The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Nicholas Christakis: From Social Networks to AI, Special Thanksgiving Podcast

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Nicholas Christakis is a Renaissance Man, with whom I have wanted to have a conversation for some time. There was so much to talk about with him, and each item was so fascinating, that we barely scratched the surface, even in the lengthy discussion we had. This is a great Thanksgiving Day listen.. instead of football games! One can get a sense of the breadth of his activities by considering his positions at Yale University. He is Sterling Professor (the highest endowed chair at Yale) of Social and Natural History, as well as Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, and Professor in the Departments of Statistics, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and in the School of Management! Nicholas’ personal history is almost as fascinating as his academic accomplishments. Born in New Haven to parents who were graduate students at Yale (his father was a student of the notorious Gregory Breit, about whom I heard many stories when years later I became a Professor in that same department, and his mother was a graduate student of Nobel Laureate Lars Onsager), he moved back to Greece when his father had to return for military service, so Nicholas’s first language was Greek. His parents moved back to the US several years later, and Nicholas grew up in the US, returning to Yale University to study biology. All throughout his childhood he grew up under the shadow of his mother’s fatal illness, and he and his brothers all became doctor’s in response. But while in medical school, the bug for scientific research caused him to pursue both a Masters degree in Public Health and eventually a PhD in Sociology. Moving to the University of Chicago, Nicholas focused on caring for dying patients, and exploring how their partnerships affected their health as well as that of their partners. This began an eventual transition to studying not pairs of individuals, but networks of human beings. His laboratory has done groundbreaking experimental work studying how networks of humans operate and how one might improve their functioning. To understand human networks he has also studied networks of animals including our nearest cousins, Primates. The results of his investigations informed his most recent remarkable book, Blueprint, focused on the notion that evolution has endowed us to create and function in ‘good’ societies. We spent time discussing all aspects of this work, from the impacts of evolutionary biology on both human and primate societies, artificial communities, and the strange mating rituals of both other animals, and humans, all of which are more diverse than one might otherwise imagine. The exceptions however, prove the rule that a ‘social suite’ of characteristics, including cooperation, love and partnership, leadership and other factors, can produce a successful society. Along the way we discussed topics that appear intuitively surprising, such as culture within animal groups, and how behavior can ultimate affect genetics, something that sounds Lamarckian , but is instead a wonderful example of natural selection. We discussed the philosophical question of the nature of ‘good’, and whether one can indeed get ‘ought’ from ‘is’, as David Hume famously questioned, and ended with a discussion of how AI will affect human societies. It was truly a fascinating privilege to have this discussion, and whetted my appetite for further conversations with this lovely and remarkable man. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had the distinct pleasure of finally having a conversation with someone I'd admired for a long time, Nicholas Tristakis. Nicholas is truly a Renaissance scholar, and that's attested in part by looking at all the departments at Yale University that he has a professorship in. First, he's the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural History. The Sterling Professorships are the highest, most esteemed professorships at Yale University. But he's also director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, member of the Department of Statistics, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Medicine, the School of Management, and the

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, which gives you some sense of the breadth of his intellectual activities. He has a degree in medicine. He's a doctor. It was an internal medicine doctor, but also has a master's in public health and a PhD in sociology. And what he has done in his career is spearhead in some sense the understanding of social networks, those things that bring humans together. And looking at it from a wide variety of views, from ways that networks work and ways that we can use them to help improve the health of different communities,

but also to understanding the origins behind our social networks as human beings. And he wrote a book recently called Blueprint, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It really says that in some sense, our ability to create societies is hardwired into our genetic makeup and hardwired to create quote unquote a good society and we'll come back in a minute to what we mean by good. But in that regard, we were able to have a great discussion,

not just about what led him in that intellectual journey to study what he's doing, but the remarkable facets of experimenting with communities and also looking at accidental human communities like shipwreck communities or, where societies had to be created and see which societies thrive and which don't. And then looking at our relationship to animal communities to try and understand what's universal in that regard, including mating rituals among different species and even among humans, which is more remarkable than you might imagine.

Also the notion of animal culture, which is rather interesting because for a long time, culture was thought to be unique among human beings. but in fact animals have culture. And finally, a fascinating aspect that sounds almost Lamarckian, the idea of how behavior can impact upon genetics, namely how certain genetic genes that might code for certain behaviors might lead to enhanced survivability, and that gets eventually, try a natural selection,

gets preferred and input into the human genome. And then finally, we did the same, this notion of what good means. What does good mean when it comes to societies? And the longstanding philosophical question of how do you get aught from is and can you get off from his in science alone? And ultimately, how can we try to work with societies to make societies better, which is really his goal in understanding social networks? It was a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion that's both illuminating and educational, as well as entertaining. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. You can watch it ad-free on our

Critical Mass Substack site. And I hope you'll consider supporting that site and maybe even given that's near the end of the year, making a donation to the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that produces his podcast, or you can watch the podcast on our YouTube channel. Now, on our YouTube channel, 83% of those people who watch our podcast don't subscribe to the channel. And it's free to do that. And it would be great if you could subscribe to show your support for the channel.

And of course, if you want to listen to it, you can listen to it on any podcast. listening site. No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you'll be as enthralled by this discussion as I would. With no further ado, Nicholas Christakis. Well, Nicholas Christakis, I'm so excited to be here with you at least virtually. I'm a huge fan. Lawrence, thank you so much for having me. Well, it's, there's so many, you know, I was preparing this, this podcast and I was thinking there, you have so many different aspects of what you do. We could do two or three podcasts. We'll do one now. I know we're going to do another because we'll touch on a totally

different subject related to a book I've added that you have a piece in. And I don't want to talk about that now, but we could. But just to give a sense of how many things we could talk about, I think next to, I think you beat Robert

Sapolsky in the number of affiliations you have at a single university. Now, so I want to see if I've got them all. So, you know, direct the Yale Institute for Network Science. also, as to the Department of Statistics, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Medicine, of course, through the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural History, Stirling professors that I know from back when I taught at Yale,

it's the highest level of endowed professorship at Yale. I also saw that you also seem to have affiliations with the School of Management, History, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Do you still have those as well? Yeah, so I don't know how interesting it is to the audience, but I'm a Sterling professor of social and natural science, and my primary appointment is in sociology, but I have additional appointments in ecology and evolutionary biology, statistics and data science, biomedical engineering, medicine, and the school of management. Yeah, that's right. I had them all here. It's hard to believe you have them all. I had a colleague back when I taught at Harvard who said the great thing. thing about being a professor in many departments is you don't have to go to faculty meetings in any of them because you can always say you're in the other department. I don't know if that's true

or not. But in any case, it's so that gives a sense of the kind of breadth of your activities, expertise and writing. And I want to touch on a lot of them. But first, this is an origins podcast and I really like to find out how people got to where they are to the starting point of where we're going to talk about. And that'll, that'll take us a little while because your, your history is kind of interesting. What your parents were first of all, both scientists. Your father was in, they both were graduate students at Yale. Your father was a nuclear physicist. Your mother was a chemical physicist. Your father, you know, was a graduate student in the building I may have taught in when I, when I taught at Yale. Do you know who his supervisor was or no? Yeah, my dad, my dad, both my parents

were Greek and they went to high school in Greece. My mother was actually a Byzantine Greek. She grew up in Istanbul. Oh, okay. And then her family fled in 55 when they were the anti-Greek pogroms. Actually, her father was very far-sighted and had sent his family out. My, but both my parents were high school in Greece. They came as Fulbright scholars to the United States in the late 50s. My father arrived at Princeton just after Einstein had died.

And Wheeler was his undergraduate advisor, R.12. Wheeler was an amazing man. I knew him. But, yeah, that would be, he was a lucky guy to have a little. Yes, in fact, we have a little postcard that Wheeler wrote to my father about his thesis. And, of course, they use last names, you know, so it says Christakis, you know, blah, blah, blah. And actually my son got his Ph.D. in physics, in quantum physics from Princeton. And so I gave this card to my son when he went.

But anyway, that was, and then my dad, after he finished his undergraduate, he went to work for a man who we've since learned actually had a very, nasty reputation in physics. Bright was this guy's name. I was going to say, yeah, Gregory Bright was a hell of a supervisor, a real SOB. Yeah. Yeah. And my dad, what's really, I won't say funny about this, when we were growing up, my father would say one of the reasons

he left, he got his Ph.D. in nuclear physics under Bright, but then left the field, and he used to blame his supervisor. And I always thought this was my father being dramatic and sort of discounted it for a variety reasons until literally 40 years later, I stumbled on an oral history of physics and people were interviewed about Bright and the stories were so relentlessly negative. They were. There was a tower in the building where my office was in that building and Bright had it so

the graduate students would go up the tower and then he could hear if they walked down, you know, too early and weren't working and he, you know, he was at the base. It was quite a... Yeah, anyway, he was gone by the time I got there, but I'd heard those stories. So I wasn't surprised that he went on and changed fields after... Although, you know, I'm sure he got a good education, but...

