The Joe Walker Podcast - The Evolution Of Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

Bret Weinstein came to public prominence as the professor at the centre of the 2017 Evergreen State College...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello there, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, swagmen and swagettes. Welcome back to the Jolly Swagman podcast. I'm Joe Walker, and what an episode we have to kick off 2019. My guest is Brett Weinstein. Brett is an evolutionary biologist who came to public prominence as the professor at the center of the Evergreen State College protests. More on that in a moment. Brett is a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined by his brother eric which how would i define i would define the intellectual dark web as a disparate informal group of free thinkers and iconoclasts who were bound together

at bottom by nothing other than their defensive enlightenment values so the idw as it's called for short includes such people as Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Summers, and many other names you may be familiar with. So what were the Evergreen State College protests and why do they matter? Let me give you some context. Imagine you're a university professor, an evolutionary biologist. You're fascinated by for 14 years and mentored hundreds of students. Imagine you like your students and they like you. Imagine you have the opportunity to give them the style of education you thought you would have benefited from if only it was available. Imagine your wife and best friend teaches on campus with you and life is good. Imagine it's March 2017

and imagine your college has an annual tradition about a month away now known as the day of absence where students and faculty of color are allowed to remain off campus for the day as a means of highlighting their vital contribution to college life. Imagine you support this gesture, as someone who identifies as deeply progressive, a Bernie Sanders supporter in fact. But imagine you also stand for enlightenment values, objective truth and dialectic. You're the sort of person who believes John Stuart Mill's exhortation

that he who only knows his own side of the case knows little of that. It shouldn't be too hard to imagine being a progressive and an Enlightenment thinker. You are a university professor, after all. Now imagine hearing that the script has been flipped for your college's annual tradition, the Day of Absence, where, instead of people of colour having the option of staying off campus for the day, white people are invited, even encouraged, to leave for the day. You don't have a racist bone in your body. In fact, you regularly use your classes to teach how we should avoid our evolutionary disposition to racism. And you even risked ostracism when you were an undergraduate

for calling out racism at a fraternity. But imagine you perceive something a little bit off about this new proposed formulation for the day of absence. And so, being a diligent person, you write an email to staff where you argue that, quote, there is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles You press send. Although your email falls on largely deaf ears, you intend to remain on campus for the day of absence, which in fact comes and passes without any noise. Now imagine your bafflement as one day, about a month later, while your students are silently working on an assignment you've set them, you hear the echoes of chanting outside the building.

The chanting is about you. Imagine you go to the door to confront the protesters and engage them in dialogue. Imagine they sweep into the building, disrupt your class, chanting in front of your students that you're a racist and calling for your resignation. There's about 50 of these protesters. Imagine learning it's all because of your nuanced position on the reformulated day of absence. Imagine campus police tell you they can't guarantee your safety on campus. Imagine hearing word that rogue protesters are stalking campus with baseball bats searching cars for you.

Imagine your house is within walking distance and you're fearful for your two young boys. Imagine the college leadership has lost control and is doing virtually nothing effective to have your back. Imagine resorting to teaching one of your classes in a public park. Imagine, as a self-described deeply progressive person, being ignored by the mainstream media until you get a spot on Sean Hannity to tell your story. Imagine suing your college and four months later reaching a settlement where you and your wife resign your positions in

return for $500,000. Imagine you're now a biology professor in exile. Imagine all this happening in 21st century America in, of all places, a university. That is exactly what happened to Brett Weinstein, my guest. If you want to understand how the left could eat its own in this way, in a group abandonment of reason, listen to my episode with moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He's a gem and a Rosetta Stone for understanding the new psychology of fragility and the tribalism sweeping elite liberal campuses in the Anglosphere. There are many examples of where this goes wrong. I discussed two at the beginning of my conversation with Haidt, Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College. Brett was another later casualty in this war on reason.

And in this two-hour conversation with Brett, we discuss none of this. Brett is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist and I wanted to give him the chance to discuss his field in a way that, to my knowledge, he hasn't been able to do on any podcast before. And for that reason, I wanted to give you some lengthy context about the Evergreen State College protests if you hadn't been caught up on the story. Now, I titled this episode, The Evolution of Brett, and I meant that as a play on words. It refers to Brett's own evolution as a person and a scientist, the mentors and the challenges he encountered along the way. And it also pays homage to Brett's take on evolution. We discuss key concepts in the field, taking great pains to define them for you and provide

interesting examples. And we finish by exploring a most interesting question. Is religion an adaption? Now, Brett famously debated this very question on stage in Chicago with the famous scientist Richard Dawkins in October 2018, we discuss it here in a little more depth. Now, describing religion as an adaptation is not to say that everything about it is good or to approve of its literal claims. That would be the naturalistic fallacy. But on the latest figures, 84% of the people walking this earth, people around you

every day, identify with a religious group. Are they victims of a mind virus, as Richard Dawkins would have you believe, or are they living out something that has evolved with us? How you answer that question has important consequences for how we manage and regard religion moving into the 21st century. So, I suggest pouring yourself a fine whiskey or whatever your poison of choice is, kicking your feet up and enjoying this deeply fascinating chat with Brett Weinstein. Brett Weinstein, you're a beautiful man. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. So we're going to discuss the evolution of religion, the group selection controversy, whether religion is simply a mind virus, as Richard Dawkins calls it, or whether it's a

deeper, more adaptive phenomenon, and the dizzyingly important implications for our understanding of humanity and its future that flow from the answers to those questions. I'm so excited to talk to you. But first, I want to discuss the evolution of Brett and introduce a few key concepts in evolutionary theory along the way. So let's start at the beginning. You and your brother Eric, who's the managing director at Teal Capital, are both very independently successful and now famous in your own rights. What on earth was in the water in your household as children? There may or may not have been turmeric, but I don't know if there was. So, I mean, your question really is, what the heck happened? Why are Eric and I the way we are? And that's a difficult question to answer well, because although, I mean, it's weird to talk about oneself really in such terms.

But I mean, as long as you ask the question, let's take a crack at it. But in passing, let me just say, you know, Eric and I have considered this question too, because for better or worse, we seem to have different strengths than many other people. And the question is, where did that come from? And we think we know some of the answers. The problem is what we don't have is a complete model, because even if you took all of the factors that might have gone into it, and even if we're correct about what they were, nothing says that for somebody else who had all of the same factors, that they wouldn't have ended up, you know, in a ditch somewhere, that we may be, in fact, the beneficiaries of certain factors that create the right kinds of challenges, but those challenges may be ones that most people never overcome. So we call this survivor bias in science, that we see the cases that are present, and we don't see the cases that are absent. And it's very easy to get the wrong idea through survivor bias. So for example, if you were to interview lottery winners, and you were to ask them what their secret was, a lot of lottery winners would have a

method for picking numbers, which doesn't say that a method for picking numbers has any value. What it says is that people who think there's a method for picking numbers tend to buy more lottery tickets. And so you got to count all the losers who had a system, too, in order to understand the winners. But anyway, if we look at the factors that we think may be contributed, there's what I think neither of us believes is an accurate description, but what flies under the heading of learning disability. Eric and I both had severe learning challenges in school. And in some sense, that was a gift because school, in addition to teaching lots of valuable things, also conveys a lot that I think on balance isn't valuable and is in fact hazardous to independent thought. So there's a way in which being freed from obligation to school puts you in peril,

but it also opens the door to perhaps discovering some other way of thinking clearly. we also had a pair of extraordinary grandparents only one of which survived into our adulthood but nonetheless my grandfather harry in particular was a very unusual person he he than a chemist he was also a very broad mind and he among other things took children very seriously which isn't to say he wasn't a tremendous amount of fun he was all of my friends thought very highly of my grandfather because he knew cool stuff to go see and do, and he never brushed them off. If they asked a deep question about how something in the universe worked, he took his best shot at answering it. And at the point that he didn't know the answers to the why questions anymore, he was honest about that.

So he was a pretty remarkable substitute for school. And I know that I personally owe him a great deal because at the point that school more or less abandoned me, he didn't. And I think that was very important. And maybe the third important factor is one I think of in terms of the Williams sisters, the famous pair of tennis players. It seems to me that the key to the Williams sisters is that there were two of them and that they were pretty equally matched tennis wise so that what they could do is they could play tennis endlessly and each caused the other to elevate its game until nobody else could play them. And so I wonder, in Eric, in my case, if a bit of light sibling rivalry around all sorts of

topics about how things actually work when the mythology surrounding them isn't right, if that didn't result in a kind of clarity of thought that's hard to come by unless you have a well-matched adversary who you're stuck with for life. So who's Serena and who's Venus? What? I don't know. The analogy might not work at that level. So you mentioned your grandfather, Harry. What's an example of a conversation you might have with him? Do you remember any moments?

Oh, I mean, there was a lifetime full of moments. You know, I mean, first of all, something I didn't really realize about my grandfather until he was gone was that not everybody who knew him had a sense that he was an extraordinary person. He was very funny. He was a ruthless punster who would just absolutely if it took six hours to lead you down the primrose path for a great punchline, he would do it. But anyway, what I didn't realize was that he showed all of the people he cared about different stuff. Right. So I didn't realize was that he showed all of the people he cared about different stuff, right? So I didn't realize this as a kid. I sort of thought we all got the same version of Harry, and we didn't. So he took me on some kind of crazy adventure where we went to industrial parks to get pieces made for projects that we were building.

My grandfather was very adept at knowing how to get a piece of lucite milled in a particular way to integrate it into some project. And what that meant was that he was also socially adept at interacting with all of the people that one finds in an industrial park, that there's a culture that goes along with people. I mean, at the time, it was entirely men who manufacture things. And so very frequently, he would have some item that we needed to get milled in a particular way. And he would walk into some building that you just couldn't even tell what took place in this building from the outside. And it would turn out to be a machine shop of some kind. And he would walk in and he would have a three-minute conversation with some guy he'd never met. And then 10 minutes later, we'd walk out with the

part milled just so, and no money had changed hands. It was just some sort of camaraderie of working men who knew a kind of technical way of interacting that the rest of us didn't. So anyway, that's something that I think I uniquely got from Harry. Nobody else saw that side of him. My brother got a strange kind of musical education from Harry. Eric likes to say that Harry specialized in teaching people how to do things that he himself did not know how to do. So that's a, that's a very unique skill. But if you think about it, it's actually kind of a,

it's the stuff of, you know, wizards, Dumbledore and the like is figuring out how to get people to innovate means not just teaching them what you know, wizards, Dumbledore and the like, is figuring out how to get people to innovate means not just teaching them what you know, but teaching them how to figure out things you don't. So anyway, there's a book to be written about the meaning of Harry. I think it's also worth saying, you know, as long as we're exploring the question of where capacity comes from and our connections to our elders who helped us get there. Harry was in many ways himself not a success. He did not do well.

He didn't graduate college. He didn't succeed in the world of business. He had several really cool ideas for inventions that never got off the ground, that sort of thing. But there's another way in which I have the sense that he was a 1.0 version of something that he made sure Eric and I ended up the 2.0 versions of that thing. And our kids are the 3.0 versions. And I have the feeling that with our kids, you know, the project is really finally maybe ready for prime time. That's lovely. I want to introduce our listeners to your worldview and mental toolkit. And I thought we could do it via a thought experiment.

So imagine you have a 16-year-old child and the education system mysteriously evaporates tomorrow, you begin homeschooling him or her and assume that the child's about 16 years old and already numerate and literate. So which concepts or mental models would you start teaching the child and emphasizing as a matter of priority for his or her intellectual development, creativity, and survival and engagement in the world? Well, I've been thinking a lot about this question because one of the things that came out of my experience with school is a deep distrust of formal education, which served me very well as a professor, but only because I was teaching at a place that allowed me to break any rule I didn't feel like abiding by in the classroom. So I broke them all pretty much.

And it resulted in a really effective model of mentoring that I think is not known to exist elsewhere. The rules at a standard college are so restrictive that you just couldn't pull it off. So anyway, I've been in the aftermath of Evergreen, I've been trying to formalize an understanding of what it is that I discovered empirically during that period of my life. And I would say a couple things. One, your scenario makes me smile because school somehow has evaporated. And I feel like, oh, man, whoever this kid is, he's lucky because he doesn't have to get over that thing in order to figure out how to be. But then the next part of your question involves what things in particular would I make sure to teach?

And I think the first thing I would say is I would try to distance and experiences and exercises that teach all of the important stuff that one needs to know in line. So as you're doing it, you discover all of these things. Now, there's certain topics that wouldn't be discovered that way. You know, you could do a pretty good job of conveying, let's say, trigonometry, for example, as you were doing carpentry. Carpentry requires a certain amount of trigonometry in order to do various things. And so you could access trigonometry and geometry more generally, as you figured out how to convey the building of various objects, you wouldn't get to calculus that way, right? So at some level, what I think we misunderstand about school is that school is ideally a supplement, right? It's not the way

we get educated. It's a supplement to correct for the fact that some of the things that are good to know for a modern life are not discovered just simply by living, right? But school should really be the exception in education, not the rule of education. The rule of education should be experiential. And in some sense, what I would hope is that a curriculum could be put together such that the child would never really know that they were in school, that everything seemed like some sort of project with a purpose, and that that purpose would correct the big failing of school as I see it, which is that it doesn't correctly address the motivational structure of a human being,

right? Very often it substitutes the affirmation of some authority figure at the front of the room for success. And what this does is it causes people to become addicted to approval. And if you're addicted to approval, if that's what motivates you, then you're not going to be able to innovate because you need somebody telling you what to do. And if we want innovators, we have to cause them to build a motivational structure that will allow them to feel good about accomplishing things that nobody else can see the value of yet, because that's how you get to an innovation that actually matters. So I don't know if that answers your question, but in general, I would, I would try to make the educational process as informal, as fun and engaging as possible.

And the fact is nothing teaches that like projects that actually produce something useful in the end. Let's move on to evolution and the evolution of Brett as well. Do you remember the moment you first got hooked on the concept of natural selection? I think so. I was a kid. I was, I think, about five years old. And my grandmother was still alive.

And my grandmother and grandfather had hiked me and my brother into Griffith Park, which is something we did with some regularity. And there were these little oases that there was some story, I don't exactly know, but there was some story, I think it was during the Depression, the Works Progress Administration maybe had paid to have these little oases created in the hills above Los Angeles. Maybe that's not their explanation, but for some reason there were these little patches of various interesting plants, like a little mini arboretum. And we were sitting in one having lunch and my grandfather always carried with him this beautiful little pen light. It was a loop, a very high quality glass magnifier with a ring light around it so you could look at whatever you were looking at you know at 10 times magnification and it would just be

clear as a bell and so anyway I was looking at a flower I think and he just pulled the thing out of his pocket I'm not even sure if he said anything to me I think he just kind of turned it on and handed it to me. And, you know, I knew the thing and I looked into the flower and I saw a lot of structure that just wasn't really obvious to the naked eye. And there's, you know, this is definitely my adult mind imposing something on the experience, but there was a discovery in there that the flower was not there for our benefit. The structure there was meaningless to a person who didn't have a magnifier. You just wouldn't notice that it even existed. And so what that meant, what it implied, was that there was a universe of interesting puzzles that weren't built for us. They were endlessly amusing to think about, but they weren't designed to be understood.

And that that was the most interesting kind of puzzle because nothing guaranteed that you had the tools to unpack it. So they were truly challenging. And I think I think I was really addicted to the idea that there was a relatively simple set of concepts that could unpack the part of the universe that I found most compelling, which was, you know, since even before that moment, I was absolutely fascinated by animals. And so, yeah, I think it was that. My grandfather explained just the bare bones of Darwinism, I believe, that afternoon as we were sitting in the little oasis. And I was hooked. And I should say there's another part of that story. Some other wasn't the same day or week or anything like that. But there was a book that my grandparents had, a children's book called Animals Do the Strangest Things. Sure. Do you know the book?

