actually brings us into the realm of multiculturalism. That if you go outside science and now you talk to someone from a different culture, then you're going to have all these problems, aren't you?

And so, and the solution to avoid misunderstanding is there has to be a process of achieving mutual understanding. But if a scientific community was operating well, it would hold that to a minimum, basically. This is what's needed to prevent a tower of Babel. And I think that actual scientific communities succeed to two different degrees. And one thing about evolution, returning to evolutionary theory as a whole, is that it does provide a common language. If you read any of my books, including my most recent one, it's all about, and this goes beyond group selection, basically this view of life, evolutionary theory, as a unifying theoretical framework that can solve this Tower of Babel problem. That's a statement

which goes way beyond group selection. Group selection is not the only thing I do. So really, the most important thing is to have a common theoretical language. And that language is a combination of evolutionary theory and complexity theory. And I think that at that scale, Brett would probably agree with me. He would wish evolutionary theory to become much more broadly known and applied. I've got one more question related to religion and group selection, and then I want to ask you about moving evolutionary theory into the real world, so to speak, and finish on that. The question about religion, just to wrap this section

of the conversation up, is I was hoping you could tell us the story of how the Jewish community survived around the time of the Seleucid persecution of 167 to 164 BC by developing a belief in the afterlife. Right. This is fascinating. It is indeed. And what it means is that we can study cultural evolution in the same way as genetic evolution. We can pick a trait such as belief in the afterlife, and we can ask the historical question, when did it originate? And how did it spread compared to alternative beliefs? And there might be an individualistic explanation.

For example, maybe to allay our fear of death. That's a common theory. Or maybe there's a group selection explanation. explanation, is the historical record detailed enough to decide that question? Is there a fact of the matter? And do we have enough information to that in the Hebrew Bible, death is mentioned about a thousand times. they don't go to any afterlife at all in about 70 mentions uh people there's an afterlife but it's not heaven it's more like the greek hades it's sheol it's the dismal dreary place where everyone goes whether they've been good or bad uh and sheol is only mentioned in a certain context when people uh die without having succeeded in their lives. That's when Sheol is mentioned.

I've done nothing in my life. Now I'm dying, and I'm going to this dreary place called Sheol. So when does the concept of the afterlife associated with Christianity, when does it appear in the Hebrew Bible? Not until the book of Daniel, which we know was the last book to be added to the Hebrew Bible. And that concept of the afterlife is not about an individual's anxiety about death. It's all about solidarity. Basically, the afterlife is something that's going to happen. It's going to be an end of days. And then everyone's going to come back. And some will be judged and some won't. The The context was intergroup competition within Judaism. Basically, you had strict sects that were keeping themselves apart,

and you had others that were accommodating to Hellenic culture. And the belief in the afterlife was basically a judgment against Jews that were accommodating. And it can clearly be understood as a mechanism that created solidarity in between group competition. That was the original origination of the concept of the afterlife. After that, it morphed and has morphed many, many times. But this is a case, an example, in which we could actually take a cultural trait and we could ask the question, how did it evolve? And even not just ask it in functional terms, but actually have something similar to a fossil record in which we can find out when it originated and the factors that caused it to spread.

So interesting. I want to leave religion now and ask you about whether all of this, the group selection debate, evolutionary theory more broadly, is its significance is just confined to the academic realm or whether there are insights that we can use to structure our societies and build a better world. And there was an interesting shift in your career where you moved from not just a focus on the academic debates but to thinking about how we can construct our societies and some of the practical implications of the ideas that you were studying. Do you remember when that point of inflection was for you? Sure. The first step was when I created our campus-wide evolutionary studies program. And there I had a sort of epiphany that although I was having fun as an individual scholar traveling the world and interacting with dispersed colleagues, what would it be like to

actually have my university become more literate about evolution? So I created a program called EVOS that teaches evolution across the curriculum. And so that was step one. And when EVOS was established, then I began to think about my hometown, the city of Binghamton, as like a field site. When you're an evolutionist, you do field work. You study organisms in their natural environment. So why shouldn't we be studying people in their everyday lives? That's what sociologists do. But it turns out when you approach it from an evolutionary perspective, it becomes somewhat of a new model. And so because I was interested in altruism, what I did was I collaborated with our school superintendent, and we gave a survey to all of the public school

students in grades 6 through 12. And basically, what that survey measured was two things. First of all, how pro-social are you as an individual? Let's say we could measure that in a survey. How pro-social are you as an individual? And secondly, how pro-social is your social environment? What kind of social support do you get from individual? And secondly, how prosocial is your social environment? What kind of social support do you get from your family, neighborhood, school, church, and extracurricular activities? Five forms of social support. And evolutionary theory tells us that prosociality, being nice to others, in order for it to succeed in a Darwinian world, those who give must get. There must be a correlation between the pro-sociality of

the individual and the pro-sociality of their social environment. If you want to think about that as the R term in inclusive fitness theory, be my guest. In any case, we need that correlation. And that's what we found, actually, an amazingly high correlation was 0.7 between the pro-sociality of the individual and the pro-sociality of their social environment. If you take that correlation coefficient of 0.7 and you treat it as the R-term in inclusive fitness theory, that means that the phenotypic correlation between the individual and their social environment is greater than full siblings.