Yeah, he learned physics, and my mother actually was in physical chemistry, and her advisor was Onsogger. Oh. And I have a water from my mother from that phase of her life when she talked about being pregnant with me and having to take an exam under Onsager,

which is a treasured possession of mine. So I'll bet. Genuously links to these people. Yeah, Ansager was the great, yeah, was the great scientist at Yale. Not right. Unsarger was amazing, yes. Wow.

Well, that's a, now the first question, therefore, that I want to ask you is the opposite of what I always ask because my parents wanted me to become a doctor and I became a scientist, much to my mother's dismay. But let me ask the other way around. Your parents are both scientists.

Were they dismayed that you? you wanted to become a doctor? Well, I have a very complicated relationship to my training in medicine. And I'll answer your question, but then if you give me a chance, I'll come back to talk a bit more subtly about it. Because, you know, I have physics envy, of course. And, you know, yeah, I was going to ask to interrupt. My question really was, why didn't you become a physicist? I think there was a lot of psychodynamics in my household when I was a boy, and we raised our own

children very differently. I made a lot of choices as a young man of things to study that when I look back reflected attractions and repulsions, which had nothing to do with a field and which had to do with, you know, my own psychology or my own life experience. So medicine, you know, I grew up my mother when we returned, we went to Greece when I was very little after my turn. Your first language was Greek, right? You went when you were three years old and you didn't come back to your six. Was that because they went to a postdoc or they just returned? No, they went to Greece actually for a vacation, but my father had had military deferments. So they drafted my father into the Greek army. And what was amazing just incidentally is he had a PhD nuclear physics from Yale,

but the Greek army and its infinite wisdom simply because he could read and Wright made him a dentist's assistant. So my father's, my father's military service in the army was, you know, being a dentist assistant. But anyway, then in 67 he finished his tour. And then in 68, there was the coup in 67. Yeah. He couldn't leave. And they returned anyway to the United States in 1968.

And right around that time, my mother felt very seriously ill with a cancer that's very treatable now. but back then was lethal, which was Hodgkin's disease. Yes. DeVita had just discovered the effective treatment for that, which wasn't widely known. And my mother, and so I grew up with a terminally ill mother. She died when I was 25 when she was 47. Yeah, I read that. Yeah, it was unfortunate.

And all my mother's sons became doctors. So regardless of any other abilities or interests, you know, I think, so that was one psychodynamic thing going on, which moved me to medicine. And then my father was a physicist, and I grew up with my mother,

was, as I said, a chemist. And we grew up in a very sciencey household. Many years later, when I met Danny Connaman, who was one of my heroes, I told Danny that when I was in high school, my father gave him, gave me the paper

when he, on judgment and under uncertainty in which he published in science in the 70s and, you know, I read that as a high school kid. So, you know. I was going to ask if you got a lot of science in the home and obviously did. Yeah, I mean, I think it wasn't education so much.

It wasn't that my parents formally educated me, but scientists were held in great regard. Yeah. So I went to college and I at Yale actually and I studied biology, but by then I had sort of formed a fixed idea that I should train in medicine. That's why you went to bio. I was wondering why you entered in biology. I knew you entered in biology at Yale. And I wonder, you already made up your mind to be a doctor at that point before you got in. Pretty much. But the other thing that happened is, and I wish I had, you know, my parents, by then my parents had gotten divorced. I didn't have, my mother was quite sick. I didn't have, I had a wonderful scientific advisor, a man by the name of Tom Reese, who just recently died, who was a very well-known neuroscientist. I did lots of summers of research in neurobiology and cellular neuroanatomy at the marine biology labs at Woods Hole. So I had a lot of exposure to sort of laboratory culture. And I had this mentor who was very important to me. But he was in the biological science. sciences. And what happened is I got to Yale. I was immature. I was, I had just turned 17 in May of

79. I was the third best math student in my high school. And, and we did multivariable calculus in high school. So I wasn't bad. Yeah, you had a good education, yeah. Yeah. But what happened is I got to Yale and I had gone from the experience of being able, I was a good teacher and I was always able to give clear examples to other people and I had this very fulfilling experience even as a high school student of helping other people learn. So they would, I would try to teach them something and then they would, you know, I could, you know that feeling when you can just see, you see in their face that they understand what the teacher experience. We used to call it in Science Museums and was the aha experience.

Yes, and it's so gratifying as a teacher. First of all, it's really gratifying when you have that experience. When you subtly understand something, it's just a magnificent feeling as a scientist or as a scholar. It's also magnificent as a teacher. And so I would tutor other kids in math, for example, when I was in high school. And, you know, they would say, I don't understand something. And I would say, well, let me explain it to you again. And I would give another example.

And then after a while, they didn't understand it. It would be really hard for me to understand why they didn't understand it. But I would keep working with them and so on. So I got to Yale and I tried to take, I think it was physics 230. And it was completely impossible for me. So I think I took physics 180 instead. And that was like the second of four levels of physics or something. And then I tried to take math 200, which I can't remember if it was real analysis or if it was linear algebra.

but that was completely impossible for me. And so I took math 120, which was multivariable calculus, and it was incredibly hard for me. And I went, and of course it was, because I was surrounded by brilliant. You could have been surrounded by awful math teachers. I knew many of the math. It was the hell. Well, yeah, but what was interesting is I didn't have anyone to tell me that to persevere.

Or to tell me that it was okay. Okay, not to be the best student. A lot of people think you have to be the best math student to be a good student or you have to be. And boy, I know a lot of friends of mine who won Nobel Prizes who were nowhere near the best math students in their class. Correct. And I could have been, I think, a decent empirical physicist, even if I wasn't the best math student in my class. Yeah. But of course, I didn't have then the understanding I have now. And so I just judged that that physics was unattainable to me. and so so and but I had of this very funny experience when I was a freshman and and and my my ass was getting kicked by how hard this math class was it's for I don't know if your listeners are our age or or younger but hopefully all ages well in those days and still I mean the the

problem sets took like 10 for 20 hours for a problem set and they were completely impossible I be completely impossible. And many years later, I know I'm meandering, but many years later, I asked one of my colleagues, a physics professor, I can't remember if this was Doug Stone, who does theory at Yale. I know Doug. I know, Doug, yeah. He's a colleague of mine. Yeah, and I asked some colleague of mine, why did physics professors make their problem sets so difficult. And he gave me the only explanation I've ever heard, which was very moving to me and very profound, which was, he said, it's a form of preparation for a life in physics that the natural world is difficult to understand and takes a lot of effort. And you have to be able to tolerate a lot

of frustration. And so we make our problems hard. I don't know if this post hoc. Well, you know, I shouldn't digress, but I should, since you became a doctor, I should tell you a famous story, which I knew the person who did this about a physics professor teaching pre-med students, and he was teaching something called Atwood's machine, which has a, got all these pullies and it's, you know, classical mechanics. And the kid puts up his hand and says, you know, what use is this machine? And the professor said, what do you mean? This is, this has saved countless thousands of lives. Maybe you know this story. And, and the kid goes, what do you mean? countless thousands of lives. How did it do that? It said by keeping idiots like you out of medical

school. Anyway, and we couldn't talk that way anymore. But it's a valuable lesson. I mean, this digression has been fun, but it's important for people to know that they don't, first of all, it's hard. And the fact that it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Science is hard in general, but also that you don't have to be the best mathematician or experimenter. You just have to want to do it and also just persevering. You know, sure, people find math hard, but people find piano playing hard too. And a lot of practice, you know, helps with that. So I think it's an important lesson.

And the digression certainly was worth it from that point of you. Sorry, go on. Well, nothing. I was just going to say that, you know, I'm always, of course, very moved by Einstein's, you know, subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. Yeah. And I think for me, a life in science has been a gift beyond words that, you know, I can't even, I'm so grateful that I've had the life that I've had as a scientist. And later we'll talk more about the kind of science I do maybe. But back in math 120, so I had this problem set that was impossible. And there was this math major down the hall for me. Mitch Hoffman, I think, was his name. And I may have garbled his name. Mitch hears this. I hope he calls me. But I went down the hall and I said, Mitch, I said, could you help me? I can't do this problem set. And he said, oh, he looked at it for a second. He goes, yeah, I can

help you with this. And I said, well, can you explain problem three to me or whatever? And he looked at it. He goes, well, you know, it's like this. And he explained it to me. And I had no idea what he was talking about. And then he said it again. And I saw in his eyes, same disappointment. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I was like, okay, I can't do this. Anyway. So I switched to biology. I must say it's hard to need to know that at least you started in the right direction. Even if you didn't end up there, it's good to know that you at least realize that was the right place to go to begin. Anyway, and then I went to medical school for the other reasons I mentioned.

Yeah, in fact, look, let me ask you about that. I was going to jump ahead because your medical school history is interesting too, and I want to ask about its trajectory. But I have to ask this now because you brought up your mother. And I was reading about her. And you mentioned her in the book, in the book we're going to talk about, which I show, the blueprint. It's not going to be all about your book, but we'll talk about your book. Your career began with palliative care, and for quite a long time, you worked with dying patients. Was that because of your mother?

I mean, is that what? Yeah, I was a totally a counterphobic response. I mean, I grew up under the sort of Damocles, right? Like I thought my mother was going to die, and by whole childhood, I was obsessed with prognosis and predicting would she live? And a lot of my early research was on physician decision-making, prognostication, prognostic algorithms, forecasting. And then clinically, I was a hospice doctor.