No. Well, I only remember one animal from it. It must have had a dozen creatures whose little story was described in there. But the pangolin was described in this book. And I thought, that is such an improbable and strange and marvelous creature. And I was just very compelled that such a thing, A, should exist and that, B, given that it exists, that it's not as famous as an elephant or a giraffe or something like that. So anyway, I mean maybe what we're discovering is that I just for whatever reason have a mind that is so compelled by the glory of creatures that it was bound to happen. Even just a little bit of scratching the surface with respect to what creatures are like was enough to get me hooked. And then how long after that until you started studying evolution formally?

What was your undergrad? Well, you know, I should say, as much as I dislike school, about one in five teachers that I encountered before getting to college was a really good egg who had something interesting to convey and cared more than they needed to for their job. And so I had a really good biology professor. I think Dr. Pete was his name. And anyway, he said some pretty interesting stuff that stuck with me, some of which I still use. You know, like the idea that in most populations, the average individual produces two offspring that survive to reproduce. That's a very powerful concept. When you think about how many offspring are born to, you know, a spider, let's say, a small spider might produce a couple hundred offspring. Whereas, you know, a chimpanzee might produce a successful one,

might produce three or four offspring in life. So the idea that the number is the same irrespective of what style of creature you are is very jarring because for one thing it implies there's an awful lot of death that comes along with being the one kind of creature and a much reduced quantity of death that comes along with being the other and why would selection uh not choose one path or the other and you know there are very good reasons that it doesn't but in any case my point is i i had some some high quality thinkers who i ran across early before i got to college and then in college actually as a freshman, I had a pretty interesting experience. I'm not even sure what triggered it, but I fell in with a group of freshmen who just started hanging around together at the beginning of our freshman year. And this one guy in my group, Dave, he and I just started using evolutionary logic to

unpack things that weren't typically thought to be evolutionary. So we, you know, we became fascinated by the idea that human behavior might have a lot to do with evolution that we don't recognize. And, you know, for a while, this was just sort of an informal game that we would we would hypothesize about things that might work in certain ways. And then it turned out that there was a whole field of people who had explored this path ahead of us, which, you know, could be disempowering to discover that lots of people had done the work ahead of you. On the other hand, it meant that you could check your work pretty readily because you didn't have to do the

experiments yourself. Somebody else had already gone there. So as I realized that what my friend Dave and I had been playing around with was actually a field, and I started to explore what was in that field, and I found some of it glorious and some of it sorely lacking and I just I fell into it that way at some point so I was at the University of Pennsylvania and I took there was a rule I think actually Eric is the one who clued me into the rule which is never mind the prerequisites. Right. Prerequisites often keep you out of the course that you should be in. And there was a chemical ecology course.

You know, it was a graduate course. It was a seminar with maybe 15 people in it. And as a freshman, I signed up for it. And I was, of course, completely out of my depth. But I was able to keep up. You know, if they made certain allowances, I was able to keep up with the grad students in that course. Because for some reason, evolutionary thinking was very intuitive to me. And that also resulted in, I remember the professor well, the guy's name was Larry Clark. Larry Clark was a specialist on chemical ecology and birds.

I wasn't, I didn't yet realize how glorious birds were, but nonetheless, Larry Clark affirmed that I was making sense and it didn't matter to him that I wasn't a graduate student or even, you know, a senior. The fact that I was a freshman who was making sense was worthy of encouragement to him. And so he encouraged me. I think the thing is the farther I went down this road, the more voracious I became to hunt bigger puzzles and find more remarkable landscapes of ideas. I mean, I guess that's just the nature of a healthy addiction. So we're going to continue discussing the evolution of Brett, but I'm also going to start weaving in some concepts in natural selection now to help prepare the stage for our discussion of religion and group selection to make sure that all the audience is on the same page. So can you give us a brief explanation of Darwinian natural selection and its four prerequisitesites speaking of prerequisites yeah um but i think i think it is worth coming at this in a slightly different way because i think very frequently we uh we make

natural selection more mystical than it really ought to be. Okay. That really it's an extension of a very basic process that exists outside of the biological world. And the biological world does one extra thing that makes it especially powerful. But essentially, the four characteristics that you have to have are you have to have reproduction, you have to have variation between the products of reproduction, you have to have heritability of the variation between the products, and then you have to have differential success of the outputs. So if you eliminate any one of these things, then you don't get natural selection. You get something else that has some of its characteristics, but none of its power. But the thing that I learned, and actually I learned this from Richard

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, which is a book that I recommend everybody read. It's a very powerful analysis and very intuitively presented. And what Dawkins says in the book is that there are four characteristics that cause a pattern to become common. And I'm extending this a little bit. I'm saying it in a way that makes it relevant to things that have nothing to do with biology, which I think Dawkins came very close to saying, but he didn't quite get there. But the four characteristics, let's see if I can do it off the top of my head. The four characteristics are that a pattern, so he says that a pattern must reproduce itself at some rate. I would alter that slightly and say that a pattern must come into existence at some level of regularity, that the pattern must have a high degree of fidelity

so that two units of this particular pattern are enough alike that they share a memory location in our minds so that we can identify that they are in fact common rather than different things so what what do I have I have come into existence at some rate they must have high fidelity they must persist for some period of time. And then they must capture resources that are limited in the ecosystem. Okay, those are the four. And the key thing is, if you slightly alter his list so that it's not inherently biological. And you say, these are the things that make patterns common, so that the pattern can be spiral galaxies, the pattern can be neutrinos, it can be anything, right? It can be giraffes, anything. And the question is,

well, how common are neutrinos? Well, neutrinos will be common by virtue of a formula that applies the level at which neutrinos come into existence, how similar they are to each other, how likely they are to persist over some period of time, and how good they are at accumulating the stuff in the universe, right? That pattern is selection, right? It's not natural selection because natural selection is a reserved term for biology, but it is selection, the portion of natural selection that is simply the force that sorts things in the universe and decides that there will be more of some and less of others. That force is not biological and it is visible through your telescope as much as your microscope, right?

If you look up into the sky, the commonality of different kinds of stars is just a simple product of these four characteristics. Now, what is different in biology, the thing that causes the stuff outside your window to look very different than the stuff outside your telescope is heredity that if you add heredity to selection what you get is iterated cumulative motion towards a goal now there's some fraction of the audience, even biologically sophisticated people, maybe especially biologically sophisticated people, who will blanch at my invoking a goal because it really depends what one means. You know, natural selection is a mindless process in some sense. And so its goal is either a mind numbing one that we could call fitness or essentially non-existent because the biological world is a special case of the non-biological world. But when one watches a strangler fig grow and encrust a tree and then replace it in the forest. That strangler fig, of course, does not know what

it's doing. It's simply programmed to deploy a structure that results in the replacement of an existing canopy tree. But it is not wrong to think of it as having the goal of replacing that tree. It's not a conscious goal, but it functions as if it has a goal in the same way that, you know, an ant searches for scraps of food. The ant presumably doesn't know it has a goal either. So this process whereby heredity plus this general process of selection that is anywhere and everywhere you look results in the very special phenomena of biology which behave in a very goal-directed fashion, which is what separates them from the other objects. And in this process of natural selection, what are we selecting for? What are the units of selection? Well, that's a great question. And this is one of the places where I depart from many of my colleagues, because I think we've done far too much reverse engineering of the answer to that question from the facts of biology as we find them here on Earth, which has a lot of biases built into it. I mean, for one

thing, a really good theory of selection and the biology that results from it ought not be so limited that it only applies here on Earth. It ought to be pretty good anywhere that process is unfolding in the universe. And so the biases that come out of studying Earth's biota are in some sense unavoidable, but in another sense we ought to at least be aware that we are looking at a single data point of life and that the theory ought to apply to all data points of life. Also though, we have biases within the biota, which is to say, we see the patterns that are of a type that our perceptual and cognitive apparatus recognizes them, which means that the more subtle phenomena involved in our biological world are discovered later, and they get left out of the core theory. So in any case, what I'm

getting at is what are the things to be selected? What is the level at which selection functions? I strongly suspect that a hundred years from now, if there are still people on earth studying biology, that we will look back at our current understanding of that landscape and we will we will view ourselves as very crude and i i'm i'm trying not to fall into that pitfall without having really good tools to escape it i'm trying to spot where we've been misled by what we happen to have encountered. So natural selection can explain everything, almost everything about the biological world, including altruistic behavior, a point that we might touch on again later.

I want to read out a few reactions that different people have had to the gene-centered view of evolution. And then I want to get your reaction. And I'll escalate in terms of the dismay of the person. So in The Selfish Gene, the book that you mentioned, a young Richard Dawkins wrote that, quote, we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. In 1994, Randolph badly for many nights, trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. And then finally, in Unweaving the Rainbow, one of his later books, Dawkins wrote about a few of the responses that original readers of The Selfish Gene sent to him. And I quote him again,

a foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it. So troubled was he by what he saw as his cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism. So, Brett, do you remember the moment you first grasped the full implications of the

gene-centered view of evolution? And what was your emotional reaction if you had one? Yeah, that's a doozy of a question. I do feel a little trepidation about answering it because my reaction, while, A, I understand all of those actions, and I've certainly seen them in my students and in others, um, there's a way in which I feel like that's, um, that's what happens if you get the message, but only halfway, right? So my reaction is actually one of feeling liberated and empowered that the discovery of what selection accounts for and what the to recognize that, yes, it is true.

The genes have something in mind for us. And I swear to you, it cannot be defended. Right. You can defend pieces of it, but you certainly can't defend the aggregate. And so if that is true, then we are in the following interesting predicament. We human beings are the most marvelous machines, the most marvelous patterns in the known universe. We have minds that are capable of the most astonishing acts of beauty and insight and compassion. And we are also capable of torture and genocide and evil.

If you recognize that both of those things are the product of this mindless process of selection, that you have been handed the machinery to do all of these marvelous things, with the hazard of doing all of these terrible things, then isn't the obvious choice to take power away from the genes, to reject their hegemony, and to say, look, this machinery is going to be rededicated to something worthy of it. I want to do something that's actually valuable with this marvelous machinery that Selection built for the mind-numbing process of increasing my fitness. I'm not so interested in my fitness. Once you know what fitness is, you'd have to be crazy to care about it. So if you're not interested in fitness but you've got this marvelous machine, what are you going to do with it?

That's the question. So I guess I would encourage listeners not to stop halfway through the valley when you discover what selection has in store for you. Go all the way through. Realize that you can't possibly, you know, if you discovered that you were a robot with a murderous program walking around like a nice guy waiting for your objective to stray into the crosshairs so you could destroy it and there was no reason to destroy your objective you might say well no i'm not going to be that robot i'm going to do something else so i encourage people um to uh not lose so much sleep and realize that they've been handed an amazing gift and that the purpose of it is not worthy of your attention.

So there was a video circulating on Twitter last week, which I know you retweeted, and I thought we could quickly talk about it to demonstrate the full explanatory reach of the concept of natural selection. And the video just quickly was of an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper. And the snake sort of sways its tail seductively, and it looks like there's a spider on the end of the tail. A bird swoops in to pick up the spider, and then the snake turns around and stabs up the bird. Now, how on earth does a spider-mimicking tail evolve? Because to many people, they'd think that something has to come into the world, something like that, perfectly designed in

the first instance for it to even work. Yeah, well, so I have to say, I would like to imagine that I would have come up with the elegant answer to that question on my own. But I have to say I'm leaning a little bit on something I read from Dawkins many years ago. I think it's in Climbing Mount Improbable, which is a very good book. So I'm a little frustrated with Dawkins at the moment because of some things that he said during our interaction in Chicago. But it doesn't mean I didn't learn an awful lot from him early on. And one of the things that he goes through in that book that has stuck with me is an explanation of essentially a response to the creationist argument that a half an eye is of no value, so an eye couldn't have possibly come about through

gradual evolution. Well, Dawkins points out that this is nonsense for lots of reasons. One of the reasons it's nonsense is that we have a great many examples of intermediate eye-like structures in nature. And so we can see more or less the path that an eye would travel where it is valuable at each of the intermediate steps. But he also goes through an explanation of a crude eye and its value. In fact, I believe he discusses there the battle, the arms race between a caterpillar that mimics, maybe it mimics bird shit. There are certainly lots of caterpillars that do. But in any case, the question was, how good a mimic does the caterpillar have to be to avoid the bird, right? And the answer is, well, that's not really the question.

The question is, is it good enough to fool the bird at 10 meters, right? A poor mimic might be good enough to fool a bird at 10 meters. It might be good enough to fool a bird who's distracted because it's got predators to be worried about, or good enough to fool a bird in the context of a very noisy background. And so what I think people need to realize is that there are different levels of evolutionary difficulty. And very often the things that impress us most, like the spider mimic on the tail of the snake or a caterpillar that does a very convincing job of looking like a snake or bird shit or whatever it does, is that the path to the fully realized mimic can start with something that fools a small number of individuals at a great distance. That in evolutionary space, even fooling a small

number of individuals at a great distance matters quite a bit if fooling them means they don't come closer to investigate and then consume to these phenomena of no interest to the predator and a fully fledged um mimic that can fool a human eye that knows what they're looking for right the smoothness of that path means that evolutionarily this is more or less a straightforward story because each gradual improvement in the degree to which the mimic looks like the model provides extra advantage. There's no discontinuity. That's not always the case. There are other kinds of evolutionary phenomena where it's much harder to understand how something would have gotten from A to B. But in the case of a mimic like the spider at the end of the tail of the snake, If you look at the snake and the thing that was circulating on Twitter was the first time I've ever seen, I think, a picture or video of this

animal. I didn't know that the animal existed. But if you look at it, the snake itself has a kind of hairy scales. So the scales have these raised projections. And again, all I have is the one piece of video of this one individual animal, but the animal is sitting on these volcanic rocks that are broken apart in a way that they're very jagged. And so the projections on the snake camouflage it. So I don't know if that's why they evolved, but my guess would be the projections on the snake scales evolved to camouflage it against the fuzzy background of broken, jagged, volcanic rocks. But once you've got those fuzzy projections, some number of them will sometimes look spider-like at some angles, right? And the movement of a spider's tail will sometimes animate

the spider-like projections on the tail that just barely look like a spider enough to dissuade, or to, in this case, encourage a bird to come closer. And if it happens to be in strike range, even if it's just one in a hundred times, that might be enough of a signal for selection to propagate that animal above some competitor whose projections look just a little bit less spider-like, and you're off to the races. It's a smooth slope from the slight tendency to look a little bit like a spider to looking an awful lot like a spider. So let's talk about the two gene-centered mechanisms for explaining altruistic behavior in humans, because natural selection can also explain altruistic behavior. So we'll talk about

kin selection first, and then we'll come back to reciprocal altruism in a little bit. What is kin selection? I'm not sure if you need to explain inclusive fitness first, but maybe just give us a general outline. I mean, we more or less should just treat these as the same process. So inclusive fitness is elevated by kin selection. a race to propagate one's genes, that the genes are not always housed in the self, that they are housed in other individuals who are related at some predictable rate. So when an individual produces an offspring through sexual reproduction, with some slight wiggle room for things like mitochondria, the offspring contains 50% of the genetic material that the parent had. And the reason it's only 50% is because there's a second parent who also contributes 50% of their genome. And so the offspring is 50% related to both parents. When you have two full siblings, each of them has gotten 50% from each parent,

but they will have gotten a different 50%. And so they will share 50%, statistically speaking, of their genes with each other. But unlike their relationship with their parent, the 50% that they share will be, that's a statistical probability, right? They could share more or they could share less based on what we believe to be a more or less random process of selection of which half of the parent genome goes into the offspring, which is why sometimes siblings can look an awful lot alike, and sometimes they look very little alike, because there's a statistical process dictating how closely they are related. And, you know, we can see that manifest in the genes that affect

phenotype, affect how you look. So in any case, when you realize that other individuals share some percentage of your genes and that you can understand approximately how many genes they share with you based on in what way they are related to you, then you could increase your success at propagating your genes, not just by producing your own offspring, but by facilitating the reproduction of other individuals who share your genes. And what Bill Hamilton, who is now dead, but is one of the great 20th century evolutionary biologists, pointed out was that there was actually a formula by which you could predict the altruistic behavior of an individual based on the degree of relatedness between the two parties and the relative cost of the action to the individual choosing to be

altruistic and the benefit to the individual receiving the product of that altruism. And that these things were just related through a very simple mathematical formula, which he said would predict, um, predict benevolent behavior in nature. And this formula is now for some reason become extremely controversial as group selection has, uh, returned to the fore. Um, but for many of us, it stands as one of the great triumphs of 20th century evolutionary biology, a mathematical formula that predicts altruistic behavior in nature irrespective of species. So the formula is RB is greater than C.