Which is 0.5. Which is 0.5. So isn't that incredible in a modern American city? And although not all forms of social support are spatially based, if you actually then mapped the students onto their residential locations and create a map of pro-sociality in the city of Binghamton, it was incredibly heterogeneous. So basically there were neighborhoods in which these kids were clustered into highly prosocial or non-prosocial neighborhoods. Then we did many other experiments validating the survey

and things like that. So that's what it means to study a topic such as altruism in the real world. And knowing all of that, then what can we do? What kind of interventions can we do to actually increase pro-sociality in real-world settings? Now you get into more of an implementation mode, which I've been doing ever since. And do you think you could have arrived at these practical insights without group selection? Yeah, I mean, sure.

Again, honoring the principle of equivalence, I could have made all those predictions on the basis of a correlation coefficient. So, yeah. But I guess it adds strength to the case. Oh, yeah. I think that especially when you're, I in the first place nobody thought of doing that and if by if by inclusive fitness if by kin selection you mean real kin which was the original formulation then the idea that the other forms of social support i mean really at this scale

if you look at the three categories that you mentioned, I mean, here you have this great correlation of 0.7, right? Can you explain that by genealogical relatedness? Oh, maybe a little, but not much. Direct reciprocity? I don't think so. Indirect reciprocity? Not that either. Basically, a lot of this has to do with institutions. And In what sense is an institution like a church either of those three things? So I do think that really the reason that I

myself think mostly in terms of multilevel selection theory is because I do find it much more informative. Yeah. In your book, This View of Life, you have this great piece at the beginning

where you talk about what a theory is and what a theory does. I wonder, are you aware of Daniel Kahneman's idea of theory-induced blindness? It's probably he's making the same point I am. So why don't you articulate it and then... Yeah. So... I think, again, honoring this idea of equivalence,

I think it's probably the same point, but I just thought you might find it interesting that he seems to agree. So this is from Thinking Fast and Slow, his book. He's talking about why Bernoulli got the concept of utility wrong. So quoting here, The mystery is how a conception of the utility of outcomes that is vulnerable to such obvious counterexamples survived for so long. I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often

observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness. Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it. Many scholars have surely thought at one time or another of the stories such as those of Anthony and or jack and jill who people we mentioned in an earlier explanation uh and casually noted that these stories did not jibe with utility theory but they did not pursue the idea to the point of saying this theory is seriously wrong because it ignores the fact that utility depends on the history of one's wealth, not only on present wealth. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed,

disbelieving is hard work and system two is easily tied. End quote. Yeah, so I think that that's very interesting, but can probably be generalized quite a lot. And when you think that there's so many things to attend to, we can't possibly attend to them all. So that's why we need meaning systems. A theory is a kind of a type of meaning systems. But I think that all symbolic systems, in order to see, you must be blind, is one way to put it.

You can't forefront some things without pushing other things into the background. So that means that nothing is obvious all by itself only against the background of other other um beliefs everything we do makes sense against the background of some beliefs and blinds us to possibilities so i think that that's uh that's the most general general formulation that once you see things through an evolutionary lens, then it transforms the obvious. Things become obvious that were invisible or regarded as doubtful before. And what should be privileged about evolution?

Well, because it's a true theory so uh and so we we adopting the adopting the evolutionary worldview is perhaps the most important thing to do and then of course once you have we have all these controversies that exist within the evolutionary um uh worldview but uh um that's uh worldview. In your book, This View of Life, you have a great quote of Einstein's on the topic of theories. Can you remind me what that was? Very simply, the theory decides what we could observe. So he was talking about the electron orbits and the fact that you couldn't see the electrons, but nevertheless you could make predictions based on their existence that you could observe.

So what are some other insights that evolutionary theory has for how we should structure our societies and our economies. At the beginning of the conversation, we mentioned Eleanor Ostrom's core design principles. Is there something you'd like to say about that? Well, I think that every subject, every important topic in policy can benefit from an evolutionary perspective, although sometimes in different ways. So, mismatch theory, for example, the idea that adaptations to past environments can become mismatched to current environments is huge. And even without talking about group selection, you can get a lot of insights from that concept, including such things as I have all examples, as you know, of

why are we so many people nearsighted? Why do so many of us need glasses? It turns out to be a mismatch between eye development, which evolved in the context of ancestral environments, and there's something about modern environments that's different and is causing eye development to misfire. What is it? It turns out that it's probably time spent indoors. Then we have the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that our immune systems are malfunctioning because our environments are too clean, as strange as that might seem. And then we have the idea that child development is being