So I didn't finish my education. I went to medical school in 84 and then got my MD and my MPH in 89 and then went to University of those were at Harvard. And then I went to Penn, got my PhD. Well, that's fascinating. I want to deconstruct that a little bit, because it is interesting. You left Yale in 84, which, by the way, is the year before I moved there to become a professor, which I would have been amused if you'd been in my class.

But anyway, but you did your MD and you did an MPH. Already, that's not a standard route. So why did you, why did you do a master's in an MPH as well as an MD at Harvard? Well, when I got to medical school at the time, I wanted to be a reconstructive surgeon, actually. So when I first got to medical school, I wanted to reattach severed extremities. And in one of my first year embryology classes, we had a man by the name of Joe Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for renal transplantation. And after he won that, he moved into craniofacial surgery. So cranial surgery, this was like 40 years ago, is with kids that have very severe facial anomalies due to defects in embryogenesis.

And, you know, for example, their eyes would be like a hammerhead shark, eyes on the sides of their heads. And we would do these sagittal incisions and peel their face down and then cut out the bone in the middle of their face and roll the eyes together with not putting too much traction on the optic nerve and then reassembled the face and so on. So he came to talk about this and I was completely swept away, of course, by this and went to, you know, after class to like, you know, oh, Professor Murray, could I hang out with you? And he, you know, he dismissed me, but he sent me to work with a magnificent man by the name of John Mulligan. And basically I skipped the whole first year of medical school and was operating at Children's Hospital with this very famous plastic surgeon by the name of John Mulligan. But by the end of that year, I decided. decided I couldn't be a surgeon. Good to know. And then was looking around for things to do. And my second year of medical school, my mother was terminally ill, and I needed more flexibility in my schedule because I was in Boston.

She was in D.C. I needed to be able to be with her. So I took a year off and got a master's in public health degree. And it was during that period that my interest in the social sciences was sort of rekindled, I would say. Okay. When I was an undergrad, I had taken a lot of anthropology classes, which were very interesting to me and linguistics.

Yeah, sure. Yale undergraduates tend to always be driven to social science of the arts, taken away from science as much as possible. Anyway. Oh, it was that MPH. And I knew I wanted to be a scientist, and I also by then knew that in the 50s, you could get an MD degree and be a scientist.

But by the time I was a student in the 80s, the medical training was just not enough. Yeah, exactly. So I knew I needed to get a PhD, and so then the question was what to get a PhD in. And I was doing all this sort of social scientific stuff at the School of Public Health, and I was choosing between economics and sociology and anthropology.

And again, for idiosyncratic reasons, I picked sociology instead of economics, which would have been a bit, in some ways, a more sensible choice. Yeah. And then I wound up at Pennant doing my clinical training and my PhD in sociology, and then I finished my education at 33 in 1995. It's an amazing route.

It's interesting to see it. Well, you got your, I mean, the interesting thing is you finished your residency in internal medicine in 1993 and your PhD and sociology in 1995, if I'm correct, from my research. And that's two years. I mean, you must have already been doing, I mean, to do a PhD, normally a fair amount of time, you must have already had a lot of data or something that you could apply to that in order to be able to get it so quickly. Well, I can't imagine that this is too interesting to the listeners.

But what, what I got it, I got to pen in 89 and I left in 95. That was six years. But what I was able to do is back then, internal medicine residencies were three years. Oh, okay. if you petition the board, you could do something called short track, which is you extend your residency to four years, but only the first two are clinical and the next to our research. So I did my residency in two years, and then the next two years triple counted as a fellowship in internal medicine as my first two years of my PhD, and as the last two years of my residency.

So I did my PhD in four years instead of three or six or whatever. And so then by 95, I had finished all three of those things, the residency, the fellowship, and the PhD. And then, but then, interestingly enough, and we're now beginning to this to talk about, we'll get to your research now in a way. But you didn't, you know, you could have gone off right away and just been a pure academic, but you were a practicing doctor and palliative care. in fact, work with indigenous, indigent patient, not indigenous, indigent home-based patients and lend of life care. It must have been very difficult,

but you chose to be a clinician, in a sense, at least seem to me, eventually that led you to looking at, as you said, the research you began to do on end-of-life care, physician's choices, and ultimately the widowhood effect, which we'll talk about in a minute, minute, but did you choose to become a clinician hoping that you'd get data to become

to a research scientist? Or what led you to go in that direction? Well, in those days, and I think still, the way academic medicine was organized, at least in internal medicine, but I think in other specialties, is that you picked one of two career PAS when you became a professor of internal medicine, which is that you did either 80% clinical and 20% research or 80% research and 20% clinical. Okay. And I was in the so-called research category. So I was primarily intended to build my own lab to do science and only spend 20% of my time

clinical, which is what I did as an assistant professor. But I was blessed that I was recruited by the University of Chicago, which has remained I think my favorite university on the planet. I've never spent, well, I've been a visiting for us there for a little while, but I agree with you. It's a wonderful university. It has a great history. Yeah.

And they jointly appointed me in medicine and sociology, which was something that my other job offers had not given me. So I took the job immediately, and it reflected their flexibility and their willingness. So I was jointly appointed in medicine and sociology, but the downside of that meant that in order to be tenured, which I was in 2001, I had to satisfy the criteria for both medicine and sociology, which were very incommensurate. Yeah.

So anyway, so that's, so I started, so clinically I was taking care of people who were dying. And then sociologically, you were thinking, you were taking care of the people who were dying, and sociologically, you were studying the general trends of end-of-life care and physician choice, which is interesting me. I know you did that. I don't know much about it. Did you, did you interview a lot of doctors or did you, where did you get your data from there? Lots of different things. I did quantitative studies of survival. I did quantitative studies of physician decision making and biases in physician decision making, sort of picking up that Danny Connman and Spurson the Inconman stuff. I did, I did sort of big data, this was before

it was called Big Data, Big Data studies of of healthcare delivery. And I had done during my thesis, but I wasn't any longer doing it, some qualitative work on interviewing doctors about how they make predictions. And that was a general area I was working in, was in sort of end-of-life care, physician decision-making, physician prognostication. And then, as you mentioned earlier, I became interested, partly because of my beloved wife was so worried that all I was doing was studying death and destruction. Oh, okay. I mean, literally, that's all I was doing.

I was taking care of people who were terminally ill, and I was studying. Very difficult. You know, and so she said, well, can't you study something else? And so I was like, well, you know, why don't I study the widowhood effect, which has like a little flavor of marriage in it? It's still hard death, but it doesn't, yeah. It's interesting. I, you know, I didn't know. I hadn't heard of the term.

The idea is that basically people often die or, you know, get sick after their close partners die. And you studied, and I was amazed, this is where I first saw big data. You're 500,000, over 500,000 couples in 2006. Where did you get that data? 500,000 couples. So we, I mean, this is sort of inside baseball. We got the data from Medicare, actually, in those days. So we got Medicare claims data and we were able to assemble data sets with, actually, at one point, I had in my lab data on 32 million Americans and all of their health care use for four years.

So you won't. Let me step back a bit. You've always, I mean, I've looked at the stuff you've done since. Networks, I mean, it's not only big data, but manipulating data and systems and computers, were you, was this an interest of yours or did you just always have people who could do this for you? you seem to have always gone in the direction of both big data and manipulation of data and utilizing numerical systems, be it either that or eventually to AI and boss, which we'll get to. Well, so, you know, I guess I can answer that in three ways. First of all, I'll say that for the last 15 years, we've mostly done experiments. So, you know, we have a huge program of research, beginning in 2010, was our first publication,

where we do randomized controlled trials and field trials involving tens of thousands of people who we, you know, manipulate in various ways. But before then, yes, we were doing sort of computational social science. It wasn't called it back then. But I would say, and I mean, you know, you're kind of teeing me up for, I mean, it's hard. to be, it's hard to share with an audience understandings one has of oneself. Yes. That do not come across as immodest. But I would say that one of the things I think I am good at as a scientist is observing the world. So I

may not have the best mathematical ability, but I'm a good observer of the world, a careful, patient, detailed... detailed. Yeah. And so I would find data and I would figure out ways to extract insights from data. And so back then, it was possible to petition the Medicare CMS and with a lot of headaches get access to the data. And we built computer systems and statistical tools that allowed us to handle that data. We did all that in my lab. When you say wee, I mean, did you, you know, I just wondering, are you, do, do you, you've developed software systems, at least your lab has and all the rest. Is that you, do you do do that? Or is it, do you like doing that? Well, I think I'm 62 now, so I don't touch, I don't touch, you know. I know what it's like when, when basically, yeah.

Well, yeah, back then, yes, I used to program first in basic and then DMDP, the MDP, and then, you know, SAS. And then it's data and then it R. And I think I stopped with R. Yeah. I know that feeling. I used to do basic and Fortran and then my students did see and beyond that. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know, there's that there's that wonderful PhD comics thing, which I love, which is, which is they have the graduate students professor proofing the laboratory, you know. And they're putting the equipment out of reach and the future comes into middle. Yeah. And I heard a story, maybe you can confirm it, that at MIT there was some very complicated experiment, and the graduate students contrived to have a complete duplicate apparatus, that that was the professor was allowed to fiddle it. Wouldn't surprise me. I was at MIT, but yeah, that's maybe a barfical, but it might have happened. The only time I almost got blinded was, as an undergraduate, I did a little.