Yep. Can you quickly break that down for us? Sure. So R is the degree of relatedness. B is the benefit to the individual receiving the benefit. And C is the cost of the individual engaging in the altruism. And so the point is, if the degree of relatedness times the benefit received by the recipient is greater than the cost to the altruist, then the altruism is favored because it isn't really altruism. It's a kind of genetic selfishness that manifests in benevolent behavior. But I would say we can get all tied up in the horror of this equation if we become overly obsessed with selfishness in the connotations of selfishness as we see them as a human being. uh, tremendous acts of compassion and, uh, human decency are driven by this process, things that we should honor. So the very fact that a parent will lay down their life

for their child, that they will go to bat for that child and do everything they can, um, to make sure that that child succeeds, yes, you can wag your finger at them and you can say you're really being selfish because the child carries your genes. On the other hand, we can also see that the pattern of benevolence is one that we can willingly abstract and apply even when the justification based on Hamilton's rule isn't there. So in other words, there are many excellent adoptive parents of children, and their parental love is no less effective, and it is maybe even more honorable because they have chosen it. But in any case, we shouldn't discount the decency of human beings just simply because there is a genetic explanation

that explains where it came from. Yeah. So J.B.S. Haldane, when he was asked if he would give up his life to save a drowning brother, famously quipped, no, but I would gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins. The premise of the joke being that the relational coefficient for a sibling is a half, whereas for a cousin, it's an eighth. Is that a literal application of Hamilton's rule? Does it work like that? Well, let's put it this way. If you construct the puzzle so that that's the only thing going on, then it does work that way. And, you know, it more or less

matches our understanding of how people view their relatives. The problem is, in my opinion, we have over-instantiated the narrow version of Hamilton's rule. And so we look for named relationships. We look for, you know, uh, offspring and siblings and cousins and second cousins and these things. And we imagine that's all that's going on. But the fact is, there is an entire landscape of genetic overlap that is not easily quantified. And so much of the mystery of the way kin selection actually works probably requires us to understand that selection may have programmed us to recognize degrees of relatedness that do not have names. So I suspect we will discover that over time. Unfortunately, it's very contentious. And I think

a lot of people, including possibly Dawkins, would prefer we spend our time on something else. All right, shifting gears a little bit. Who was trivers how did you meet him uh what was his impact on you geez so uh i was very lucky to meet bob trivers bob trivers is um one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century he was in fact um a uh a mentee of Bill Hamilton, who we just spoke about. Um, so he and Bill Hamilton became very good friends, but I believe early on Bob wrote to, to Bill, um, Bob who had not studied biology. I think he had studied math and anyway, he wrote to Bill about some ideas that he was working on and Bill wrote back and was very encouraging to Bob. Anyway, Bob went on to be unarguably one of the great evolutionary minds of the 20th century,

very influential in evolutionary biology. And he's just a very fascinating, clear-headed thinker who I didn't even know who he was at the point that I left the University of Pennsylvania and then sometime later ended up going back to school at the University of California Santa Cruz where he happened to be a professor so the point that Heather and I arrived at Santa Cruz Heather came home one day and said you'll never guess guess who's here. I said, oh, tell me. And she said, Bob Trivers. And I, you know, I sort of searched my mind, Bob Trivers, that rings some kind of a bell. Anyway, so Bob Trivers happened to be there teaching a course called Social Evolution, which was a course he taught from a book he had written. And we both signed up because I had managed to hook Heather on evolutionary thinking. And anyway, we took this course and Bob was just the most amazing professor. It was just,

he was one of these people that was an absolute delight to watch at the board. And he had the most remarkable stories, some of which, you know, you probably just couldn't get away with telling in a modern classroom. But at the time, he told them and, you know, the class loved him for it. It was just nonstop fascinating. And at some point, we became friends with Bob, we started to hang out with him. And he, you know, he would invite us to parties at his house. I remember one in which Bill Hamilton came to the party. And anyway, we were introduced to Bill. But Bob took me at one point to Jamaica as a field assistant. So he spent a lot of time in Jamaica studying various things.

One of them was sexual selection in lizards. And he took me to Jamaica as a field assistant to do some technical work figuring out why the anole lizards of Jamaica have these flags under their throats that they flash at each other from one stump to another, sending some kind of signal that sometimes starts a fight. Jamaican flags? No, no.

Actually, there are a bunch of different species on Jamaica, and they have very different flags. But no, they have these colorful little flaps that are activated by a little projection, a muscular. There's like a little bone a little bone, uh, that pulls the flap out from under the neck. And the animals are very, so it's the males who have these things and males are very sensitive to some, uh, animal, you know, 20 yards away, flashing one of these dewlaps and, uh, it results in all kinds of interesting behavior unfolding. Um, so anyway, that's a long-winded answer. But let's just say Bob, who is still very much alive, who has now won the Crawford Prize, which is – there's no Nobel Prize in biology, but the Crawford Prize is the closest thing there is.

Bob has won the Crawford Prize. And in any case, I was incredibly lucky to interact with him early on. It had all kinds of influence on me. So Bob also pioneered the theory of reciprocal altruism, which was the other gene-centered mechanism for explaining altruism that we were going to return to. Can you give us a brief outline of that theory? Well, sure. I mean, in some sense, you know, it's funny that it even requires a formalization. You know, Bob's work on it is absolutely brilliant, but in some sense, a lot of evolutionary biology, especially when it comes to behavior, is in some sense the rediscovery of things that everybody's grandmother knew. And reciprocal altruism is

the discovery that to the extent that there is a system in place that results in an individual calculating that by doing good, by being benevolent to another individual, that they are likely in the future to receive benefits that meet or exceed the expenditure that they made, that that behavior will be favored. So I guess an easier way to say it would be if you think that somebody is going to treat you well for treating them well, it makes sense to behave that way. So this then, of course, results in the possibility of having organized bands of individuals who are not narrowly calculating degrees of relatedness, but in fact are perfectly capable of cooperating with individuals they are not closely related to for very good reason. But, you know, it's one of the foundational elements of a grand theory of cooperation.

Your other great mentor apart from Bob Trivis was Dick Alexander. So tell us who Dick was, what his impact was on you. Well, Dick Alexander, who died August 20th of last year, was my graduate advisor. And he was an absolutely remarkable person. He wasn't as famous as Bob Trivers or Bill Hamilton. But in many ways, he had as broad an impact through a large number of students that he sent into the world and through some very deep works on, in particular, evolution of morality and related phenomena in human beings. So he was a pioneer when it came to understanding the evolutionary nature of humans. And in many ways, I think he has not yet gotten his due for how farsighted he was. So one thing that I think obsesses his students is trying to make sure that the world understands who he was,

even though he's gone and his fame maybe didn't reach quite as far as some others. So Dick was, by training, an entomologist. He studied insects. And he was a curator of insects at the University of Michigan in the Museum of Zoology. And I must say, I did not immediately end up as his student when I got to Michigan. I got to Michigan, I was actually, one of the few bad pieces of advice Eric ever gave me was he told me that he thought I should avoid evolutionary biology in graduate school and maybe return to it later in my career after I'd done something maybe more technical and hard-headed like neurobiology or biochemistry or something like that. What was his reasoning? I think he thought that evolutionary biology was too soft as a science, that it wasn't rigorous enough.

And, you know, I don't think his advice was – it ended up being wrong, but it ended up being wrong for a very interesting reason. So I tried to follow it, and I shopped around for – once I got to graduate school, I went to various different labs and, you know, I hung out with the neurobiologists and, uh, and I checked out various different groups of people. And what I found surprised me, which was that there was almost no laboratory at the university and Michigan's a big one, so there were a lot to choose from. There was almost no place where people were particularly clear-headed, right? There was just obvious flaws in thinking and blind spots that were in evidence everywhere. And there was one place that that wasn't true.

And the one place it wasn't true was in the Museum of Zoology. And then there were a couple of laboratories in the Museum of Zoology where people thought very clearly. The one that appealed to me most was the insect division where Dick Alexander was one of the curators. And in particular, he had accumulated a group of people around him who had the very conspicuous phenomenon that they did not overwhelmingly study insects. So the insect division was weirdly populated by people who were studying birds. Some of them were studying dolphins. Yes, there were some studying insects. There were people studying apes.

And so the question was, what the heck was going on? Why did the insect division accumulate all of these people who weren't particularly thinking about insects? And the answer was that Dick had created an environment that was intellectually very rigorous, very open-minded, and people fled there. So I became a kind of refugee. I had searched for my home in biology, running away from evolution, and had ended up right back in the core of the adaptive evolutionary thinkers at Michigan by virtue of the fact that that's the place where people who were doing biology were making sense. So anyway, it brought me back to evolutionary biology. And Dick, in particular, was a very good mentor. First of all, it is conspicuous that I believe it is true to say

that none of the people that he mentored, not a single one that I'm aware of, ever left the program feeling resentful of Dick. That's an amazing accomplishment. Being a graduate mentor is not an easy thing to be, and even a very good one will tend to cause a good bit of resentment. But the way Dick went about it resulted in people caring for him and revering him and listening to him, because it was quite clear that he had every interest in you succeeding, that he told you exactly what he thought, whether it was easy for you to hear or not, and that this made you more powerful in the end. So Dick and I also got along quite well because, you know, I had, in working with Bob, I had started thinking a great deal about humans and evolution and questions about things like religion and culture.

And unlike the fashion of the moment in 2019, Dick and Bob were both broad-minded about the possibility that many of the large-scale human phenomena are the product of some version of Darwinian natural selection. And I was too. So anyway, Dick and I got along very well on that topic, as with many others. And he was really the perfect person to run into at that point in my development as an evolutionary biologist. What are some of the ways resentment is typically caused in graduate programs? Well, I mean, think about the following problem. You gravitate to a mentor because something about their work compels you and you want to be part of it. Well, your mentor is caught in a race to maybe gain tenure or even beyond tenure to gain stature in the department. They're trying to publish large numbers of papers,

so they may behave in a kind of predatory way. They may put their name on every paper you write because in their mind, the paper is really the result of their work. After all, your work wouldn't exist if they didn't provide you support and a laboratory. So there's this kind of economic exchange that develops that is quite extractive of graduate students. You know, the graduate students exist in large numbers in order to facilitate the work of the primary investigator in the lab, which means that there won't be enough jobs for all of the people who are in graduate school, which the mentor knows. And if the mentor were honest about that, then the students would understand that they were being exploited. And so

the students don't tend to hear this from their mentor, but they tend to discover it later when they go to get a job. And there's that. There's also the fact that because you're interested in the same subject as your mentor and ideas are being discussed back and forth, it's extremely easy for an idea to occur to two people or for an idea to be presented in one place and for a person not really to register that it was presented there and then to rediscover it as they're thinking and imagining that it is their own idea. And so there's lots of room for the sense of being mistreated in graduate school. And what Dick did was he, A, was very honest about the danger of these things. And he went out of his way to make sure that they didn't happen. So for example, he basically had a policy that said, I don't want you working on what I'm working

on. Not because I'm territorial, but because I don't want any working on what I'm working on. Not because I'm territorial, but because I don't want any ambiguity. I want you to learn how to do high quality work and for you to know what's yours and that you've accomplished it. And it freed him to give you very high quality feedback and for you to know exactly what it meant. In one particular case, so I did a lot of stuff during graduate school where I wasn't really supposed to be working on some project, but it caught my attention and I couldn't stop myself from doing it. And, you know, in some cases distracted me from what the department thought I was doing. But in one case, uh, wrapped up in this idea around senescence, um, and. Which is aging.

Yeah. Yeah. Aging, you know, it's not exactly aging, but yeah, it's, uh, it's the increasing, uh, uh, vulnerability and the degradation of efficiency with age. So it's what we commonly call aging. Yeah. Anyway, Anyway, I fell into a really interesting project with senescence. And I remember vividly, you know, it happened in an instant where I was in a seminar that Dick happened to be leading. And a student presented something that caused an absolute epiphany, right? Like it was instantaneous that two things that I knew that were separate suddenly rammed into each other and became a very important idea. And I remember raising my hand and trying to convey what had just occurred to me,

and nobody in the room got it, including Dick. And then, you know, I couldn't let it go. And I went and I started to write about it. And I started to look up data to see whether I was really on the right track. And I remember writing, what would you call it? I mean, just some sort of a proposal of a hypothesis for Dick. And I remember him scratching his head over it. And the thing that really struck me was that he was very clear about the fact that he did not understand what I was saying. There's a long history in evolutionary biology of dispensing with mechanism because for a long time it was impossible to discuss the details of the biological mechanisms but you could

discuss the phenomenology you could discuss the way creatures behaved or the form that they took even if you couldn't explain the molecular underpinnings of how it happened and so anyway there's sort of a culture in evolutionary biology of not paying attention to mechanism. And I've never really been of that culture. I've always been a bit fascinated by mechanism, even as I'm fascinated by function and behavior. And anyway, so in trying to convey this idea to Dick, the mechanism part was making it impossible. I just couldn't, I couldn't get it across what I was saying. But instead of throwing up his hands and saying, well, I don't know if it's garbage or not, you know, he had some other way of interpreting. He looked at it and

he said, you know, this has the ring of truth to it. I have the sense that this may be very important, even though I don't know what you're saying. And over the course of truth to it. I have the sense that this may be very important, even though I don't know what you're saying. And over the course of a year, I convinced him that it made sense and I was able to convey this viewpoint. But it's a very special mentor who is capable of straddling that gap. Most mentors would, as soon as they knew that they couldn't follow the concept, they would just sort of not want to take responsibility for saying one way or the other. But in Dick's case, he was able to give me the encouragement that I needed and to give me the sense, you know, he wasn't just rooting for me. He was actually saying,

no, this has the ring of biological truth to it. I just don't know enough about the mechanism to say whether you're making sense. And that that was a very, um, it was a very important role for him to play. And also, you know, I guess the thing is there was just no, there was no resentment on his part that I was doing something in a realm where he wasn't the expert, right? He thought that was good. And I think the thing is there's too much pettiness in mentoring these days. And the fact that Dick didn't suffer from any of it was a real gift. That's amazing. So that sort of brings us to the end of your formal education, I suppose, in the evolution of Brett. I know at various times throughout your high school and your college education, you described the experiences as being almost traumatic.