subverted by modern child-rearing environments. Kids can't play, and it's important for them to play. So here is evolutionary thinking providing a lot of insights before we get into group selection. But when we do get to group selection, then this fundamental problem that Darwin was the first to perceive, the idea that pro-social traits are not locally advantageous, and so that therefore we need mechanisms

that suppress disruptive behaviors in order for cooperation to take place. And that this takes place at every rung of a multi-tier hierarchy is enormously important. It basically provides an alternative to the entire concept of laissez-faire in economics. And then at a more mundane level, every group of people who are trying to do something together is faced with this dilemma and typically varies in how well they cope with it. So just understanding the basic dilemma of pro-social traits and then building in features of our groups that are protective can do so much. It's incredible. So these are all things that become quite obvious from an evolutionary perspective. It makes one optimistic about the potential for positive change

once we know what to do. Yeah. On that, one of the loveliest ideas I've learned about recently, which I learned about through your book, This View of Life, is Jim Cairn's social baseline theory. Tell us what that is. and he was seeing a patient who was an old World War II veteran and who was experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome late in life and was resistant to any kind of therapy. He wouldn't do anything that Jim asked him to do. And eventually he said, I want my wife with me. And Jim had never heard this request before. But he said, okay. And his wife came in. At first, Jim treated her as a bystander. And the man was no more receptive than before. And then his wife said, let me hold his hand. So she did. And the old man became suddenly receptive to therapy, very receptive to therapy. And Jim was amazed.

And he was asking the question, what was it about holding hands that changed it? Something must have happened in the brain. And so he embarked upon some experiments with normal people, regular people, in which he'd put them in an fMRI machine. He'd threaten them with electric shock, which was very stressful. And then he'd do that under three conditions, alone, holding the hand of a stranger, and holding the hand of a friend. And he was able to duplicate the same effect, that holding the hand of a friend had a tremendous calming effect on the brain. And then a colleague of Jim said, you know, you should be thinking of the holding hands condition as the normal condition and the alone

condition as the abnormal condition. And so Jim started to think, what was the one constant in human evolution. We existed in all these different climates and ecological niches. What was the one constant was to be a member of a highly cooperative group. That's what our ancestors almost always experienced was that they were members of highly cooperative groups. And that happened enough so that basically the brain evolved under those conditions. And the upshot, which is social baseline theory, is that the human brain does not distinguish between individual resources and social resources when it makes its trade-off decisions. It seamlessly integrates individual resources and social resources. And an experiment, not by Jim, but by his colleague, demonstrates how this works. So imagine that I take you to the base of a steep hill, and I ask you to estimate its slope,

which you do. And I have you do this under a number of conditions which deplete your personal resources. So with a heavy backpack or not, having fasted or not, having had a workout or not. In each case, when we deplete your personal resources, of course, you should be less inclined to climb the hill. But strangely enough, the way you perceive that is actually to see the hill as steeper. So the more depleted your personal resources are, the steeper the hill appears. So against that background, a fourth condition is to be estimating the slope alone or with a friend standing next to you. And as soon as the friend is standing next to you, all of a sudden the slope seems less steep. So what has the brain done? It's basically

factored in a social resource, the presence of a friend, in just the same way as personal resources. The brain does not distinguish. And so against that background, the idea that the lone person is somehow the fundamental unit, which is the assumption of economics, that the individual is the self-interested unit, makes all of his decisions without regard to others, seems supremely wrong-headed. And so the best thing you can do for well-being is to be a member of a nurturing group. Earlier we said that people are more like

ants in ant colonies than we might have imagined and this is a great demonstration of that. The brain expects to be in a cooperative group and when that's not the case, then the brain becomes alarmed and stressed and so does the body. And we know this from all the toxic effects of loneliness and so on. So there's a real paradigmatic change there. It's quite moving in a sense as well. And earlier I also mentioned John Haidt's metaphor that we are 90% chimp and 10% bee. Where do you put it?

Oh, let's say 50%. But you know, these things, we don't want to just carve them up. It's like nature and nurture. They're not just additive. I think what it does mean is that when we want to construct large-scale societies, we need to have small groups as a cell in multicellular societies. We should get people functioning in small cooperative groups as much as possible. And so there's a real practical prescription there. How do we do this in a practical sense? How do we bring it to scale and most of my time now is spent working on that objective with something called pro-social that we can link to if you go to pro-social.world you'll see how we're doing

this around the world is forming people into smaller groups in a way that we can also study scientifically. Well, Dave, we wish you all the best with your work and we'll certainly be linking to ProSocial and all of your other resources. I can't thank you enough for being so generous with your time. We've covered so much ground and thanks for joining me in the challenge of trying to translate a lot of these very esoteric ideas to a public audience it's been fantastic well thank you for being so well informed and for providing this uh information service thanks dave thank you so much for listening i hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

We covered a lot of ground. For show notes and links to everything we discussed, you can find those on my website, www.josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. I'm also on Twitter. My handle is at Joseph N Walker. Thank you for your time. Thank you for listening.

Until next time. Ciao.