When I learned, I didn't want to be an experimentalist. I did experimental work and it was very frustrating, but I almost got blinded when the professor came in the lab and raised the button to see what he was happening. Anyway, exactly. Don't touch. So by the time I was, you know, 40, I really wasn't, I wasn't, you know, administering. I just thought of you like that kind of stuff because I'm impressed well, all of that.

But when you say experiments, we still, people are probably still wondering where my heading, but we'll head there. When you say experiments for tens of thousands of people, it really means, I assume, you're not, I mean, that you're interacting with them online. You're doing experiments with them online. Is that correct? I mean, you're not doing experiments. I mean, you had a thousand people.

Well, no, we have a project that's been going on for 10 years in Honduras, where we have a cohort of 30,000 people in 176 isolated villages. Okay. We're part of an enormous randomized control field trial. Okay. So that's right. Amazing. And you must have a very big group then doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we just had a paper in science in May of 2024, which reported the results of this artificial induction of social contagion. Yes.

Using certain mathematical algorithms to identify, confirm certain theoretical predictions about which individuals by virtue of their topological location within a network should induce the greatest cascade effects. and we showed that we could do that. And then from that, a subgroup of that, in about 19 villages out of those 176, over the last five years, we collected a stool and spit from 2,000 people, which was really hard to get the liquid nitrogen carted into Honduras to freeze the jungle and freeze the stool

and ship it back in the United States and do genetic sequencing. We did shotgun metagenomic sequencing of all the bacteria and these people's stool, and we have a paper coming out in nature later this month, which is November 2024 on the social metagenomics, on looking at the spread of the microbiome through social network. So it's all very empirical, like a lot of effort to do this, you know, to, it's a little bit like, you know, like, it's not like LIGO, but, you know, there's like an army of people

that build this apparatus. Yeah, sure. we build a social apparatus basically. Yeah, I mean, you were kind enough to send me the nature paper and a few of the others, which I got to read as well and see what you're doing now. And it's interesting to see how it harkens to what you're writing in the book. But the, but the key thing that I guess, I mean, you're perfect, after all, you are director of the L. Institute for Network Science. And, and, and I want to get to networks. And it's interesting, I guess, is it correct to say that, so when you were looking at the Widow, the fact, you

We're doing what we call diads. You're looking at couples, pairs. But clearly what is relevant for your Ernstant society, which is what Blueprint is all about and a lot of your work, the social evolution of humans is to go beyond diads to do networks. And it was, I guess, in 2004 that you began to make that transition to looking at social networks. And of course, as you talk about it,

book and we'll get to. It's difficult. It's difficult to study societies because, you know, first of all, they've existed for a long time and you can't manipulate them and you have to be lucky in certain cases to see them be created in microcosm. But when do you talk about that transition from diets to social net, when you first sort of began to realize that so that networks were the key tool to study society that you wanted to, and many aspects of social. society for you. So you want to talk about that? Well, I mean, first of all, I've now spent, you know, 30 years studying human social interactions and studying networks. And that's, you know, that's what I've devoted my life to. And I, I can represent that I have no regrets

about that. Yeah, sure. You know, it's been very exciting run. These networks, you know, they are, a feature of the natural world. They are imperceptible. Well, that's not quite right. They're perceptible, but they're not a physical object. Yeah. And, but they're nevertheless features of the natural world, and they are extraordinary phenomena and can be difficult to see,

but they have very profound implications for our lives. And what's amazing to me is each of us, by the way, not just us, but certain other animals as well, which you can talk about. Yeah, we will. We'll be shaped by natural selection to choose other individuals with whom we interact. And then all of those individuals are also making such choices. And we proceed to assemble ourselves into these very ornate, elaborate, baroque, beautiful structures known as networks,

which in turn follow all these very amazing mathematical rules. and it's possible with effort to discern those rules and then ultimately to exploit those rules and in a classic progression of science, you know, observation, experiment, manipulation, proceed right through that trajectory, which is what my career has done. I mean, I started with observation in the aughts.

And by 2010, we were doing experiments and by 2020, we're doing interventions. And, you know, we can now control and show mastery, at least, I won't say mastery of the natural world. That's too hubristic. And I actually don't believe that. But we can at least demonstrate deep knowledge of the natural world.

And so that's, you know, that's what I've done. Now, let me step back to for, you know, that you made a really important point. The deep knowledge only comes from being able to, you know, test predictions to know if you really have deep knowledge. That means not just being able to observe, but manipulate. And so some of the things you've worked on, and you know, social contagion, ways to try and see if you can manipulate social groups to make them be able to take vitamins better or do a cure anemia or, or improve their cooperation ability or hurt it.

Those are the kind of things that we're talking about, just so people have a sense. Yeah. So the question is, can you take a group of human beings? And again, we're hopscotching a little bit, but just to fix it. Just to fix ideas. So one of the metaphors I use here is the allotropes of carbon. And as everyone learned in high school chemistry, you can take carbon atoms and assemble them one way and you get graphite, which is soft and dark, or take the same carbon atoms

and assemble them another way, and you get diamond, which is hard and clear. And there are two key intellectual ideas there. First of all, these properties of softness and darkness and hardness and clearness are not properties of the carbon atoms. They are properties of the collection of carbon atoms. These are emergent properties. Emergence, by the way, is another fantastic and interesting, you know, broad idea. Well, we may get to it in the context of reductionism.

Yeah. So these properties are emergent properties. And second, which properties you get depends on how you connect the carbon atoms to each other. You take the same carbon atoms and assemble them one way. You get one set of properties or another way. You get a different set of properties. And it's the same with human groups. You can take human groups and connect them one way and you get one set of properties

or take them another way and arrange them in a different network topology. and you get different properties. And we have built software that allows us to conduct experiments with real people and engineer these social arrangements and then test and see, can we make this group of people more productive, more innovative, more healthy, not because of who they are, but because of how they are arranged? And can we do that by constraining the system to have the same number of people and the same number of ties or the same degree distribution?

So we or other parameters slowly but surely zeroing in on what's the essence of how you get this emergent, you know, this group of people is cooperative. That's an emergent property of a social system or healthy. It's an emergent property. And so to me that's a very deep sociological claim that relies on a huge amount of mathematics and a scientific tradition that I feel that I'm proud to be a part of. you know, like, you know, we're only alive a certain amount of time. And, you know, none of us are going to be Newton or Darwin or Galileo or Einstein. But, you know, you can make a little contribution, you know, my little brick that I'm going to contribute. And so that's, you know, that's what, that's the vineyard I've been laboring in. And it's fascinating. And it really is.

I mean, I was, as I began, I wasn't aware of it all in many ways. And learning about the kind of things you can do to manipulate networks to affect people's behavior is fascinating. And of course, the way that behavior then changes them, and maybe as we'll talk about in a minute or an hour, is how it may even change your genes in a way. And that's that feedback, that feedback, which is really, you know, where I want to go to next. I mean, you, true that you jumped up, you, you talk this 2019, I think you had a paper on rewiring social networks, which is fantastic. And I want to come back to that at the end. But I'm really interested now in this, you know, this project you began 20 or 15 years ago or 18 years ago on

evolutionary biology and the genetics of social networks, which is what led you to to write, the book, Blueprint. And the thing that it treated me about Blueprint was its title, the subtitle, the evolutionary origins of a good society, a highly non-popular notion that somehow society can be good and that maybe people are in some level intrinsically good or at least act for intrinsic good, something that goes against much of what you hear,

and I have to say, I guess when you look at the news, much of what you see in the news, and given the current climate, it's hard to remember that society can be good given what we're going through right now in so many ways. But I found it refreshing and interesting. Anytime anything challenges sort of conventional wisdom or my previous biases or assumption, I'm always, I love being wrong.

So I thought I want to read and see if I disagree with you or what I can learn. And so I do want to spend, you know, a fair amount of time now going through the ideas in Blueprint, which are fascinating, if you don't mind. and I and I and you know I've done I done my there's lots of you can yeah I you know I and but anyway um but I was interesting I was interested in once again the blueprint begins with once again your experience in palliative care that basically death and grief the the idea is that look there are some things are universal and it's reasonable to assume if something is universal among all humans that maybe it's biological at some level. I mean, that's a reasonable assumption. And, you know, you'd have to check it,

but it's the first assumption you might want to make. And one way, therefore, is to look for universalities. Something that sociologists have done. And I must admit, when I was a youngster, I got intrigued by sociology until I realized it wasn't physics. But, but at some level, you know, I saw people trying to turn into physics, but then I realized that humans were just so much more difficult than physical systems to deal with. But I was intrigued. My brother did agree in sociology. But anyway, But one universal that really attracted you was this notion of death and grief. You'd seen it, and everyone tends to respond the same way. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Well, I don't know where there's a lot I could say about grief. I think any of the listeners who have had the experience of grief will know immediately what I'm talking about. Probably most of the listeners have not yet had the experience of grief. and I need to emphasize that grief is a very distinctive emotion. It's not sadness or depression or anger. It is a very special thing. And until you've had it, you don't really know it. And it's a physical thing.