I think I may have heard you use that particular word in the past. And we did mention the problems you see in education at the beginning of this conversation. But can you just tell me, like, what specifically or concretely about, take college, for example, would you not enjoy or struggle with the most? Well, you know, so, I mean, it's very hard for me to separate college from anything else because college basically reproduced the same pattern that had been going on since the second grade. So in my case, I'm not a huge fan of the designation dyslexic. I don't really believe that dyslexia is what we think it is. But nonetheless, let's just say whatever it is, I've got it in spades. And what that meant was that every time I tried to submit work, it was very difficult for my teachers who, you know, did not have a lot of extra bandwidth to figure out whether or not the work I'd submitted was

any good. So that wasn't their fault. But the result of it was that the feedback I got was negative no matter what the content was. And what that did was it caused me to have to make a kind of choice. Really, we're talking about the second grade where this choice got made. The choice was, did I want to submit stuff and be dismissed as dumb? Or did I want to somehow avoid submitting stuff and be enigmatic and there's just no question it's better to be enigmatic than dumb so what this meant was that I got a circuit in which the submitting material to authority tends not to work out very well, which had lots of effects, some of which were very negative and I struggle with to this day, and some of which were very positive. with authority, then you may well discover how to think your way around the fictions that are

derailing your field, for example. I should say all of the people I ended up respecting and learning from, all of my mentors without exception, were all people who had problems with authority. You know, these weren't vandals, but they were all people who had been burned by authority. And, you know, in some cases, they were very successful. Dick Alexander didn't like authority much at all, but he was also a very highly decorated professor. So that was a very positive thing to discover somebody who had succeeded in spite of his distrust of authority, who could provide useful guidance to somebody who was having even more trouble with it than he had had. So I'm not sure how well that answers the question. But the problem is, we build our

academic structures around constraints. And one of the constraints that we build them around is just economic efficiency. There's nothing good about sitting in a classroom in rows facing forward, looking at a person and you know at a chalkboard but it is economically efficient right you you can teach a bunch of people relatively efficiently with that structure so the process of bouncing out of that system, of being incompatible with it, means that the system then tells you a lot of things about yourself that I don't fit is very painful until you stop listening to it. At the point you stop listening to it, it becomes a bit more amusing. But until you do, it seems it contains an awful lot of jeopardy.

So anyway, yeah, that trauma, you know, I mean, I guess I'm long since over it now. But there is a way in which I don't like classrooms. I didn't, you know, the fact that I was teaching in one was kind of funny because I was the last person who you would have thought would have stayed in school a minute longer than they had to. On the other hand, what I was able to do was provide a classroom that would have worked for me had somebody done it. And it was very rewarding to see other students who struggle with the structures of school liberated to find skills they didn't know they had because, you know, the rules just weren't the normal ones. You've mentioned Heather, your wife, in passing, and she's also a great biologist in her own right. I'm curious, are there any evolutionary concepts that have improved your relationship? Concepts that if you overlooked them would have left you with a less happy marriage? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I should say Heather is kind of my other secret weapon. So Eric and I have known each other obviously longer than I've known Heather, but Heather is

the person I come home to every night. And because we're in the same field and we know all of the same basic stuff, it makes for extremely rich conversations about what is and what might be. And, you know, we're always presenting hypotheses to each other and talking through what predictions they make and whether we know of any evidence that says one way or the other, whether they're accurate. So there is a way in which the answer to your question is in part, it has been tremendously fruitful to have a life partner who also shares a deep interest in that same subject matter. But in terms of navigating the relationship, there are some things that are just vital. So I would say here are a couple. One is the understanding that

empathy is not a characteristic that exists at one level. You have empathy with somebody, but your empathy with them is greatest where you share a history with them, and it is much cruder and sometimes just downright misleading in places where you and the other person don't have a similar history. So for example, Heather and I grew up in LA. We were born in the same year. We traveled in the same circles. In fact, I knew Heather in high school. We were not going out, but we were friends. And so that's an

awful lot of sort of shared history. Even when we weren weren't together just the simple fact of traveling in the same circles means that we've come to we've arrived at the present through a parallel path and it means we know an awful lot about what the other person knows and sees we've seen the same chunk of history from nearly the same place but i'm not a, and there are things that are very different if you're a woman. And so my empathy, that is to say my ability to understand, to predict what she's going to feel about something, is very high until we get stuff to stuff that's quite different between men and women, in which case I have to be aware that my predictive powers are likely to be greatly reduced. On the other hand, I could say that exact thing. And of course, I have said that exact thing to Heather, and she knows exactly what I mean. And so to the extent that we get into something where we're not hearing each other, because one of us is male and the other is female, and that creates a limit into how much we can

understand each other. We can also say that. We can say, hey, this is one of those places where I don't think you get what it's like to be me. And it just, it's not an accusation. It's just an observation. So that's very powerful. And I would say the other thing is the recognition that human beings are, you know, when I say I, I'm referring to my conscious self. But my conscious self is not a large fraction of myself. Most of me is a mystery to me, as is true with everybody. And what that means is that there are many places in a human life where you might know that you want to change something, let's say, but you're powerless to do it because the control switches aren't in your conscious mind. Well, it makes a huge difference in a relationship if you can say to your partner, you know, if your partner is taking you to task for something that you're doing that they don't like and you can say, oh, actually, you know what?

I agree with you completely. Right. You're just right about this. Doesn't mean I can change it, but I'm on your side. The conscious me is on your side in this argument. And we're both up against my unconscious. And if we can figure out how to convince my unconscious to go along with this, it will. But in the meantime, just know that this isn't me willfully ignoring your perspective. This is me powerless to make your perspective carry weight in this because I'm a human being and

so much of me is unconscious. So anyway, the ability to have a partner to whom you can say such a thing and they don't think that you're full of crap or pulling something is a great benefit. Brett Weinstein, we've set the stage tremendously now for talking about religion. A very controversial topic in evolution. Now, we'll start at the beginning again. I've heard people proffer the theory of mind complex,

the hypersensitive agency detector, human tendency to anthropomorphism, all these possible explanations as the most likely mechanism that originally bootstrapped religion into existence. Do you have any opinion on that topic? How do you think religion originally came about? I mean, this is one of these places where I don't even think this is a hard question. I just think that we have a couple of basic assumptions in our evolutionary toolkit that aren't quite right, that turn this into a very difficult problem. But in general, you ought to look at religion exactly the same way you look at the wing of a hummingbird or

the eye of an iguana. It's an adaptation. Obviously, it's an adaptation. And to the extent that some large fraction of evolutionary biologists would say, hey, wait a minute, what do you mean it's an adaptation? How can that possibly be? Really, the burden of proof is on them. These things are so expensive when it comes to human endeavor and so persistent that to imagine that they are anything other than an adaptation is really an extraordinary leap of logic. So in some sense, I have the feeling that whatever explains my particular trajectory through evolutionary theory has freed me from obligation to simply accepting the assumptions of my elders. And

when one is freed from accepting your elders' assumptions, that comes with some responsibility. You can't throw them out willy-nilly. Most of the assumptions of your ancestors are probably right. But you have to be able to depart from them when those assumptions are making a fool out of you. And I would say evolutionary theorists at the moment are being made into fools by assumptions that support the idea that religion might be some kind of mind virus or an anthropomorphizing brain overfitting or any one of these explanations. They're an adaptation, pure and simple. Let's give people a little more context. In terms of summarizing the literature, I think it's fair to say that

there are about three possible ways that religion could have evolved. Firstly, as a meme. Secondly, as a spandrel and then thirdly as an extended phenotype can you just give us before explaining the you know the merits or the problems in in each of those explanations can you just give us sort of a dictionary definition as an evolutionary biologist of each of those terms, a meme, a spandrel, and an extended phenotype? Yeah. So, first of all, I don't think these are necessarily competitors. Sure. So, for example, I would say I believe that religion is a meme complex, and it is also extended phenotype. I would say probably it contains some spandrels,

but in general, the spandrels will be small relative to the other structure. Okay. So to define these terms, meme is Richard Dawkins' term coined in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, and it is his analog, his cultural analog for genes. So a meme is a unit of information that is not stored in the genome but evolves outside of it. What I said to Dawkins in Chicago when we met in October was that I thought he didn't have the full courage of his convictions and that in fact he had been very right in his outlining of the concept of memes but that he had made an error which goes uncorrected to this day which is that he argued that memes these analogs of genes are like a new kind of life. In fact, he uses the term that they are evolving in

a new primeval soup. And what that suggests is that they are independent of the genes. That is to say, the behaviors of people evolve independently of the genes of people, which can't possibly be true. So we probably don't have time to go into why that is the case, but it does not make sense that a human being would have such a large brain so hospitable to picking up cultural information if that cultural information were actually causing that human being to act in a way that wasn't good for its fitness. So, okay. So a meme is a unit of cultural transmission and a unit of cultural selection. I should say, as long as we're here, I do not believe that it is especially useful to speak of a meme or a gene.

In both cases, I think this gets us into trouble. So I think to speak of things that are genetic or mimetic makes a great deal of sense. But to say that something is a gene or a meme often causes us to say something foolish. And Dawkins would agree with you on that? I don't know if he would agree with me on that. I think he would agree with the point, but I think he would, he might defend. So, this is so complex. Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene, does Gene, he defines the term gene. And he defines it in a way that is, well, by 1976 standards would have been very vague.

But the vagueness of his definition is the reason that it's the only definition that has persisted from 1976 to the present in a viable form. In other words, some part of him intuited that gene couldn't possibly mean the thing that we thought it meant, that our view of it was too simplistic. And so anyway, he carved out a broader space to talk about them. But anyway, we're far afield here. So, okay, we've got the term meme, which is like, it is an analog of genes, but transmitted culturally. The other term, next term was spandrel. So, a spandrel is an architectural term, and it refers to the triangular piece above a pillar where a pillar supports a dome. And the reason that it has relevance in biology is that Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote a famous paper in which they argued that evolutionary biologists had gotten carried away with themselves and were describing everything biological as if it were the product of adaptation

when in fact a great many things might be accidental byproducts of adaptation and they used the example of the spandrels in a famous dome housed, I think, four saints associated with four particular rivers. And their point was if you look at the paintings on these spandrels, it looks as if the spandrels were there to house the paintings. But in fact, the spandrels were an architectural byproduct. And then once that byproduct existed, somebody threw these paintings there because it made it nicer um so it's easy to misinterpret which was the causal force now no doubt there's some truth in that but it gould and lewontin their fears were not only overblown but actually uh essentially sabotage of evolutionary theory. Gould and Lewontin were concerned that evolutionists were getting carried away

with what they were doing and that as they confronted questions about human evolution that they might reveal things that would be very bad for humanity. And so at least many of us believe that they were effectively trying to derail the study of evolution when it came to people with their spandrel argument. It took evolutionary biology decades to recover from it. So, again, my point is not that there are no spandrels, but the way evolution works, there should not be very many of them, and they shouldn't be very conspicuous. Evolution tends to eliminate inefficiencies. And that means that when we see a structure worthy of discussion, it tends not to be, it tends to be an adaptation and not a spandrel. Okay. So we've got meme, we've got spandrel, and the third one was extended phenotype. So phenotype, first of all, is the manifestation of a gene. So, genotype is the

actual information stored in the genetic layer inside the genome. And phenotype is the effect on the being of a particular sequence of genetic material. So you might have a particular sequence that makes your eyes brown. Somebody else might have a mutation that causes that brown pigment not to function and reveals blue. These are phenotypic characteristics. They correspond to different sequences in the genes. Extended phenotype is Dawkins' argument that phenotype is not really... Hello there, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, swagmen and swagettes. Welcome back to the Jolly Swagman podcast. I'm Joe Walker, and what an episode we have to kick off 2019.

My guest is Brett Weinstein. Brett is an evolutionary biologist who came to public prominence as the professor at the center of the Evergreen State College protests. More on that in a moment. Brett is a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined by his brother Eric, which, how would I define it? I would define the Intellectual Dark Web as a disparate, informal group of freethinkers and iconoclasts who were bound together at bottom by nothing other than their defensive enlightenment values. So the IDW, as it's called for short,

includes such people as Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Summers, and many other names you may be familiar with. So, what were the Evergreen State College protests, and why do they matter? Let me give you some context. Imagine you're a university professor, an evolutionary biologist. You're fascinated by the natural world and how it evolved. Imagine you teach at a small liberal arts college surrounded by trees set on 1,000 acres about an hour's drive from Seattle. Imagine it's the perfect place for you to develop your own curriculum. You've taught there for 14 years and mentored hundreds of students. Imagine you like your students and they like you. Imagine you have the opportunity to give them the style of education you thought you would have benefited from if only it was available.

Imagine your wife and best friend teaches on campus with you and life is good. Imagine it's March 2017 and imagine your college has an annual tradition about month away now, known as the Day of Absence, where students and faculty of colour are allowed to remain off campus for the day as a means of highlighting their vital contribution to college life. Imagine you support this gesture as someone who identifies as deeply progressive, a Bernie Sanders supporter in fact. But imagine you also stand for enlightenment values. Objective truth and dialectic, you're the sort of person who believes John Stuart Mill's exhortation that he who only knows his own side of the case knows little of that. It shouldn't be too hard to imagine being a progressive and an enlightenment thinker, you are a university professor after all now imagine

hearing that the script has been flipped for your college's annual tradition the day of absence where instead of people of color having the option of staying off campus for the day white people are invited even encouraged to leave for the day you don't have a racist bone in your body. In fact, you regularly use your classes to teach how we should avoid our evolutionary disposition to racism. And you even risked ostracism when you were an undergraduate for calling out racism at a fraternity. But imagine you perceive something a little bit off about this new proposed formulation for the day of absence. And so being a diligent person, you write an email to staff where you argue that, quote, there is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves

from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles, and a group encouraging another group to go away. On a college campus, one's right to speak or to be must never be based on skin color, end quote. You press send. Although your email falls on largely deaf ears, you intend to remain on campus for the day of absence, which in fact comes and passes without any noise. Now imagine your bafflement as one day, about a month later, while your students are silently working on an assignment you've set them, you hear the echoes of chanting outside the building. The chanting is about you. Imagine you go to the door to confront the protesters and engage them in dialogue.

Imagine they sweep into the building, disrupt your class, chanting in front of your students that you're a racist and calling for your resignation. There's about 50 of these protesters. Imagine learning it's all because of your nuanced position on the reformulated day of absence. Imagine campus police tell you they can't guarantee your safety on campus. Imagine hearing word that rogue protesters are stalking campus with baseball bats searching cars for you. Imagine your house is within walking distance and you're fearful for your two young boys.

Imagine the college leadership has lost control and is doing virtually nothing effective to have your back. Imagine resorting to teaching one of your classes in a public park. Imagine, as a self-described deeply progressive person, being ignored by the mainstream media until you get a spot on Sean Hannity to tell your story. Imagine suing your college and four months later reaching a settlement where you and your wife resign your positions in return for $500,000. Imagine you're now a biology professor in exile. Imagine all this happening in 21st century America in, of all places, a university. That is exactly what

happened to Brett Weinstein, my guest. If you want to understand how the left could eat its own in this way, in a group abandonment of reason, listen to my episode with moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He's a gem and a Rosetta Stone for understanding the new psychology of fragility and the tribalism sweeping elite liberal campuses in the Anglosphere. There are many examples of where this goes wrong. I discussed two at the beginning of my conversation with Haidt, Nicholas Christakis at Yale, and Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College, Brett was another later casualty in this war on reason. And in this two-hour conversation with Brett, we discuss none of this. Brett is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist, and I wanted to give him the chance to discuss his field in a way that,

to my knowledge, he hasn't been able to do on any podcast before. And for that reason, I wanted to give you some lengthy context about the Evergreen State College protests if you hadn't been caught up on the story. Now, I titled this episode The Evolution of Brett and I meant that as a play on words. It refers to Brett's own evolution as a person and a scientist, the mentors and the challenges he encountered along the way. And it also pays homage to Brett's take on evolution. We discuss key concepts in the field, taking great pains to define them for you and provide interesting examples. And we finish by exploring a most interesting question. Is religion an adaption? Now, Brett famously debated this very question on stage

in Chicago with the famous scientist Richard Dawkins in October 2018. We discuss it here in a little more depth. Now, describing religion as an adaptation is not to say that everything about it is good or to approve of its literal claims. That would be the naturalistic fallacy. But on the latest figures, 84% of the people walking this earth, people around you every day, identify with a religious group. Are they victims of a mind virus, as Richard Dawkins would have you believe, or are they living out something that has evolved with us? How you answer that question has important consequences for how we manage and regard religion moving into the 21st century. So I suggest pouring yourself a fine whiskey or whatever your poison of choice is,

kicking your feet up and enjoying this deeply fascinating chat with Brett Weinstein. Brett Weinstein, you're a beautiful man. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. So we're going to discuss the evolution of religion, the group selection controversy, whether religion is simply a mind virus, as Richard Dawkins calls it, or whether it's a deeper, more adaptive phenomenon, and the dizzyingly important implications for our understanding of humanity and its future that flow from the answers to those questions. I'm so excited to talk to you. But first, I want to discuss the evolution of Brett