It hurts your body. People talk about how their chest is caving in and it aches and how their facial muscles are taught from crying and sadness and clenching. And people, in the olden days, people would self-flagellate and throw up. ashes on themselves. And there's a lot of questions about why people do that. Are they signaling to others that they are bereaved? Or it's almost this, I won't say it's masochistic,

but it's this kind of, you're just so overwhelmed with the horror and the sadness. And it's a very distinctive emotion. Now, what's interesting is, we have evidence that elephants grieve and that orcas grieve and that chippenzis and gorillas grieve. And so this begs a certain set of scientific questions about where does grief come from? Even goals, which amaze me, by the way. Sorry. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Like what role might it play and what purpose might it serve? And one of the insights is that grief is connected to individual identity and personal relationships. In other words, you don't grieve really the death of strangers. I mean, you can read about awful deaths in warfare. You can be very sad. And if you're very empathetic, you can be, I think, extremely sad. But you don't really have grief. Grief is connected to a particular person that you know and are connected to.

And so there's this deep connection between grief and, weirdly, our capacity for individuality and love. And because you grieve for a particular individual, and so you need to be an individual and have a connection to that individual, and you have to have an affection for that individual that's very already profound. And that's what grief is connected to. And it's seen universally.

I mean, anthropologists have described this. And as I said, in other animals, too, which further vindicates its universality in humans. So, yeah, anyway, those are some observations about grief. In fact, yeah, well, you hit the point that when you see things, when you see something that is not only universal on humans, but actually happens in other animal species, then it becomes even more,

suggestive that there's some evolutionary biological basis behind it. Things that we share with other animals, which will actually, it'll go, I mean, you probably intended this, but you'll go full circle because your book ends in some sense in that humans are not separated from nature. But when you see that, you realize that

we're, look, we are animals, and if we share it, there must be some biological basis of it. And I was amused, especially in light of the presidential campaign we just went to, you almost could have been the speech right here for Campbell Harris, because You said, I'm less interested in what is different than what is the same. I remember her constantly over and over again saying,

what unites us is more important, what divides us. And in this case, however, you put substance behind that statement. And the point is that there are differences, as we'll talk about. But in many ways, you point out that the exceptions prove the rule. And this universal heritage that began with grief, there's another universal aspect of humans, which is society. And therefore he suggests that if all humans are social beings in society, then maybe there's a biological basis behind society.

And what's surprising and what I think you try and argue is that biological basis is good. And we'll come back to what good means. I don't want to deal with it yet because it's an interesting subject and not so obvious. But you argue, and I think that the heart of the book, is that there are, there's a social suite of characteristics that human have, humans have, and, and, and, and, you know, you work through them and we'll work through some of these as we talk about it, call you, what you call the social suites. And, you know, I could, I could read it.

You probably, you, there are eight of them. One, the capacity to have and recognize individual identity. Two, love for partners and offspring. Three, friendship. four social networks, five cooperation, six preference for one's own group. That is in-group bias. And it's interesting to me that you ultimately refer that as a good thing, which would be interesting to talk about.

Mild hierarchy is number seven and eight social learning and teaching. And that these form the basis of what is good about society and what's good about being a human being. Do you want to elaborate on that at all? I mean, I've obviously summarized it for you, but maybe it's hard. No spin. I mean, it's hard to know.

I mean, I can't elaborate. It would take a whole book to elaborate on all. You did write a whole book, and we'll go through the book. So the point is we'll go through each of these things, but did I, did I represent that correctly? I mean, what I mean to understand is a couple things. I guess by way of background, I would say that is that first of all, you know, I think for too long, both scientists and the person on the street have been focused on the dark side of human nature. But, and I think the bright side has been denied the attention at deserve.

And I actually think it's a little bit like Star Wars. You know, I think that like, you know, the good pushes out the bad. You know, you can't defeat darkness with darkness. You have to defeat darkness with light. And if every time I came near you, you lied to me or you stole from me or you injured me or you killed me, I would be better off living atomistically and apart from you. So this suggests immediately that the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs and that we would be endowed by natural selection with tools to have us live socially, effectively together.

And that on balance, the good must outweigh the bad from our social interactions. And so that's one sort of overarching frame of the book. Another set of overarching ideas regarding those eight things that you mentioned is that it's crucial to understand. People ask, well, why these eight, why not others? for example, why not include religion on the list? Yeah. And so on. The important thing to understand about those eight is that those are things that require the presence of another person to express.

You cannot express those. You can be religious on your own, on an island. But you can't, I mean, you can't love yourself, but that's all we're talking about. We're talking about love of others. You can't have inequality with yourself. We have mild hierarchy requires a presence of others. Cooperation requires a presence of others. So those are all phenotypes that we manifest inter-individually as a collectivity among ourselves.

And finally, they are phenotypes which are at least partially genetically shaped. So we have evidence that they are heritable. So for example, they're not, for example, we don't include personal adornment is not on the list, like clothing. We have no reason to believe that the fact that we clothe ourselves. ourselves is genetically predestined, whereas the love we have of our partners or our ability to cooperate does have a genetic or a heritable component. So those are the things. They are good qualities that we manifest interpersonally and that are at least partially

genetically shaped and that are required for us to be able to live convivially. And those are the reason I put those things on the list. Okay, no, great. Now, I'm going to ask question. It's not combative because it's intriguing. When I first read this and heard, I thought, well, that seems obvious, or at least it seems eminently reasonable. Why would one write and want to write a whole book about it? And my first assumption is that there must be significant to resistance to this assumption that these are not only heritable, but that they impact on genes.

And it was part of the motivation, and I must say that, of course, the subject matter that will then go into is fascinating. So it's not as if any of these things are obvious. I learned an incredible amount, which is why I love to do this. But is it because there's a resistance to the notion that there's this genetic component of our social behavior? Well, there is in many quarters, there is in many quarters a resistance to the belief that genes play a role in human social behavior. I mean, of course, among what I would regard to be serious and credible scientists, there is not much resistance to this idea.

But among some scientists and certainly among many people, there's a resistance to this idea. And many people are afraid of the claim that genes play a role in our social behavior. and, you know, I discuss in the book how these, this belief can be caricatured as being deterministic or essentialistic or positivistic and so on. And, and, and so, so yeah, I think there is that. And I also think there is, has been for longer, there has been more of an interest in the dark side of our nature, as we discussed a moment ago, in our propensity to violence,

which also exists, and so on. And so, you know, I was, I think there was some resistance to these ideas. But even if there hadn't been, I think it would have been worthwhile trying to tell a coherent story and to amass the empirical evidence in support of these claims. Yeah. The evidence is fascinating. And for example, you know, I think just to pick up a thread we discussed earlier about networks, it turns out that the mathematical structure of the networks we make, I believe, has been shaped by natural. election to optimize certain, to optimize benefits and minimize costs. So in a very real way, the spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas. We assemble ourselves in a fashion

that maximizes the opportunities for social learning and the spread of ideas. But as soon as we do that, we now create pathways for the spread of deadly germs. So if you think about it from a Darwinian point of view, it must have been the case that the cost and benefits of this must have been weighed in some way. And there is evidence in the mathematical structure of human social networks that such an accounting, in fact, took place. And in fact, the fact that the mathematical structure of networks is similar in us and in other social mammals is further evidence of this, you know, that these other animals were coping with the same kind of, you know, Darwinian pressures. So, so, yeah, I think, I think, I think, I think it is possible to,

I think it's possible to adduce empirical evidence that's not easy to assemble to support this claim. And so that's why I think the exercise was worthwhile. Well, I mean, I concur that it was worthwhile. Well, you keep mentioning to the audience, and just to be clear, so we've been discussing so far how natural selection has shaped our social life. But there are other new ideas about how our social life has shaped our genes. Yeah, that's fascinating. Which is the backwards path. And that's another whole set of work done mostly by other scientists.

I haven't done much of that work myself on gene culture co-evolution. Yeah, yeah. I tried to mention that because not just our genes affect our behavior, but ultimately, which sounds almost heretical to say that behavior affects our genes, because it almost sounds Lamarckian, but it's not, and we'll get there. And but, you know, when you first hear it, it's sort of, okay. And I love that. So let's go through.

I want to go through some of the things that fascinate me. Can I say one more thing, though, just to pick up as much as you want. This is you. I just to pick up because you mentioned, you mentioned like the Kamala Harris and there's more than unisus than divide us. I think it's very important to understand this because I think we're in a philosophical moment where it's, it has become over the last 20 years, very trendy to privilege difference. And to be quite interested in differences between human groups or between countries or or between subgroups. and so on. But I think it's not only a scientific claim, but also a beneficially moral claim to say that there's more that unites us than divides us. And I think this is an emphasis on our

common humanity. And these traits that we're discussing this social suite, to the extent that they're universal and that they're good, provide a foundation for that insight. And anyone who's traveled anywhere, and by the way, this has been described for thousands of years in writings that we have, You know, you go to another country and you step off the plane and people have, they're dressed differently and they smell differently and their food is different and they're dressed differently and they have different gods. And initially you're struck by all these differences. And then you start talking to some people. And before you know, you see, they love their children and they tell jokes and they like to hang out together. And they have some gender stereotypes that, you know, are very amusing because, are you familiar to you. And on and on and on. And, you know, you see that these people are just like you. and that this society in a very deep and fundamental way has a lot more in common with you. And I think what's happened is it's like standing on a 10,000 foot plateau and looking at a 300 foot hill and a 900 foot hill and thinking they're so different until you step back and you see that they're tiny hillocks on the top of a 10,000 foot mountain. And that really there's not a lot of difference. And I think, first of all, I think that's empirically true.

but in addition, I think it provides a kind of sort of philosophical frame, which I find both appealing and useful. First point. Second, this interconnects with another very deep and profound set of ideas in the sciences, which Darwin talks about lumpers and splitters, and I'm sure you're familiar with these ideas. Yeah.

No, there are people who as scientists are obsessed with making distinctions between things, and pulling things apart and saying, well, this type of fish is different than that type of fish. And there are other people who are saying, well, they're all fish. You know, they all have certain fluid dynamic properties and, you know, fins and so on who get the sense of the thing. And it also interconnects with, in the social sciences, you know,

actually as an artifact, I think, of certain inventions in the 1950s related to regression modeling, which were based on measures of, central tendency and computation of averages, that these mathematical models privilege the prediction of averages. Because, why? Because it was much easier to do that than to deal with variance. Yeah.

And so we have like half a century of tradition of predicting the average person of this type does this thing, rather than predicting and looking at the variation, lumpers and splitters again. Yeah. So this is a thoroughgoing tension in the sciences. And I'm not saying either is right. They're both interesting and important. Lumpers and splitters are needed.

But I think it's helpful sometimes when you're engaged in splitting to start doing some lumping or what you're doing some lumping to engage in some splitting. And so in a way, Blueprint is trying to say, you know, you think that people are so different. But actually, let's do some lumping. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, it's, you know, this is wonderful. Actually, right where my next question, I happen to have 10,000 feet mentioned, because I was going to say that the first thing you do,

it's interesting to me in some sense, you don't ever use this phrase, at least as far as I can find it. But, you know, anthropology looks at universal features of culture. But what's interesting to me is that when you talk about, okay, what's universal? you focus on, you know, there are many differences. But, you know, there's this sentence, this phrase kept coming to my mind, which is the exceptions prove the rule.

And throughout your book, I found that coming to my mind all the time, that we can see exceptions, but in some sense, they prove an underlying rule that you can discern. And you... Yeah, an example of that just to fix ideas for the readers is that, for example, it has claimed that play and children is universal. And actually people found at one society where actually children are strongly discouraged from play. Like when they begin to play, like the parents might put their hands in the fire, like burn them when they reach for a toy.

But that proves the rule. Like a huge amount of effort is required to stop the children from playing, right? Perfect. Same, by the way, with loving your offspring. This fact that we evolved to have a sentimental attachment for our children, you can, you know, collective child rearing has been tried repeatedly over millennia, and it always fails. It's very difficult to get parents to surrender their children to be raised by others.

It can be done. It happens occasionally. There's some experiments, but it doesn't take. Yeah, no, it's, okay, well, and that leads us to then some of the examples you talk about. So as a scientist, say, okay, well, I've wanted to look at what's university, in communities, but, you know, I can't manipulate communities and I can't, and I, you know, only have these societies that have been there. So let me look for different types of communities. And the first thing you look at is unintentional communities. And I must admit, though, and that comes up with

shipwrecks, which I found fascinating reading about. It must have been fascinating for you to study it. But you want to talk a little bit about, once again, how the exceptions prove the will. There's shipwrecks. And the main point is there are vastly different. different outcomes that result from a group of people being shipwrecked, and that forces them just like Lord of the Flies to make a mini-society. And the results can be Lord of the Flies, or they can be, you know, one of the examples of which I love Shackleton. But why don't you talk about it, not me? Well, I think, again, from a scientific point of view, so the claim is that genes affect not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure

and function of our minds, but also the structure and function of our societies. So if you were trying to study this scientifically, what you would love to do is to take a group of babies and abandon them on some far away island and somehow contrive for them to be raised, you know, and fed and cared for into adulthood, but not encultured, not given any culture, and then come back and see, you know, 20 years later, what kind of social order they made for themselves. Now, of course, you can't do this. It's obviously unethical and cruel, but people have thought about it. In fact, it's been called the Forbidden Experiment. And monarchs, actually Herodotus writes about an Egyptian pharaoh called Samtick I think, who, or maybe the second, I don't remember, but anyway, who and other

monarchs over time who have imagined, or actually they've asked themselves the question, what is our innate, not innate sociality, but what is our innate language? Like if we weren't taught a language, what language would we speak? And they contrived, it is said, to have some babies raised by a mute shepherd up in the mountains

and then come back and see what language they speak. And I think there was a Scottish king in the 15th century who did this experiment, and allegedly when he came back, the babies, he wanted to know what was the language of Adam and Eve. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And allegedly when he came back, he found

that the babies spoke passable Hebrew was the conclusion from, you know, from the experiment. But so, so obviously you can't do experiments like that with real people over vast timescales. But so you, the idea then would be to either rely on natural experiments or to rely on actual experiments, which we also do in my laboratory over shorter timescales or in more stylized way as one must in experiments. One must always do that in experiments. Yeah. So that part of the book collects evidence based on your lab's work with creating societies and Amazon you talk about and and we do experiments with thousands of people in these,

we create using our software, we create temporary artificial societies of real people and then we manipulate them to test some of these claims. But before that, we did observational work. And one of the observational studies was this archipelago of shipwrecks. Between 1500 and 1900, they were, I don't know, 7 or 8 or 9,000 shipwrecks around the world where the boat actually wrecked. It didn't just, you know, was it just lost at sea? Yeah, it wrecked. And then of those wrecks, there were, I don't know, 20, I think, where at least 19 people made it ashore and stayed together for at least two months, from which there was at least one survivor.

so that we could have a record. And I studied all of those. Yeah. And the archaeological excavations of the rec sites to try to see what could be discerned about the social order that these people, when they were suddenly forced to make society anew, what did they do?

And then I looked at other examples of communes, you know, kibbutzis. We'll get to kibbutz in a second. I want to focus on a shipwreck for a moment because I want to, once again, in some sense, by looking at the differences, you kind of see what we're successful societies, what the attributes that lead to, quote, unquote,

you know, durable, sustainable and successful, quote, and maybe even good societies. And maybe it's worthwhile giving two different examples. I mean, as you say, in my mind, Shackleton is a prototypical example of how an amazing group of people survived under circumstances I can't imagine. having been to Antarctica. But there are some groups that didn't behave as well.

And you try and look at what were the attributes that led to success or not success. Maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit. Well, I think, you know, obviously the argument is that the ability to manifest these elements of the social suite, friendship, cooperation, teaching, identity, and so on. Mild hierarchy. All of those are crucial to the successful formation. of a group. And one of my favorite examples, which I stumbled on, but it's just an unbelievable natural experiment, was in 1864, they were two different shipwrecks at the same year on the same

isolated islands south of New Zealand, north of Antarctica, the sub-Antarctic islands, and where on the southern part of the island, the Grafton wrecks, and five men make it ashore and live there for two years and eventually all get off. And on the north of the island, the Inverick Rex, 19 men make it ashore, and they survive for almost two years, and all but three of them die. And the path taken by those two wrecks, and they never encounter each other. By the way, both the captain and the first mate of the graft and wrote accounts, which I was able to find first editions of those books, are on my shelf over here, which I love. Oh, wow. And the captain of the Inverico, one of the three survivors, writes an account. And actually the Grafton,

captain when he's later rescued reads in the newspaper about the Inverco. And actually he says this captain was a bad captain. You know, their crew didn't survive well. I mean, just incredible coincidences. And in the one of the accounts from one of the Grafton people, one day they see a column of smoke up north in the distance, which I'm convinced was from the Invercoe. And they went to try to find it. But the two crews never met while they were there. Just an extraordinary story. Yeah. So you couldn't imagine. Amage is perfect. And very different. And actually, one of the things that is very interesting about it just to give the audience,

people listening right now, just one little flavor, was when the grafting wrecks, the captain had had a fever and was in his cabin, and the boat crashes and is taking on water, and four men make it ashore, and they could have abandoned the captain to drown on the boat that was breaking. But instead, they set up a very dangerous rope line from the shore, and they ferry the captain back on their, like by holding onto the rope and holding onto him through the torrential, you know, the storm and save his life. Meanwhile, on the Inverco, 19 guys make it ashore and they're at the foot of this big cliff on this beach with very little salvage at that point. They had like some matches and a pencil and some couple of pounds of hard tack or something and pork. and one of the men has a broken extremity

and they abandoned that man to his death. So one wreck begins with a supremely cooperative and altruistic act which sets the tone for their group's survival and the other begins with this super non-cooperative act which sets the tone for that group also had a little unfortunate episode of cannibalism. So, you know, very different trajectories

for those two wrecks. you can, one thing that also, if I found very touching in the nature of the captains, was if I'm correct, if I remember that the captain for the graft, and after being rescued later on went back several times to the island, figuring, you know, other people may be wrecked, and I've got to save them if they've ever been wrecked, which is a really remarkable thing to do. Eventually, the Royal Navy, there were so many wrecks on these islands, a multiple. There were at least four or five wrecks that we have accounts of

at different time periods over a century or more, that they started putting depots and like little instructions. Like if you're a band, if you're wrecked on this island, walk north. There's a food in it. Hey, you know, over here. Sidney, it's a really incredible history, actually. Yeah, no, it is. I found a fascinating.