and introduce a few key concepts in evolutionary theory along the way. So let's start at the beginning. You and your brother Eric, who's the managing director at Teal Capital, are both very independently successful and now famous in your own rights. What on earth was in the water in your household as children? Turmeric. No, there may or may not have been turmeric, but I don't know if there was. So, I mean, your question really is what the heck happened? Why are Eric and I the way we are? And that's a difficult question to answer well,

because although, I mean, it's weird to talk about oneself, really, in such terms, but I mean, as long as you ask the question, let's take a crack at it. But in passing, let me just say, you know, Eric and I have considered this question, too, because for better or worse, we seem to have, uh, different strengths than, than many other people. And the question is, where did that come from? And we think we know some of the answers. The problem is what we don't have is a complete

model because even if you took all of the factors that might have gone into it, and even if we're correct about what they were, nothing says that for somebody else who had all of the same factors, that they wouldn't have ended up, you know, in a ditch somewhere. That we may be, in fact, the beneficiaries of certain factors that create the right kinds of challenges, but those challenges may be ones that most people never overcome. So we call this survivor bias in science, that we see the cases that are present and we don't see the cases that are absent. And it's very easy to get the wrong idea through survivor bias. So for example, if you were to interview lottery winners and you were to ask them what their secret was, a lot of lottery

winners would have a method for picking numbers, which doesn't say that a method for picking numbers has any value. What it says is that people who think there's a method for picking numbers tend to buy more lottery tickets. And so you got to count all the losers who had a system too in order to understand the winners. But anyway, if we look at the factors that we think may be contributed, there's what I think neither of us believes is an accurate description, but what flies under the heading of learning disability. Eric and I both had severe learning challenges in school. And in some sense, that was a gift because school, in addition to teaching lots of valuable things, also conveys a lot that I think on balance isn to school puts you in peril, but it also opens the door to perhaps discovering some other way of thinking clearly. We also had a pair of extraordinary grandparents, only one of which survived into our adulthood. But nonetheless, my grandfather, Harry, in particular, was a very unusual person. He was a chemist, but much more than a chemist, he was also a very broad mind. And he, among other things, took children very seriously, which isn't to say he wasn't a tremendous amount of fun. He was. All of my friends thought very highly of my grandfather because

he knew cool stuff to go see and do. And he, you know, never brushed them off. If they asked a deep question about how something in the universe worked, he took his best shot at answering it. And at the point that he didn't know the answers to the why questions anymore, he was honest about that. So he was a pretty remarkable substitute for school. And I know that I personally owe him a great deal because at the point that school more or less abandoned me, he didn't. And I think that was very important. And maybe the third important factor is one I think of in terms of the Williams sisters, the famous pair of tennis players. It seems to me that the key to the Williams sisters is that there were two of them and that they were pretty equally matched tennis wise so that what they could do is they could play tennis endlessly and each caused the other to elevate its game until nobody else could play

them. And so I wonder, uh, in Eric, in my case, if a, a bit of light sibling rivalry around all sorts of topics about how things actually work when the mythology surrounding them isn't right, if that didn't result in a kind of clarity of thought that's hard to come by unless you have a well-matched adversary who you're stuck with for life. So who's Serena and who's Venus? What? I don't know, the analogy might not work at that level. So you mentioned your grandfather, Harry. What's an example of a conversation you might have with him? Do you remember any moments? Oh, I mean, there was a lifetime full of moments uh you know i mean first of all something i

didn't really realize about my grandfather until he was gone was that not every everybody who knew him had a sense that he was an extraordinary person he was very funny uh he was a ruthless punster who would just absolutely if it took six hours to lead you down the primrose path for a great punchline, he would do it. But anyway, what I didn't realize was that he showed all of the people he cared about different stuff. Right. So I didn't realize this as a kid. I sort of thought we all got the same version of Harry and we didn't. So he took me on some kind of crazy adventure where we went to industrial parks to get pieces made for projects that we were building. My grandfather was very adept at knowing how to get a piece of lucite milled in a particular way to integrate it into some project. And what that meant was that he was also socially adept at interacting with all of the people that one finds in an industrial park, that there's a culture that goes along with people i mean at the time

it was entirely men uh who manufacture things and so very frequently he would have some item that we needed to to get milled in a particular way and he would walk into some building that you just couldn't even tell what took place in this building from the outside and it would turn out to be a machine shop of some kind and he would walk in and he would have a three minute conversation with some guy he'd never met. And then 10 minutes later, we'd walk out with the part mill just so and no money had changed hands. It was just some sort of, you know, camaraderie of working men who knew a kind of technical way of interacting that the rest of us didn't. So anyway, that's something that I think I uniquely got from Harry. Nobody else saw that side of him. My brother got a

strange kind of musical education from Harry. Eric likes to say that Harry specialized in teaching people how to do things that he himself did not know how to do. So that's a very unique skill. But if you think about it, it's actually kind of a, it's the stuff of, you know, wizards, Dumbledore and the like, is figuring out how to get people to innovate means not just teaching them what you know, but teaching them how to figure out things you don't. So anyway, there's a book to be written about the meaning of Harry. I think it's also worth saying, you know, as long as we're exploring the question of where capacity comes from and our connections to our elders who helped

us get there, Harry was in many ways himself not a success. He did not do well. He didn't graduate college. He didn't succeed in the world of business. He had several really cool ideas for inventions that never got off the ground, that sort of thing. But there's another way in which I have the sense that he was a 1.0 version of something that he made sure Eric and I ended up the 2.0 versions of that thing and our kids are the 3.0 versions and I have the feeling that with our kids, you know, the project is really finally

maybe ready for prime time. That's lovely. I want to introduce our listeners to your worldview and mental toolkit. And I thought we could do it via a thought experiment. So imagine you have a 16 year old child and the education system mysteriously evaporates tomorrow. You begin homeschooling him or her and assume that the child's about 16 years old and already numerate and literate. So which concepts or mental models would you start teaching the child and emphasizing as a matter of priority for his or

her intellectual development, creativity, and survival and engagement in the world? Well, I've been thinking a lot about this question because one of the things that came out of my experience with school is a deep distrust of formal education, which served me very well as a professor, but only because I was teaching at a place that allowed me to break any rule I didn't feel like abiding by in the classroom. So I broke them all pretty much. And it resulted in a really effective model of mentoring that I think is not known to exist elsewhere. The rules at a standard college are so restrictive that you just couldn't pull it off. So anyway, I've been in the aftermath of Evergreen, I've been trying to formalize an understanding of what it is that I discovered empirically

during that period of my life. And I would say a couple of things. One, your scenario makes me smile because school somehow has evaporated. And I feel like, oh, man, whoever this kid is, he's lucky because he doesn't have to get over that thing in order to figure out how to be. But then the next part of your question involves what things in particular would I make sure to teach? And I think the first thing I would say is I would try to distance myself from that mindset to begin with. And what I would do instead of figuring out topics that needed to be taught is I would figure out

projects and experiences and exercises that teach all of the important stuff that one needs to know in line. So as you're doing it, you discover all of these things. Now, there's certain topics that wouldn't be discovered that way. You know, you could do a pretty good job of conveying, let's say, trigonometry, for example, as you were doing carpentry. Carpentry requires a certain amount of trigonometry in order to do various things. And so you could access trigonometry and geometry more generally as you figured out how to convey the building of various objects. You wouldn't get to calculus that way, right? So at some level, what I think we misunderstand about school is that school is ideally a supplement, right? It's

not the way we get educated. It's a supplement to correct for the fact that some of the things that are good to know for a modern life are not discovered just simply by living, right? But school should really be the exception in education, not the rule of education. The rule of education should be experiential. And in some sense, what I would hope is that a curriculum could be put together such that the child would never really know that they were in school, that everything seemed like some sort of project with a purpose, and that that purpose would correct the big failing of school as I see it, which is that it doesn't correctly address the motivational structure of a human being, right?

Very often it substitutes the affirmation of some authority figure at the front of the room for success. And what this does is it causes people to become addicted to approval. And if you're addicted to approval, if that's what motivates you, then you're not going to be able to innovate because you need somebody telling you what to do. And if we want innovators, we have to cause them to build a motivational structure that will allow them to feel good about accomplishing things that nobody else can see the value of yet because that's how you get to an innovation that actually matters. So I don't know if that answers your question, but in general, I would try to make the educational process as informal, as fun and engaging as possible. And the fact is nothing teaches that like projects that actually produce something useful in the end. Let's move on to evolution and the evolution of Brett as well. Do you remember the moment you first got hooked on the concept of natural selection?

I think so. I was a kid. I was, I think, about five years old. And I was, my grandmother was some story. I think it was during the Depression, the Works Progress Administration maybe had paid to have these little oases created in the hills above Los Angeles. Maybe that's not their explanation. But for some reason, there were these little patches of various interesting plants, like a little mini arboretum. And we were sitting in one having lunch. And my grandfather always carried with him this beautiful little pen light. It was a loop, a very high quality glass magnifier with a ring light around it. So you could look at whatever you were looking at, you know, at 10 times magnification. And it would just be clear as a bell. And so anyway, I was looking at a flower, I think, and he just pulled the thing out of his pocket. I'm not even sure if he said anything to me. I think he just kind of turned it

on and handed it to me. And, you know, I knew the thing and I looked into the flower and I saw a lot of structure that just wasn't really obvious to the naked eye. And this is definitely my adult mind imposing something on the experience. But there was a discovery in there that the flower was not there for our benefit. The structure there was meaningless to a person who didn't have a magnifier. You just wouldn't notice that it even existed. were built for us. They were endlessly amusing to think about, but they weren't designed to be understood. And that that was the most interesting kind of puzzle because nothing guaranteed that you had the tools to unpack it. So they were truly challenging. Um, and I think, I think I was really, uh, addicted to the idea that there was a relatively simple set of concepts that could unpack

the part of the universe that I found most compelling, which was, you know, even before that moment, I was absolutely fascinated by animals. And so, yeah, I think it was that. My grandfather explained, you know, just the bare bones of Darwinism, I believe, that afternoon as we were sitting in the little oasis. And I was hooked. And I should say there's another part of that story. Some other wasn't the same day or week or anything like that but there was a book that my grandparents had a children's book called animals do the strangest things and um sure i only you do you know the book well i only remember one animal from it i you know it must have had a dozen creatures whose little story was described in there but the uh pangolin was described in this book. And I thought, that is such an improbable and strange and marvelous creature. And I was just very compelled that such a thing, A, should exist, and that B, given that it existed, it's not as famous as an

elephant or a giraffe or something like that. So anyway, I mean, maybe what we're discovering is that I just, for whatever reason, have a mind that is so compelled by the glory of creatures that it was bound to happen. Even just a little bit of scratching the surface with respect to what creatures are like was enough to get me hooked. And then how long after that until you started studying evolution formally? What was your undergrad? Well, you know, I should say, as much as I dislike school, about one in five teachers that I encountered before getting to college was a really good egg who had something interesting to convey and cared more than they needed to for their job. And so I had a really

good biology professor. I think Dr. Pete was his name. And anyway, he said some pretty interesting stuff that stuck with me, some of which I still use, you know, like the idea that in most populations, the average individual produces two offspring that survive to reproduce. That's a very powerful concept. to, you know, a spider, let's say. A small spider might produce a couple hundred offspring, whereas, you know, a chimpanzee might produce a successful one, might produce three or four offspring in life. So the idea that the number is the same irrespective of what style of creature you are is very jarring because for one thing it implies there's an awful lot of death that comes along with being the one kind of creature and a much reduced quantity of death that comes along with being the other and why

would selection uh not choose one path or the other you know, there are very good reasons that it doesn't. But in any case, my point is, I had some, some high quality thinkers who I ran across early before I got to college. And then in college, actually, as a freshman, I had a pretty interesting experience. I'm not even sure what triggered it. But I fell in with a group of freshmen who just started hanging around together at the beginning of our freshman year. And using evolutionary logic to unpack things that weren't typically thought to be evolutionary. So we became fascinated by the idea that human behavior might have a lot to do with evolution that we don't recognize. And for a while, this was just sort of an informal game that we would hypothesize about things that might work in certain ways. And then it turned out that there was a whole field of people who had explored this path ahead of us, which, you know, could be, uh, disempowering to discover that lots of people had done the work ahead of you. On the other hand, it meant that you could check your work pretty readily because

you didn't have to do the experiments yourself. Somebody else had already gone there. So as I realized that what my friend Dave and I had been playing around with was actually a field, and I started to explore what was in that field, and I found some of it glorious and some of it sorely lacking, and I just fell into it that way. At some point, so I was at the University of Pennsylvania, and I took, there was a rule, I think actually Eric is the one who clued me into the rule, which is never mind the prerequisites, right? Prerequisites often keep you out of the course that you should be in. And there was a chemical ecology course. You know, it was a graduate course. It was a seminar with maybe 15 people in it. And as a freshman, I signed up for it. And I was, of course, completely out of my depth.

But I was able to keep up. You know, if they made certain allowances, I was able to keep up. You know, if they made certain allowances, I was able to keep up with the grad students in that course because for some reason evolutionary thinking was very intuitive to me. And that also resulted in – I remember the professor well. The guy's name was Larry Clark. Larry Clark was a specialist on chemical ecology and birds. I didn't yet realize how glorious birds were. But nonetheless, Larry Clark affirmed that I was making sense. And it didn't matter to him that I wasn't a graduate student or even a senior.

The fact that I was a freshman who was making sense was worthy of encouragement to him. And so he encouraged me. And anyway, I think the thing is, the farther I went down this road, the more voracious I became to hunt bigger puzzles and find more remarkable landscapes of ideas. I mean, I guess that's just the nature of a healthy addiction. So we're going to continue discussing the evolution of Brett, but I'm also going to start weaving in some concepts in natural selection now to help prepare the stage for our discussion of religion and group selection to make sure that

that all the audience is on the same page so can you give us a brief explanation of darwinian natural selection and it's for prerequisites speaking of prerequisites yeah um but i think i think it is worth coming at this in a slightly different way. Because I think very frequently we make natural selection more mystical than it really ought to be. Okay. That really it's an extension of a very basic process that exists outside of the biological world. And the biological world does one extra thing that makes it especially powerful. But essentially, the four characteristics that you have to have are, you have to have reproduction, you have to have variation between the products of reproduction. You have to have heritability of the variation between the products.