I love just the history and seeing the differences of what happens. Okay, then from these, and you can see the results. It depends a lot on whether, as you say, that social suite can be created. and it requires, you know, a hierarchy at some level, a captain who exerts leadership, and at the same time, some egalitarianism. It's really kind of fascinating. You see these opposite balances that are required for that to occur. And again, how different they are, but once again, how they rep—how the exceptions prove the rule,

that in some sense you would argue that the exception, namely the group, I'mbrico, I guess, did not survive in principle because they weren't they they weren't demonstrating the kind of attributes that produced successful societies. Then you have these intentional communities. You know, a number which I knew of, of course, Walden was not really community. It was avoiding a community. And then Brook Farm and then Walden too, which had a huge impact on me when I was a kid. I must remember. I mean, for a while I became a behaviorist after reading Walden too. And then many years later grew out of it, especially with my friend, no more, Shomsky. But you would argue that in some sense, all of these communities have tried to

become utopian and kind of failed because they, because once again, they kind of try and defeat the standard, meant some, if not all, of the aspects of a good society. You want to elaborate on that a little bit, maybe? Well, I think, again, I think to the extent that, you set out to design a utopian community that works consonant with human nature, you're going to be more successful than one in which you try to work against it. So it's very interesting. For example, if you look at the issue of the element of love in the social suite, so some societies, many societies have said, you know,

we want people to feel a primary allegiance to the whole group or to the leader. Like if you have these like totalitarian or sometimes sadistic leaders of these sort of communitarian movements, for them, the existence of love between a people, usually a heterosexual couple, but it could be homosexual couples too. It's not, you don't need to be heteronormative here. One doesn't need to be heteronormative. To the extent that love exists between partners, that is a threat to the communal sensibility or the power of the leader. So these many communitarian movements have tried to deal with this in interesting ways. And paradoxically, they can go to two extremes. Some, like the shakers, try to prohibit all sex.

So they don't want anyone to have sex with anyone else and to feel a special attachment to anyone else. By others go to the other extreme and have like a kind of a free sex, kind of or geastic kind of situation where anyone can have sex with anyone else. But neither of those work, actually, because people don't like those. Yeah, I mean, it's clear, it was always amazing me. I lived in Shaker Heights for a while, but the Shakers, it seemed to me if you want to have a long, a community that survives, the idea of celibacy, somehow it gets in the way. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so, and in the other extreme, but the point is, is both of those solutions to the, quote, if you problematize love, if you problematize the fundamental. attachment that we have to our partners, that we evolved to have, and you try to exert a social force that stops it, you might succeed temporarily, but not permanently. And it's not consistent with a well-run or survivable society. So, and the same, by the way, with the collective child-rearing love of offspring. So it's been tried since the time of Plato. Plato discusses this in the Republic. Yeah. Certainly with Kibbutz has tried it. It learned. for a generation or maybe two, and then it goes away.

Because people are so, I mean, but there are still a kibbutzs, right? But they don't have communal child wearing anymore? Correct. Okay. Interesting. I mean, when I was growing up, I remember thinking about that, and I wasn't sure whether that continued. Okay, so that's the point.

Then let's move from the intentional community, then the artificial communities, which is really your bellywick in some sense, creating these communities online and manipulating them in order to manipulating their interactions to learn about how social networks impact on individuals and how they impact on the success of the community. In some sense, trying to create all possible societies, which is what an ideal scientist would, like I said,

let's have all possible societies and see what the variance is and see where it comes. And talk, what I was really, I guess what I found fascinating is used word that we are pre-wired for society and and and the work that you've done demonstrates that. So maybe you could talk about that for just a few minutes. Well, I mean, I think first of all, I mean, we kind of, I mean, it's like this conversation is just so wide-ranging. It is, it is. And that's why I've ordered how we do it in one one. I know. And I was in some ways I'm prepared for it. I mean, my mind is flashing in all many

different directions. I'm kind of aware of the audience and don't want to either bore them or overwhelm them. And I, and I'm trying to pick up threads from before. I know, I'm putting a lot on you. But I think, I think we're heading in, I have a narrative in mind. Oh, and no, no, I'm not, just so you know, my technician just said, not bored. Yeah, I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to manage, you know, it's like when I have a conversation with one of my graduate students or postdocs, and it's really exciting, like those conversations you have sometimes as a scientist. Yeah. And your mind just flashes in exactly so many directions. And you have to decide which thread to follow.

And then when you come back, which other thread, and then you forget some of them. And it's very hard. So I'm scribbling some notes here. I'll be a kind leader. I'll try and direct you back if we're. So the thing is if the one of the, so there are two, I mean, there's so many things that have obsessed me in my lab over the last 30 years. But the fundamental thing that we have been known for, I've been studying, is social contagion in complex networks.

So can we find empirical evidence for the spread of phenomena, principal social phenomenon, although we also have studied the spread of germs and biological contagion? And specifically in complex networks, networks that have this very baroque structure that we humans make, that follows these particular mathematical rules. So our networks do not look like a graphite or a diamond. They don't have a very regular structure that those chemical objects have. So but as part of that work, we've also studied the determinants of social structure because it's an experimentally manipulated that structure in order to study how contagion might be optimized, given different structures. So what you're alluding to now is the branch of our work, and we published, I don't know, at least a dozen experiments

with many thousands of people now where we used this software that we wrote called Breadboard, which again is, you know, for those that know, breadboard is, you know, when you were in high school doing building electronic circuits as I did. And they used to, yes. Yeah, you take your resistors and capacitors and your battery and your switch and your lights

and build these little circuits on, you would pin those... On a breadboard. On a breadboard. And so this was why we called it breadboard because we wanted to create a kind of breadboard for social experiments, where you would take components and assemble them

and then test the circuit in a way. And so we wrote this software that allows us, and it's integrated with online labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific, or you could do it in classrooms or in firms with intranets. And people could come to your, and you could create a temporary artificial society of real people and then test claims about what kind of social order is optimal.

How much inequality is good or bad? You could randomly assign societies to have different levels of inequality. How much friendship is good or bad? What topology is beneficial? How much hierarchy is a problem? you know, how much in-group bias do you need for optimal performance and so on. And that's what we've done.

We published now dozens of experiments testing these ideas, providing a compliment to. So now note the difference between experimentation and observation, right? This is, again, the classic tension in the sciences. Yes. You want verisimilitude? You need observation. Do you want robust causal inference? You need experiments.

Yeah. But you can vote. Yeah. You know, so these are in some ways very unrealistic, but you can have very rigid experimental control. And we have then, I would say, proven some claims about what are the prerequisites for the emergence of cooperation in social systems or the – anyway. So that also adds to the whole body of work. Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. And that part of the – you know, again, it was new to me.

And it was remarkable that one can do. I didn't think these kind of experiments would be possible. I thought about it using, well, we'll talk about some of the things I've thought about some other time. Anyway, this is your chance. I'd like to hear from you, too, Lawrence. What was that? I'd like to hear from you, too, Lawrence. I'm hoping, as I said, I told you before, that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Yes. Anyway, so, but let's go. But are you Bogart or am I? We'll talk about that. Who's Bogart? Okay. We can switch. Anyway, speaking of Bogart and Raines,

let's talk about mating. Because the next part of the book, again, is an example of, well, you talked about, one of your friends basically said, if you have a single example of polygyny or polyandry, then you know,

then you can't say the humans are naturally pair bond. And, of course, that is exactly the opposite of what you're trying to demonstrate. But there is a detailed, I mean, it's almost like, well, it is an anthropological almost study of the many. What is amazing is that in spite of the fact that the argument is that we really do have this deep pair bonding in love that is central and is genetically wired in us. Nevertheless, every possible mating strategy and societal infrastructure for mating exists.