And then you have to have differential success of the outputs. So if you eliminate any one of these things, then you don't get natural selection. You get something else that has some of its characteristics, but none of its power. But the thing that I learned, and actually I learned this from Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, which is a book that I recommend everybody read. It's a very powerful analysis and very intuitively presented. And what Dawkins says in the book is that there are four characteristics that cause a pattern to become common. And I'm extending this a little bit. I'm saying it in a way that makes it relevant to things that have nothing to do with biology, which I think Dawkins came very close to saying, but he didn't quite get there. But the four characteristics, let's see if I can do it off the top of my head, the four characteristics are that a pattern, so he says that a pattern must reproduce itself

at some rate. I would alter that slightly and say that a pattern must come into existence at some level of regularity, that the pattern must have a high degree of fidelity, so that two units of this particular pattern are enough alike that they share a memory location in our minds, so that we can identify that they are in fact common rather than different things. So what two do I have? I have come into existence at some rate. They must have high fidelity. They must persist for some period of time. And then they must capture resources that are limited in the ecosystem. Okay, those are the four. And the key

thing is, if you slightly alter his list so that it's not inherently biological, and you say, these are the things that make patterns common, so that the pattern can be spiral galaxies, the pattern can be neutrinos, it can be anything, right? It can be giraffes, anything. neutrinos come into existence, how similar they are to each other, how likely they are to persist over some period of time, and how good they are at accumulating the stuff in the universe, right? That pattern is selection, right? It's not natural selection because natural selection is a reserved term for biology, but it is selection, the portion of natural selection that is simply the force that sorts things in the universe and decides that there will be more of some and less of others. That force is not biological, and it is

visible through your telescope as much as your microscope, right? If you look up into the sky, the commonality of different kinds of stars is just a simple product of these four characteristics. Now what is different in biology, the thing that causes the stuff outside your window to look very different than the stuff outside your telescope, is heredity that if you add heredity to selection, what you get is iterated, cumulative motion towards a goal. Now, there's some fraction of the audience, even biologically sophisticated people, maybe especially biologically sophisticated people who will blanch at my invoking a goal, because it really depends what one means. You know, natural selection is a mindless process in some sense. And so its goal is either a mind-numbing one that we could call fitness or essentially non-existent because the biological world is a special case of the non-biological world. But when one watches a strangler fig grow and encrust a tree and then replace it in the forest, that strangler fig, of course,

does not know what it's doing. It's simply programmed to deploy a structure that results in the replacement of an existing canopy tree. But it is not wrong to think of it as having the goal of replacing that tree. It's not a conscious goal, but it functions as if it has a goal in the same way that, you know, an ant searches for scraps of food. The ant presumably doesn't know it has a goal either. So this process whereby heredity plus this general process of selection that is anywhere and everywhere you look results in the very special phenomena of biology which behave in a very goal-directed fashion, which is what separates them from the other objects. And in this process of natural selection,

what are we selecting for? What are the units of selection? Well, that's a great question. And this is one of the places where I depart from many of my colleagues, because I think we've done far too much reverse engineering of the answer to that question from the facts of biology as we find them here on Earth, which has a lot of biases built into it. I mean, for one thing, a really good theory of selection and the biology that results from it ought not be so limited that it only applies here on earth it ought to be pretty good anywhere that process is unfolding in the universe and so the biases that come out of studying earth's biota are in some sense unavoidable but in another sense

we ought to at least be aware that we are looking at a single data point of life and that the theory ought to apply to all data points of life. Also, though, we have biases within the biota, which is to say we see the patterns that are of a type that our perceptual and cognitive apparatus recognizes them, which means that the more subtle phenomena involved in our biological world are discovered later and they get left out of the core theory. So in any case, what I'm getting at is what are the things to be selected what is the level at which selection functions i strongly suspect that a hundred years from now if there are still people on earth studying biology that we will look back at our current understanding of um that landscape and we will we will view ourselves as very crude and i i'm i'm trying not to fall into

that pitfall without having really good tools to escape it i'm trying to spot where we've been misled by what we happen to have encountered so natural selection can explain everything or almost everything about the biological world including altruistic behavior a point that we might touch on again later um i want to read out a few reactions that different people have had to the gene-centered view of evolution and then i want to get your reaction um and and and i'll escalate in terms of the dismay of the person. So in The Selfish Gene, the book that you mentioned, a young Richard Dawkins wrote that, quote, we are survival machines,

robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. In 1994, Randolph Nessie said, quote, the discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. When I first grasped it, I slept badly for many nights,

trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. And then finally, in Unweaving the Rainbow, one of his later books, Dawkins wrote about a few of the responses that original readers of The Selfish Gene sent to him. And I quote him again, a foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it. So troubled was he by what he saw as his cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully

that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism. So Brett, do you remember the moment you first grasped the full implications of the gene-centered view of evolution? And what was your emotional reaction if you had one? Yeah, that's a doozy of a question. I do feel a little trepidation about answering it because my reaction, while A, I understand all of those actions and I've certainly seen them in my students and in others. There's a way in which I feel like that's what happens if you get the message, but only halfway, right? of human goodness is, is profoundly disturbing at a level that one must morally reject the hegemony of the genes. And so what I'm waiting for is other people to recognize that, yes, it is true.

The genes have something in mind for us. And I swear to you, it cannot be defended, right? You can defend pieces of it, but you certainly can't defend the aggregate. And so if that is true, then we are in the following interesting predicament. We human beings are the most marvelous machines, the most marvelous patterns in the known universe. We have minds that are capable of the most astonishing acts of beauty and insight and compassion. And we are also capable of torture and genocide and evil. If you recognize that both of those things are the product of this mindless process of selection, that you have been handed the machinery to do all of these marvelous things with the hazard of doing all of these terrible things, then isn't the obvious choice to take power away from the genes, to reject their hegemony and to say, look, this machinery is going to be rededicated to something worthy of it. I want to do something that's actually valuable with this marvelous machinery that selection built for the mind

numbing process of increasing my fitness. All right? I'm not so interested in my fitness. Once you know what fitness is, you'd have to be crazy to care about it. So if you're not interested in fitness, but you've got this marvelous machine, what are you going to do with it? That's the question. So I guess I would encourage listeners not to stop halfway through the valley when you discover what selection has in store for you. Go all the way through. Realize that you can't possibly, you know, if you discovered that you were a robot with a murderous program walking around like a nice guy waiting for your objective to stray into the crosshairs so you could destroy it, and there was no reason to destroy your objective, you might say, well, no, I'm not going to be that

robot. I'm going to do something else. So I encourage people to not lose so much sleep and realize that they've been handed an amazing gift and that the purpose of it is not worthy of your attention. So there was a video circulating on Twitter last week, which I know you retweeted, and I thought we could quickly talk about it to demonstrate the full explanatory reach of the concept of natural selection. And the video just quickly was of an Iranian spider-tailed horned viper.

And the snake sort of sways its tail seductively and it looks like there's a spider on the end of the tail a bird swoops in to pick up the spider and then the snake turns around and steps up the bird now how on earth does a spider mimicking tail evolve because to many people they'd think that something has to come into the world, something like that, perfectly designed in the first instance for it to even work. Yeah, well, so I have to say, I would like to imagine that I would have come up with the elegant answer to that question on my own. But I have to say, I'm leaning a little bit on something I read from Dawkins many years ago. I think it's in, uh, in climbing Mount improbable, which is a very good book. Um, so I'm, you know, I'm a little frustrated with Dawkins at the moment because of some things

that he said during our interaction in Chicago, but it doesn't mean I didn't learn an awful lot from him early on. And one of the things that he goes through in that book that has stuck with me is an explanation of essentially a response to the creationist argument that an eye, a half an eye is of no value, so an eye couldn't have possibly come about through gradual evolution. Well, Dawkins points out that this is nonsense for lots of reasons. One of the reasons it's nonsense is that we have a great many examples of intermediate eye-like structures in nature and so we can see more or less the path that an eye would travel where it is valuable at each of

the intermediate steps. But he also goes through an explanation of a crude eye and its value. In fact, I believe he discusses there the battle, the arms race between a caterpillar that mimics, maybe it mimics bird shit. There are certainly lots of caterpillars that do. But in any case, the question was, how good a mimic does the caterpillar have to be to avoid the bird? Right? And the answer is, well, that's not really the question. The question is, is it good enough to fool the bird at 10 meters? Right? A poor mimic might be good enough to fool a bird at 10 meters. It might be good enough to fool a bird who's distracted because it's got predators to be worried about, or good enough to fool a bird in the context of a very noisy background. And so what I think

people need to realize is that there are different levels of evolutionary difficulty. And very often the things that impress us most, like the spider mimic on the tail of the snake, or a caterpillar that does a very convincing job of looking like a snake or bird shit or whatever it does, is that the path to the fully realized mimic can start with something that fools a small number of individuals at a great distance. That in evolutionary space, even fooling a small number of individuals at a great distance matters quite a bit if fooling them means they don't come closer to investigate and then consume you, leaving you no opportunity to leave offspring. So what I'm getting at is there is what I would say a smooth slope from a very

passing minimal resemblance to these phenomena of no interest to the predator and a fully fledged mimic that can fool a human eye that knows what they're looking for, right? The smoothness of that path means that evolutionarily, this is more or less a straightforward story because each gradual improvement in the degree to which the mimic looks like the model provides extra advantage. There's no discontinuity. That's not always the case. There are other kinds of evolutionary phenomena where it's much harder to understand how something would have gotten from A to B. But in the case of a mimic like the spider at the end of the tail of the snake, if you look at the snake, and the thing that was circulating on Twitter was the first

time I've ever seen, I think, a picture or video of this animal. I didn't know that the animal existed. But if you look at it, the snake itself has a kind of hairy scales. So the scales have these raised projections. And again, all I have is the one piece of video of this one individual animal, but the animal is sitting on these volcanic rocks that are broken apart in a way that they're very jagged. And so the projections on the snake camouflage it. So I don't know if that's why they evolved, but my guess would be the projections on the snake scales evolved to camouflage it against the fuzzy background of broken, jagged volcanic rocks. But once you've got those fuzzy projections, some number of them will sometimes look spider-like

at some angles, right? And the movement of a spider's tail will sometimes animate the spider-like projections on the tail that just barely look like a spider enough to dissuade, or to, in this case, encourage a bird to come closer. And if it happens to be in strike range, even if it's just one in a hundred times, that might be enough of a signal for selection to propagate that animal above some competitor whose projections look just a little bit less spider-like and you're off to the races. It's a smooth slope from the slight tendency to just a little bit less spider-like, and you're off to the races. It's a smooth slope from the slight tendency to look a little bit like a spider

to looking an awful lot like a spider. So let's talk about the two gene-centered mechanisms for explaining altruistic behavior in humans, because natural selection can also explain altruistic behavior. So we'll talk about kin selection first and then we'll come back to reciprocal altruism in a little bit. What is kin selection? I'm not sure if you need to explain inclusive fitness first, but maybe just give us a general outline. I mean, we more or less should just treat these as the same process. So inclusive fitness is elevated by kin selection.

So kin selection is just the recognition that in a race to propagate one's genes, that the genes are not always housed in the self, that they are housed in other individuals who are related at some predictable rate. mitochondria, the offspring contains 50% of the genetic material that the parent had. And the reason it's only 50% is because there's a second parent who also contributes 50% of their genome. And so the offspring is 50% related to both parents. When you have two full siblings, each of them has gotten 50% from each parent, but they will have gotten a different 50%. And so they will share 50%, statistically speaking, of their genes with each other. But unlike their relationship with their parent,

the 50% that they share will be, that's a statistical probability, right? They could share more or they could share less based on what we believe to be a more or less random process of selection of which half of the parent genome goes into the offspring, which is why sometimes siblings can look an awful lot alike and sometimes they look very little alike because there's a statistical process dictating how closely they are related. And, you know, we can see that manifest in the genes that affect phenotype, affect how you look. So in any case, when you realize that other individuals share some percentage of your genes and that you can understand approximately how many genes they share with you based on in what way they are

related to you then you could increase your success at propagating your genes not just by producing your own offspring but by facilitating the reproduction of other individuals who share your genes and what Bill Hamilton who is now dead but is one of the great 20th century evolutionary biologists, pointed out was that there was actually a formula by which you could predict the altruistic behavior of an individual based on the degree of relatedness between the two parties and the relative cost of the action to the individual choosing to be altruistic and their benefit to the individual receiving the product of that altruism. And that these things were just related through a very simple mathematical formula, which he said would predict benevolent behavior in nature. And this formula has now, for some reason, become extremely controversial as group selection has returned to the fore. But for many of us, it stands as one of the great triumphs of 20th century evolutionary biology,

a mathematical formula that predicts altruistic behavior in nature irrespective of species. Mm-hmm. So the formula is RB is greater than C. Yep. Can you quickly break that down for us? Sure. So R is the degree of relatedness, B is the benefit to the individual receiving the benefit, and C is the cost to the individual engaging in the altruism. And so the point is, if the degree of relatedness times the benefit received by the recipient is greater than the cost to the altruist, then the altruism is favored because it isn't really altruism. It's a kind of genetic selfishness that manifests in benevolent behavior. But I would say we can get all tied up in the horror of this equation if we become overly obsessed with selfishness in the connotations of selfishness as we see them

as a human being the fact is uh tremendous acts of compassion and uh human decency are driven by this process things that we should honor So the very fact that a parent will lay down their life for their child, that they will go to bat for that child and do everything they can to make sure that that child succeeds. Yes, you can wag your finger at them and you can say you're really being selfish because the child carries your genes on the other hand we can also see that the pattern of benevolence is one that we can willingly abstract and apply even when the justification based on hamilton's rule isn't there so in other words there are many excellent adoptive parents of children and their parental love is uh it is no less effective and it is maybe even more honorable because it is uh they have chosen it um but in any case

we shouldn't discount the uh the decency of human beings just simply because there is a genetic explanation that explains where it came from yeah so jbs haldane when he was asked if he would give up his life to save a drowning brother famously quipped no but i would gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins the premise of the joke joke being that the relational coefficient for a sibling is a half, whereas for a cousin, it's an eighth. Is that a literal application of Hamilton's rule? Does it work like that? Well, let's put it this way. If you construct the puzzle so that that's the only thing going on, then it does work that way. And, you know, it more or less matches our understanding of how people view their relatives. The problem is, in my opinion,

we have over-instantiated the narrow version of Hamilton's rule. And so we look for named relationships. We look for, you know, offspring and siblings and cousins and second cousins and these things. And we imagine that's all that's going on. But the fact is, there is an entire landscape of genetic overlap that is not easily quantified. And so much of the mystery of the way kin selection actually works probably requires us to understand that selection may have programmed us to recognize degrees of relatedness that do not have names. So I suspect we will discover that over time. Unfortunately, it's very contentious. And I think a lot of people, including possibly Dawkins, would prefer we spend our time on something else. All right, shifting gears a little bit. Who was Bob Trivers? How did you meet him?

What was his impact on you? Jeez. So I was very lucky to meet Bob Trivers. Bob Trivers is, um, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. He was in fact, um, a, uh, a mentee of Bill Hamilton, who we just spoke about. Um, so he and Bill Hamilton became very good friends, but I believe early on Bob wrote to, to Bill to Bill, Bob who had not studied biology. I think he had studied math. And anyway, he wrote to Bill about some ideas that he was working on, and Bill wrote back and was very encouraging to Bob. Anyway, Bob went on to be unarguably one of the great evolutionary minds of the 20th century, very influential in evolutionary biology.

And he's just a very fascinating, clear-headed thinker who I didn't even know who he was at the point that I left the University of Pennsylvania and then sometime later ended up going back to school at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he happened to be a professor. So the point that Heather and I arrived at Santa Cruz, Heather came home one day and said, you'll never guess who's here. I said, Oh, tell me. And she said, Bob Trivers. And I, you know, I sort of searched my mind, Bob Trivers, that rings some kind of a bell anyway. Um, so Bob Trivers happened to be there teaching a course called social evolution which was of course he talked from a book he had written and we both signed up because I had managed to hook Heather on evolutionary thinking and anyway we took this course and Bob was just the most amazing professor it was just he was one

of these people that was an absolute delight to watch at the board and he had the most remarkable stories some of which you know you probably just couldn't get away with telling in a modern classroom but at the time he told him and you know the class loved him for it it was just non-stop fascinating and at some point uh we became friends with bob we started to hang out with him and he you know he would invite us to parties at his house i remember one in which bill hamilton came to the party and uh anyway we were introduced to bill um but Bob took me at one point to Jamaica as a field assistant. So he needed he spent a lot of time in Jamaica studying various things. One of them was sexual anole lizards of Jamaica have these flags under their throats

that they flash at each other from, you know, one stump to another, sending some kind of signal that sometimes starts a fight. Jamaican flags or? No, no. Actually, there are a bunch of different species on Jamaica, and they have very different flags. But no, they have these colorful little flaps that are activated by a little projection, a muscular – there's like a little bone that pulls the flap out from under the neck. And the animals are very, so it's the males who have these things. And males are very sensitive to some animal, you know, 20 yards away, flashing one of these dewlaps. And it results in all kinds of interesting behavior unfolding. So anyway, that's a long winded answer. But let's just say Bob, who is still very much alive, who has now won the Crawford Prize, which is – there's no Nobel Prize in biology, but the Crawford Prize is the closest thing there is. Bob has won the Crawford Prize. And in any case, I was incredibly lucky to interact with him early on.

It had all kinds of influence on me. So Bob also pioneered the theory of reciprocal altruism, which was the other gene-centered mechanism for explaining altruism that we were going to return to. Can you give us a brief outline of that theory? Well, sure. I mean, in some sense, it's funny that it even requires a formalization. Bob's work on it is absolutely brilliant, but in some sense, a lot of evolutionary biology, especially when it comes to

behavior, is in some sense the rediscovery of things that everybody's grandmother knew. And reciprocal altruism is the discovery that to the extent that there is a system in place that results in an individual calculating that by doing good, by being benevolent to another individual, that they are likely in the future to receive benefits that meet or exceed the expenditure that they made, that that behavior will be favored. So I guess an easier way to say it would be if you think that somebody is going to treat you well for treating them well, it makes sense to behave that way. So this then, of course, results in the possibility of having organized bands of individuals who are not narrowly calculating degrees of relatedness, but in fact are perfectly capable of cooperating with individuals they are not closely related to for very good reason. But, you know, it's one of the foundational elements of the grand theory of cooperation. Your other great mentor apart from Bob Trivis was Dick Alexander. So tell us who Dick was, what his impact was on you. Well, Dick Alexander, who died August 20th of last year was my graduate advisor. And he was an absolutely remarkable

person. He wasn't as famous as Bob Trivers or Bill Hamilton. But in many ways, he had as broad an impact through a large number of students that he sent into the world and through some very deep works on, in particular, evolution of morality and related phenomena in human beings. So he was a pioneer when it came to understanding the evolutionary nature of humans. And in many ways, I think he has not yet gotten his due for how farsighted he was. So one thing that I think obsesses his students is trying to make sure that the world understands who he was, even though he's gone and his fame maybe didn't reach quite as far as some others.

So Dick was, by training, an entomologist. He studied insects. And he was a curator of insects at the University of Michigan in the Museum of Zoology. And I must say, I did not immediately end up as his student when I got to Michigan. I got to Michigan, I was actually, one of the few bad pieces of advice Eric ever gave me was he told me that he thought I should avoid evolutionary biology in graduate school and maybe return to it later in my career after I'd done something maybe more technical and hard-headed like neurobiology or biochemistry or something like that. What was his reasoning?

I think he thought that evolutionary biology was too soft as a science, that it wasn't rigorous enough. And, you know, I don't think his advice was, it ended up being wrong, but it ended up being wrong for a very interesting reason. So I tried, I tried to follow it. And I shopped around for, once I got to graduate school, I went to various different labs. And, you know, I hung out with the neurobiologists and I checked out various different groups of people. And what I found surprised me, which was that there was almost no laboratory at the university. And Michigan's a big one, so there were a lot to choose from. There was almost no place where people were particularly clear-headed right there was just obvious flaws and thinking and blind spots that were in evidence everywhere and there was one

place that that wasn't true and the one place it wasn't true was in the museum of zoology and then there were a couple of laboratories in the museum of Zoology where people thought very clearly. The one that appealed to me most was the insect division where Dick Alexander was one of the curators. And in particular, he had accumulated a group of people around him who had the very conspicuous phenomenon that they did not overwhelmingly study insects. So the insect division was weirdly populated by people who were studying birds. Some of them were studying dolphins. Yes, there were some studying insects. There were people studying apes. And so the question was, what the heck was going on? Why did the insect division accumulate all of these people who weren't particularly thinking about insects. And the

answer was that Dick had created an environment that was intellectually very rigorous, very open-minded, and people fled there. So I became a kind of refugee. You know, I had searched for my home in biology, running away from evolution, and had ended up right back in the core of the adaptive evolutionary thinkers at Michigan by virtue of the fact that that's the place where people who were doing biology were making sense. So anyway, it brought me back to evolutionary biology and Dick in particular was a very good mentor. First of all, it is conspicuous that I believe it is true to say that none of the people that he mentored, not a single one that I'm aware of, ever left the program feeling resentful of Dick. That's an amazing accomplishment. Being a graduate mentor is not an easy thing to be. And even a very good one will tend to cause a good bit of resentment. But the way Dick went about it resulted in people caring for him and revering him and listening to him because it was quite clear that he had

every interest in you succeeding that he he told you he told you exactly what he thought whether it was easy for you to hear or not and that this made you more powerful in the end so dick and I also got along quite well, because, you know, I had, in working with Bob, I had started thinking a great deal about humans, and evolution and questions about things like religion and culture. And unlike the fashion of the moment in 2019, Dick and Bob were both broad-minded about the possibility that many of the large-scale human phenomena are the product of some version of Darwinian natural selection. And I was too. So anyway, Dick and I got along very well on that topic, as with many others. And he was really the perfect person to run into at that point in my development as an evolutionary biologist. What are some of the ways resentment

is typically caused in graduate programs? Well, I mean, think about the following problem. You grav trying to publish large numbers of papers, so they may behave in a kind of predatory way. They may put their name on every paper you write because in their mind the paper is really the result of their work. After all, your work wouldn't exist if they didn't provide you support and a laboratory. So there's this kind of economic exchange that develops that is quite extractive of graduate students. You know, the graduate students exist in large numbers in order to facilitate the work of the primary investigator in the lab,

which means that there won't be enough jobs for all of the people who are in graduate school, which the mentor knows. And if the mentor were honest about that, then the students would understand that they were being exploited. And so the students don't tend to hear this from their mentor, but they tend to discover it later when they go to get a job. And there's that. There's also the fact that because you're interested in the same subject as your mentor and ideas are being discussed back and forth, it's extremely easy for an idea to occur to two people or for an idea to be presented in one place and for a person not really to register that it was presented there and then to rediscover it as

they're thinking and imagining that it is their own idea. And so there's lots of room for the sense of being mistreated in graduate school. And what Dick did was he, A, was very honest about the danger of these things. And he went out of his way to make sure that they didn't happen. So, for example, he basically had a policy that said, I don't want you working on what I'm working on. Not because I'm territorial, but because I don't want any ambiguity. I want you to learn how to do high quality work and for you to know what's yours and that you've accomplished it. And it freed him to give you very high quality feedback and for you to know exactly what it meant. In one particular case, so I did a lot of stuff during graduate

school where I wasn't really supposed to be working on some project, but it caught my attention and I couldn't stop myself from doing it. And, you know, in some cases distracted me from what the department thought I was doing. But in one case, I got, uh, wrapped up in this idea around senescence, um, and which is aging. Yeah. Yeah. Aging, you know. It's not exactly aging, but yeah, it happened in an instant where I was in a seminar that Dick happened to be leading. And a student presented something that caused an absolute epiphany, right? Like it was instantaneous that two things that I knew that were separate suddenly rammed into each other and became a very important idea. And I remember raising my hand and trying to convey what had just occurred to me.

And nobody in the room got it, including Dick. And then, you know, I couldn't let it go. And I went and I started to write about it. And I started to look up data to see whether I was really on the right track. And I remember writing, what would you call it? I mean, just some sort of a proposal of a hypothesis for Dick. And I remember him scratching his head over it. And the thing that really struck me was that he was very clear about the fact that he did not understand what I was saying. There's a long history in evolutionary biology of dispensing with mechanism.

Because for a long time it was impossible to discuss the details of the biological mechanisms. But you could discuss the phenomenology. You could discuss the way creatures behaved or the form that they took, even if you couldn't explain the molecular underpinnings of how it happened. And so anyway, there's sort of a culture in evolutionary biology of not paying attention to mechanism. And I've never really been of that culture. I've always been a bit fascinated by mechanism, even as I'm fascinated by function and behavior. And anyway, so in trying to hands and saying, well, I don't know if it's garbage or not, you know, he had some other way of interpreting. He looked at it and he

said, you know, this has the ring of truth to it. I have the sense that this may be very important, even though I don't know what you're saying. And over the course of a year, I convinced him that it made sense and I was able to convey this viewpoint. But it's a very special mentor who is capable of straddling that gap. Most mentors would, as soon as they knew that they couldn't follow the concept, they would just sort of not want to take responsibility for saying one way or the other. But in Dick's case, he was able to give me the encouragement that I needed and to give me the sense, you know, he wasn't just rooting for me. He was actually saying, no, this has the ring of biological truth to it. I just don't know enough about the mechanism to say whether you're making sense. And that that was a very, it was a very important role for him to

play. And also, you know, I guess the thing is there was just no, there was no resentment on his part that I was doing something in a realm where he wasn't the expert, right? He thought that was good. And, um, I think the thing is there's, there's too much pettiness in mentoring these days. And the fact that Dick didn't suffer from any of it was a real gift. That's amazing. So that sort of brings us to the end of your formal education, I suppose, in the evolution of Brett. I know at various times throughout your high school and your college education, you described the experiences as being almost traumatic. I think I may have heard you use that particular word in the past.

And we did mention the problems you see in education at the beginning of this conversation. But can you just tell me like what specifically or concretely about take college, for example, would you not enjoy or struggle with the most? Well, you know, so, I mean, it's very hard for me to separate college from anything else because college basically reproduced the same pattern that had been going on since the second grade. Yeah. So, in my case, I'm not a huge fan of the designation dyslexic. I don't really believe that dyslexia is what we think it is. But nonetheless, let's just say whatever it is, I've got it in spades. I tried to submit work. It was very difficult for my teachers who, you know, did not have a lot of extra bandwidth to figure out whether or not the work I'd submitted was any good. So that wasn't their fault. But the result of it was that the feedback I got was negative no matter what the content was.

And what that did was it caused me to have to make a kind of choice. Really, we're talking about the second grade where this choice got made. The choice was, did I want to submit stuff and be dismissed as dumb? Or did I want to somehow avoid submitting stuff and be enigmatic? And there's just no question it's better to be enigmatic than dumb so what this meant was that i got a circuit in which the submitting material to authority tends not to work out very well which had lots of effects some of which were very negative and i struggle with to this day, and some of which were very positive. You know, if you have an uneasy relationship with authority, then you may well discover how to think your way around the fictions that are derailing your field, for example.

I should say all of the people I ended up respecting and learning from, all of my mentors, without but they were all people who had been burned by authority. And, you know, in some cases they were very successful. Dick Alexander didn't like authority much at all, but he was also a very positive thing to discover somebody who had succeeded in spite of his distrust of authority who could provide useful guidance to somebody who was having even more trouble with it than he had had. So I'm not sure how well that answers the question, but the problem is we build our academic structures around constraints. And one of the constraints that we build them around is just economic efficiency. There's nothing good about sitting in a classroom in rows facing forward, looking at a person and, you know, at a chalkboard. But it is economically efficient. Right. You can teach a bunch of people relatively efficiently with that structure so the process of bouncing out of that system of being incompatible with it means that the system then tells you a lot of things about yourself that I don't know if they're

guesses or if they're accusations, but what the system decides is true of those who don't fit is very painful until you stop listening to it. At the point you stop listening to it, it becomes, uh, a bit more amusing, but until you do, it seems, uh, it, it contains an awful lot of jeopardy. So anyway, yeah, that trauma, you know, I mean, I guess I'm long since over it now, but there is a way in which I don't like classrooms. The fact that I was teaching in one was kind of funny because I was the last person who you would have thought would have stayed in school a minute longer than they had to. On the other hand, what I was able to do was provide a classroom that would have worked for me had somebody done it. And it was very rewarding to see other students who struggle with the structures of school liberated to find skills they didn't know they had because, you know, the rules just weren't the normal ones.

You've mentioned Heather, your wife, in passing, and she's also a great biologist in her own right. I'm curious, are there any evolutionary concepts that have improved your relationship? Concepts that if you overlooked them would have left you with a less happy marriage? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I should say Heather is kind of my other secret weapon. So Eric and I have known each other obviously longer than I've known Heather, but Heather is the person I come home to every night. And because we're in the same field and we know all of the same basic stuff, it makes for extremely rich conversations about what is and what might be. And, you know, we're always presenting hypotheses to each other and talking through what predictions

they make and whether we know of any evidence that says one way or the other, whether they're accurate. So there is a way in which the answer to your question is in part, it has been tremendously fruitful to have a life partner who also shares a deep interest in that same subject matter. But in terms of navigating the relationship, there are some things that are just vital. So I would say here are a couple. One is the understanding that empathy is not a characteristic that exists at one level. You have empathy with somebody, but your empathy with them is greatest where you share a history with them. And it is much cruder and sometimes just downright misleading in places where you and the other person don't have a similar history.

So, for example, Heather and I grew up in L.A. We were born in the same year. We traveled in the same circles. In fact, I knew Heather in high school. We were not going out, but we were friends. that we've arrived at the present through a parallel path, and it means we know an awful lot about what the other person knows and sees. We've seen the same chunk of history from nearly the same place. But I'm not a woman, and there are things that are very different if you're a woman. And so my empathy, that is to say my ability to understand, to predict what she's going to feel about something is very high until we get stuff to stuff that's quite different between men and women, in which case I have to be aware that my predictive powers are likely to be greatly reduced. On the other hand, I could say that exact thing.

And of course, I have said that exact thing to Heather, and she knows exactly what I mean. And so to the extent that we get into something where we're not hearing each other, because one of us is male and the other is female, and that creates a limit into how much we can understand each other, we can also say that we can say, hey, this is one of those places where I don't think you get what it's like to be me. And it just, it's not an accusation. It's just an observation. So that's very powerful. And I would say the other thing is the recognition that human beings are, you know, when I say I, I'm referring to my conscious self. But my conscious self is not a large fraction of myself.

Most of me is a mystery to me, as is true with everybody. And what that means is that there are many places in a human life where you might know that you want to change something, let's say, but you're powerless to do it because the control switches aren't in your conscious mind. Well, it makes a huge difference in a relationship if you can say to your partner, you know, if your partner is taking you to task for something that you're doing that they don't like and you can say, oh, actually, you know what? I agree with you completely, right? You're just right about this. It doesn't mean I can change it, but I'm on your side. The conscious me is on your side in this argument. And we're both up against my unconscious. And if we can figure out how to convince my unconscious to go along with this, it will. But in the meantime, just know that this isn't me willfully ignoring your perspective. This is me powerless to make your perspective carry weight in this because I'm a human being and so much of me is unconscious. So anyway, the ability to have a partner to whom you can say such a thing and they don't think that

you're full of crap or pulling something is a great benefit. Brett Weinstein, we've set the stage tremendously now for talking about religion, a very controversial topic in evolution. Now, we'll start at the beginning again. I've heard people proffer the theory of mind complex, the hypersensitive agency detector, human tendency to anthropomorphism, all these possible explanations as the most likely mechanism that originally bootstrapped religion into existence. Do you have any opinion on that topic? How do you think religion originally came about? I mean, this is one of these places where I don't even think this is a hard question. I just think that we have a couple of basic assumptions in our evolutionary toolkit that aren't quite right, that turn this into a very difficult problem. But in general, you ought to look at religion exactly the same way you look at the wing of a hummingbird or, you know, the eye of an iguana. It's an adaptation. Obviously, it's an adaptation. And to the extent that some large fraction of evolutionary biologists would say, hey, wait a minute, what do you mean it's an adaptation? How can that possibly be? Really, the burden of proof is on

them. These things are so expensive when it comes to human endeavor and so persistent that to imagine that they are anything other than an adaptation is really an extraordinary leap of logic. So in some sense, I have the feeling that whatever explains my particular trajectory through evolutionary theory has freed me from obligation to simply accepting the assumptions of my elders. And when one is freed from accepting your elders' assumptions, that comes with some responsibility. You can't throw them out willy-nilly. Most of the assumptions of your ancestors are probably right. But you have to be able to depart from them when those assumptions are making a fool out of you. And I would say evolutionary theorists at the moment are being made into fools by assumptions that support the idea that religion might be some kind of mind virus or an anthropomorphizing brain overfitting or any one of these explanations. They're an adaptation, pure and simple. Let's give people a little more context

in terms of summarizing the literature. I think it's fair to say that there are about three possible ways that religion could have evolved. Firstly, as a meme. Secondly, as a spandrel. And then thirdly, as an extended phenotype. Can you just give us, before explaining the merits or the problems in each of those explanations, can you just give us sort of a dictionary definition as an evolutionary biologist of each of those terms? A meme, a spandrel, and an extended phenotype? Yeah. So, first of all, I don't think these are necessarily competitors. Sure.

So, for example, I would say I believe that religion is a meme complex, and it is also extended phenotype. I would say probably it contains some spandrels, but in general, the spandrels will be small relative to the other structure. Okay. But in general, the spandrels will be small relative to the other structure. Okay, so to define these terms, meme is Richard Dawkins' term coined in Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene. And it is his analog, his cultural analog for genes. So a meme is a unit of information that is not stored in the genome but evolves outside of it. What I said to Dawkins in Chicago when we met in October was that I thought he didn't have the full courage of his convictions and that in fact he had been very right in his outlining of the concept of memes, but that he had made an error which goes uncorrected to this day, which is that he argued that memes, these analogs of genes, are like a new kind of life.

In fact, he uses the term that they are evolving in a new primeval soup. And what that suggests is that they're independent of the genes. That is to say, the behaviors of people evolve independently of the genes of people, which can't possibly be true. So we probably don't have time to go into why that is the case. But it does not make sense that a human being would have such a large brain so hospitable to picking up cultural information if that cultural information were actually causing that human being to act in a way that wasn't good for its fitness. So, okay. So a meme is a unit of cultural transmission and a unit of cultural selection. I should say, as long as we're here, I do not believe that it is especially useful to speak of a meme or a gene. In both cases, I think this gets us into trouble.

So I think to speak of things that are genetic or mimetic makes a great deal of sense. But to say that something is a gene or a meme often causes us to say something foolish. And Dawkins would agree with me on that. I think he would agree with the point, but I think he would, he might defend. So, this is so complex. Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene, does describe, he defines the term gene, and he defines it in a way that is, well, by 1976 standards would have been very vague. But the vagueness of his definition is the reason that it's the only definition that has persisted from 1976 to the present in a viable form. In other words, some part of him intuited that gene couldn't possibly mean the thing that we thought it meant, that our view of it was too simplistic. And so anyway, he carved out a broader space to talk about them.

But anyway, we're far afield here. So, okay, we've got the term meme, which is like, it is an analog of genes, but transmitted culturally. The other term, next term is spandrel. So a spandrel is an analog of genes, but transmitted culturally. The other term, next term, is spandrel. So a spandrel is an architectural term, and it refers to the triangular piece above a pillar where a pillar supports a dome. And the reason that it has relevance in biology is that Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote a famous paper in which they argued that evolutionary biologists had gotten carried away with themselves and were describing everything biological as if it were the product of adaptation, when in fact a great many things might be accidental byproducts of adaptation. And they used the example of the spandrels in a famous cathedral. And in this particular cathedral, San Marco, the four spandrels above a famous dome housed, I think, four saints associated with four particular rivers. And

their point was, if you look at the paintings on these spandrels, it looks as if the spandrels were there to house the paintings. But in fact, the spandrels were an architectural byproduct. And then once that byproduct existed, somebody threw these paintings there because it made it nicer. So it's easy to misinterpret which was the causal force. Now, no doubt there's some truth in that, but Gould and Lewontin, their fears were not only overblown, but actually essentially sabotage of evolutionary theory. Gould and Lewontin were concerned that evolutionists were getting carried away

with what they were doing and that as they confronted questions about human evolution that they might reveal things that would be very bad for humanity and so at least many of us believe that they were effectively trying to derail the study of evolution when it came to people with their spandrel argument. It took evolutionary biology decades to recover from it. So again, my point is not that there are no spandrels, but the way evolution works, there should not be very many of them, and they shouldn't be very conspicuous. Evolution tends to eliminate inefficiencies, and that means that when we see a structure worthy of discussion, it tends not to be.

It tends to be an adaptation and not a spandrel. Okay, so we've got meme, we've got spandrel, and the third one was extended phenotype. So phenotype, first of all, is the manifestation of a gene. So, genotype is the actual information stored in the genetic layer inside the genome, and phenotype is the effect on the being of a particular sequence of genetic material. So, you might have a particular sequence that makes your eyes brown. Somebody else might have a mutation that causes that brown pigment not to function and reveals blue. These are phenotypic characteristics is not really limited to the body of the creature in question. Phenotype extends to things like the pond that a beaver makes. A beaver has sequences in its genome that cause it to behave in a beaver-like fashion, which means that it will end up damming rivers and creating ponds that then

it lives in. And so Dawkins' excellent point is that the pond is really no less a consequence of the genes of the beaver than the color of its coat. And so the phenotype should be extended to the consequences of the creature in the world, not just the being's body. So my point to Dawkins in Chicago was religions are extended phenotype, end of story. These are consequences of our evolutionary nature that are manifest in the world beyond our bodies. His point to me was, no, they're not. These are evolutionary products of their own that happen to be like renegade software programming programs running on the minds of creatures that have evolved. And so I honestly have no idea how somebody as

well-versed, insightful, and creative as Dawkins could possibly labor under this misapprehension. It just does not add up that you would have a creature with so much computing hardware so easily taken over by what he calls mind viruses it's almost sorry it's almost as if the memetic sphere is like this used toy box into which he can sort of cast a number of inconvenient ideas like religion. Because do you think that's the heart of the issue? If he accepted that religion was extended phenotype, then he's basically conceding that something which he's spent a good part of his life raging against as a new atheist

turns out to be adaptive? Well, I mean, I do think that that's what's stopping him right on the other hand i guess it's the most obvious explanation for people who who are observing this here's the thing though i mean we're talking about dawkins is effectively um he's effectively a mentor of mine although i had never never met him until October when we met in Chicago. I had read his work and it was tremendously influential on me. So I have to say that my, my hope in meeting him was that he would recognize that a, he had been wrong about this and that, you know, given who he is, that the fact of him having been wrong would cause him as painful as it is for any of us to admit that we've been wrong about something that's been important to us, that he would rather be right in the end. And I was hoping that he would come around. And in fact, what he did was he retreated on beliefs that he once held in order

to protect this one. And I, you know, I still have hope that he will, you know, given time to think about it privately, will, you know, find his way to what seems like it has to be the right answer. But either way, it is time for humanity to recognize that we cannot dismiss religion as nonsense, that it is evolutionarily not nonsense, and that it is our obligation to give it its due. But that having done so, we also get the next part, which is if it is a consequence of evolution, if it is produced as a matter of extended phenotype of the genes, then we can say something about the content. We can say what that content is for, and we can say what its vulnerability is. And the vulnerability of that content as a product of evolution is that it will not be functional and in fact may be very dangerous in an environment that is unlike the one where it came to be. So I think the thing is for an atheist like Dawkins, there's only one way out of this puzzle. And that is to own up to the fact that this is not

mind virus. This is extended phenotype. But having done so, to recognize that it actually then returns us to the conversation about what to think about it. It does not justify that we, as a society, embrace these ideas. In fact, then we get to have a very important conversation about what to do about the fact that a large fraction of civilization is adhering to beliefs that can't possibly be up to the challenge of governing us in the 21st century. Have you maintained a dialogue with him since the event in Chicago? I wish I could say yes, but I haven't. I would like to have had, but I'm not sure how open he is to it. I must say, I thought it might be something that comes to be regarded in hindsight as a pivotal moment. It was exciting to see you

kind of turn one of his ideas back on him, not in a gotcha way, but in a really intelligent, important, profound way. And I was a little caught off guard, though, because my first reaction was Brett saying that religion is extended phenotype. That must therefore mean he's arguing for group selection. And I think a few people had the same reaction. For example, David Sloan Wilson did. I'm not sure if Dawkins also had the same reaction.

It's possible. It's hard to interpret what he was thinking on stage. I don't know if you have any opinion on that. But just for the record, are you someone who believes in multilevel selection or group selection? Maybe you need to give a quick definition of group selection first. I promise that will be the last definition. Well, this is a thorny issue.

I should tell you that David Sloan Wilson and I are headed for a discussion in Boston on this very topic. Yeah. What date is that? Well, we're still struggling over the date. We had set it for March 14th, but for some reason March 14th isn't going to work, and so we're now hunting for a new date. But anyway, the meeting is going to happen. Hopefully it will happen in March, but one way or the other. And the question or the central question that brings us together is about the issue of group selection. And so group selection is an idea that

was put to rest in the early 70s. It is the idea that individuals who are unrelated may be favored for behaving altruistically towards others in a way that would be evolutionarily significant, right? So in other words, all of the definitions of altruism that we've used in this conversation so far actually result in an individual being paid back for their benevolence, meaning that it is a kind of enlightened self-interest. And that's really the term we ought to be using. Selfishness is a bad term for it, as Dawkins points out. So enlightened self-interest can explain why an individual might sacrifice for another individual even in extraordinary ways why an individual might surrender their life for another individual right we can get there through kin selection for example um the idea that an

individual might sacrifice when they aren't going to be paid back in selective terms is a much more difficult argument to make. And so my point to David Sloan Wilson is actually, I won't say that the effect never happens. You know, do people ever sacrifice in ways that they couldn't reasonably imagine they're going to be repaid? Yeah, of course they do. But is this an evolutionary phenomenon enough that it leaves a hallmark in the universe that we can detect? That is a much more dubious claim. So we have left one piece off the list, and just in the interest of completeness, I think we should add it. So if we're to draw the entire schema of evolutionary explanations for cooperation, we've got narrow selfishness, then we've got

kin selection and Hamilton's rule. We've got reciprocal altruism. And then we've got, so that was Bill Hamilton and then Bob Trivers were the contributors of those ideas. And then Dick Alexander, who we've talked about, my advisor, contributed the last one on the list, which is indirect reciprocity. to this was the idea that you didn't necessarily need to be paid back by the same individual that you acted benevolently towards. What you needed was to be paid back by somebody involved in the same reciprocity network, right? So you can imagine that maybe you go through life, you're holding doors open for people without wondering whether they are ever going to be in a position to hold a door open for you. You're looking out, you know, if some kid going to run into the street, will you protect them from the fact that their parent isn't paying attention? You may go around doing good things and doing those good things may result in your reputation for being a good guy circulating and your reputation for being a good guy may result in your reputation for being a good guy circulating and your reputation for

being a good guy may result in you doing well in life because people want to take care of you as somebody who's known to be a good egg and that that can also be a basis a rational basis for altruistic behavior group selection is outside of this circle in the sense that to be real group selection, you have to not be paid back. Which I think the term for that is pro-social. Is that right? Yes. Right. So there was a quote in The Descent of Man, Darwin sort of toying with this idea. I think he raises it a few times.

But the quote that a lot of people, particularly David Sloan Wilson, references, 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. Now, that along with, more importantly,

a lot of modern developments in multi-level selection theory led E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson to famously say in 2010, maybe it was 2007, quote, selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary. Is your main critique of this idea that group selection isn't falsifiable? Is that what you mean when you say it leaves no hallmarks on the universe? No, I mean it's false. I don't mean it never happens, and I don't mean to discount the second part of what the two Wilsons have said. In fact, every reasonable person who's thought about group selection understands that a group of altruists has an advantage over a group of selfish individuals. That is not being questioned by anybody. The problem is

you have a free rider issue, a collective action problem inside a group of altruists. That is to say a group of altruists is vulnerable to an individual who comes in and wishes to take advantage of the altruism among everybody else in the group, but not contribute their own benevolence. That vulnerability means we shouldn't see these altruistic groups because they are vulnerable to this automatic kind of exploitation. So my point would be to solve that problem puts us in another realm, an alternative to group selection. And so anyway, we will sort this out hopefully in March with David Sloan Wilson. But I'm not leveling a naive critique. I'm not saying that there's not an

advantage to a group of altruists. Of course there is. The question is, how often do you find a group of altruists that actually succeed in the world, given the vulnerability that they automatically carry with them? Sure. Okay. So let's circle back to religion then. I know you said you didn't have enough time to explain exactly why religion has to be an adaption. But I actually think you can do it briefly. Essentially, what your argument is, is that if memes are downstream of genes, they have to be adaptive. You can't have memes without genes, but you can have genes without memes. Is that a fair description of what your argument is? Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. Imagine, just look at Catholicism for a second. Yeah, cool. Catholicism is a massive expenditure of resources that comes with a very on the physical structure of Catholics, if it was being as ill-served by this meme complex as it obviously would have to be,

that that would not be out-competed by some group of atheists who did everything that the Catholic population did except didn't believe. It must be the case that the group of Catholics is experiencing an advantage for that belief structure that is bigger than the costs that are being paid in order for that belief structure to continue through time. Because if they weren't, it's a massive vulnerability that ought to result in their being displaced by another population. There's a quote of Roy Rappaport's that I love. I just want to read it and see what you think. He said, seeming necessity. Do you think it's possible to enjoy all the benefits of community and ritual, the metaphorical truths of religion, without necessarily believing in the literal truths?

Are they separable? I want to be careful not to be too flip, because on the one hand, I certainly know people who I would say do exactly that who participate but um but do not sign up for a belief structure about the universe that is uh discordant with a scientific worldview on the other hand some of the benefits of religion seem to me do require belief, let's say, for example, in heaven and hell. Heaven and hell have a fairly straightforward way in which they could result in improved fitness, but you have to believe that they exist. If you believe that they don't exist and they're just a fairy tale, then they lose their power to alter your behavior right someone who doesn't believe they're going to go to heaven

isn't going to modify what they do in order to get in so there are some aspects of religious belief that do seem to require faith in some kind of supernatural realm and I worry about this in particular because what we have are people who are nominally believers who can dispense cryptically from certain aspects of these belief structures and gain an advantage. They can behave effectively as parasites. And I think that's a conversation we have to have more widely in civilization. It's one of the things that makes religion a poor fit for the 21st century. Final two questions, Brett. You write on your website, I'll quote, if humanity continues down our current path, we will not survive.

There are too many of us consuming too much, our technology is too powerful, and we are all hooked together in one global system. Our fates are now linked and we will all thrive or perish together. The enemy that has no name is not a nation, an organization, or a religion. It is not a corporation or an industry. It is not an economic system or an ideology. Can you tell us what do you mean specifically by that last sentence? Well, I mean, it goes back to what we were discussing at the beginning of this conversation. At the point that you realize what we are and also realize the context in which we are now behaving in this way, you become obligated to deviate us from what will otherwise be a fatal course.

That means that we have to engage in what I think is the most difficult project humans have ever faced, which is taking our evolutionary structure and repurposing it, which is something individuals do all the time, but repurposing it in a way that those who refuse to repurpose do not win. That's the hard part. We have to repurpose ourselves together in a way that does not create a disadvantage for us. Otherwise, those that refuse to come along will simply inherit the earth and keep going down this self-destructive path. And finally, what do you see as your purpose going forward? Will you remain a professor in exile?

Well, professor in exile has become a pretty interesting role yeah i get to have conversations like this one and potentially persuade people that there's something very important to be extracted from evolutionary theory and that its implications for humanity are likely to be profound and i won't say that that's all i'm going to continue to do, but to the extent that I'm able to raise awareness of the power of evolutionary thinking and of the implications that evolutionary theory has for human well-being, that seems like a good use of my time. Well, Brett, mate, thank you so much. You know, I know everyone knows you publicly for your courage in the Evergreen scandal, but I hope,

you know, if only for two hours we've been able to shoulder aside the more public IDW, Brett, and show everyone Brett the person and Brett the outstanding scientist. Well, thanks so much. This has been great fun. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that chat with Brett Weinstein. If you want to follow Brett on Twitter, he's at Brett Weinstein. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at Joseph N Walker. All the links to everything we discussed in that conversation will be up in our show notes

on our website, thejollyswagman.com. And if you did enjoy, I'd ask a special favor, please rate and review on iTunes. I know everyone on every podcast asks, but we do appreciate it and it does help. So thanks again for joining me. Until next week, ciao.