And you talk about, well, Western marriage. The Hazdao in Tanzania, who also, I think, have a similar kind of pair bond thing. Polygeny and Turkana's, polyandri in the Himalayas, no fathers in the Himalayas. and loved by arrangement and all of, I mean, things that you would have met, I mean, really remarkable to me that in some society, of course, there are many fathers because they view each, they don't view conception as being due to one sperm and an egg, but rather building up of sperm. And I like the other one where there's a, yeah, I mean, there's some societies in Amazonia that have a really unusual understanding of this biology. They, they believe that, um,

A woman in order to conceive has to have sex frequently and with many men because they think of the growing fetus like a snowball and that the semen has to accrete to give flesh to the growing baby. And all the men who had helped produce this baby are seen as the rightful fathers of this of this baby. So yeah, I mean, there are lots and lots of different. And that's interesting, by the way, just from a kind of a history of ideas. Like, where did this, when did human beings first come up with this realization that one, a single man and a single sexual act was enough to impregnate a woman? And not every society came to this realization. That's another tangent. Yeah, you'd think, of course, in Cesar, well, you've caused me to think certain ways.

but you think if population density is small enough, so you only have the opportunity to mate with one person and you have a baby, that would be pretty good proof that you just need one. Well, I mean, it wouldn't require a lot of observation either of your, arconspecifics, other humans, or of animals to recognize that sex was needed. Yeah.

Right? That didn't have parthenogenesis. Yeah, yeah, that's true. People pretty early on were able to deduce that. Yeah, exactly. But then making the conclusion that a single sexual act was enough. Most societies, most cultures recognize this, but not all cultures. Yeah, and I think that's what's wonderful. One of the reasons I've attracted to anthropology. And once again,

is this notion that people assume that what they think, the way they think about the world is universal and to discover that it's not is, I mean, that what you think is normal is, is, is remarkable. And it's, it's enlightening and it's what I love about science is being surprised. And, discovering that you're myopic. And this is a clear example. I think for me, the most telling example was these gna people of Himalayas, which have no fathers, which are trying to discourage pair bonding completely, but even then you show that even though that just like the parents

who try to teach their kids not to play, that even in a society where people are perfectly believed that you shouldn't have these pair bonds and that it's great to have, you know, partners, periodic partners, that even there somehow romantic love takes over. You want to talk about that for a second? Well, the NAA are very interesting a group. They've again been described for centuries, if not thousands of years. They're a matrilineal society. They, women take lovers, but the lovers are supposed to only come for the night. They'll have many lovers. It's not uncommon for

most women in any village to have slept with all the men in a village. And in this culture, it is seen askance to form an attachment to your partner. And now, it's been a long time since I reviewed this literature for the book. The book was published in 2019, so I may garble some of the details.

I guess you just read it. But what's amazing is that even in this society, there are occasional couples that run away like Romeo and Juliet because they're so in love, they just want to be with each other. You know, that that is the, they renounce, let's say, what we might call a kind of promiscuous culture from the outside and just want to be attached. You know, they want to be together.

They're so in love. So even there, you cannot suppress this desire. So there's a tremendous variety of human romantic and sexual behavior, both between and within societies. I am not saying that every person will manifest the same predilections. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is the underlying propensity that we are endowed with,

most of us are endowed with, to love our partner. partners. Now, of course, there can be people who are born, you know, they're sociopaths, are people who are born without the capacity for attachment. But that doesn't mean that are, you know, it's like people born without a kidney. It doesn't mean it's not normal to have a kidney. It's normal to have kidneys. Just the fact that occasionally you're born with a kidney that doesn't work or you're laughing kidney doesn't mean that that is the general, the lumper, you know, the central tendency of our. And even demonstrate, I mean, more relevantly, again, the exceptional proves the rule. Lacking a kidney causes a whole bunch of problems suggesting that people should

have kidneys. Yes. Yeah. And okay, well, I, you know, I'm tempted to, to, there's so many fascinating examples there. I'm tempted to go over them, but I want to move on. Because this notion of pair bonding that you, and by the way, my doggies are now going to get fed, which is good. And, but this notion of pair bonding, you next point out that in some sense, this, monogamy which is characteristic of many human societies and social life in general

is pair bonding is counter to what we experience in most of our primate cousins and the question of how you can how from

polygynous groups you can evolve to pair bonding. And why do you talk about it? Because you argue it's reasonable to imagine a genetic pathway from one to the other. So this is, again, it's very complicated. And not all of this is worked out, and some of this is speculative.

But, you know, there are both biological and social cultural forces that are at work. And, you know, there's an argument that in our distant primate past, we were like guerrillas. We were polygynous. And then for a variety of reasons, we became more monogamous. And one of the signals of this is the difference in body size between males and females. So gorillas, the males are vastly bigger than the females. Whereas, you know, in chimpanzees, there's less of a difference. And in us, there's still a difference, but less.

then it's unclear, and I can't remember the details at this precise moment, but roughly 300,000 years ago with the emergence of our species, we became transitioned to be a more monogamous lifestyle, which was enhanced the survival of our offspring. And then for sort of sociocultural reasons, right around 10,000 years ago, when we invented agriculture and cities and inequality and resource distribution became more feasible, we underwent. went to transition back to a more polygynous, now culturally polygionist, not biologically polygamous lifestyle. And then beginning around 2,000 years ago, during the Greco-Roman times, now for historical reasons, and people like Joe Henrik at Harvard and others have also talked a length about this. We transitioned back to a kind of cultural monogamy,

which actually begins in the West and then spreads throughout the the rest of the world, you know, in many parts of Africa and Asia, it's still to this day there's polygyny in many parts of the world. I mean, I think a billion people live under regimes that favor or tolerate or encourage polygony. But, you know, sort of began to recede under the pressure of this sort of discovery of this cultural norm of monogamy. And now, by the way, there were always rich and powerful men who had many concubines. There was always infidelity by men and by women. You know, people could be serial monogamous. The pictures are very complicated and colorful picture. We're talking at broad sweeps now. Yes.

But anyway, going back, so when we look back into the deep ancestral past, there are a set of ideas about why we evolved to not just mate with each other, but to love each other. And it has to do with the advantages that this sort of bonding with your reproductive partner offered to the survivability of your your offspring. And, you know, and that once again, this relationship between behavior and genetics that goes both ways, as you point out, that behavior, you know, that if it's not advantageous to have multiple partners by being bigger, but rather by being wealthier, then you don't have to be bigger. and you know it's cool let's talk about let's talk about let's give let's fix the listener's mind with a

famous example that uh on on the reverse so we've talked a little bit about how genes might shape social life let's talk a little bit of let's give one example of how social cultural rules that we evolve might shape our genes and and the most well worked through example uh by sarah tishkoff and others is the evolution of uh lactase uh uh persistence in in human beings. So until about 10,000 years ago, basically all human beings, so we have this enzyme in our intestines called lactase, which digest lactose, which is the principal sugar in milk. And we made this enzyme only in infancy because when we were weened, we never again

drank milk. And so there'd be no reason for our bodies to continue to wastefully produce this unnecessary enzyme called lactase. So the ancestral condition of human beings was something called LNP, lactase non-persistence. So human beings couldn't adjust lactose after they were weaned because they never again encountered milk. And that was a state of all humans until, let's say, 10,000 years ago. And then what happened, multiple occasions between three and 9,000 years ago, we domesticated milk-producing animals, cows and sheeps and goats and camels and so on. And we, because of this a techno-cultural innovation, the domestication of animals, and all the knowledge and technology

needed to domesticate and care for those animals, changed our environment, modified the world in which we live so that now suddenly there is milk in our environment. So now an occasional human who had a mutation that allowed them to digest lactose as an adult would have an advantage over other humans who could not do that, because now they had this extra food source that they could digest, and a source of calories, and a source of clean hydration when the water was befouled in their environment. And as a result of this, could survive. And the argument is that because of this, we can see that there have been multiple independent emergence of lactase persistence into adulthood, LP, instead of LNP, and that, and therefore more than half

of the humans on the planet now can digest milk into adulthood. So the kernel of the idea here is something that we humans invented or did to our environment feeds back and changes the course of our evolution. And once you accept this concept, which is, I think you must accept it. It's a truth about the world. It's a scientific fact. You now see all kinds of other things. For example, climate change.

We're modifying the environment. The humans that are alive in 10,000 years may be different humans than the humans now. or the invention of cities. I think the kinds of brains, I'm not saying that urban people are smarter than rural people. I'm saying that the humans alive today have different brains than they would have had if we'd never invented cities. Or look at you and me both wearing glasses. I think the humans that are alive today and that will be alive in the future are going to be more myopic than we otherwise would have been, but for the invention of medieval lens grinders who invent glasses and allow you and me to survive.

I would have been killed in the ancestral environment. Yeah. The lion would have eaten me. So there are many, many examples of this now, very well worked through. Uh, that, uh, that, uh, suggests that that the, the, the, the, the kind of allelic variance we have and the kinds of body morphologies that we have and physiologies that we have, have been shaped by our culture and our social, in our way of living socially. So that's that, an example.

of the reverse feedback. Yeah, wonderful. And you know, at that point, I wrote a note to myself, which later on came up. I motorized myself about the nature versus nurture. Is this really a false dichotomy? And then I was amused that later on, basically you say, nature versus nurture, the answer is yes. Or nature or nurture, the answer is yes. And it is a false dichotomy, because there isn't this distinction between nature and nurture because they interrelate. But at the same time, there are a whole bunch of interesting bits of biology that come out of here that relate to the interplay between society and genetics. And let me just throw some out you can explain.

One, basically, you tend to like the smell of people who have the same political ideology as you. Want to explain that? Well, actually, this is a new, this is work that many other sciences have been doing on olfaction in humans and in other animals. we tend to neglect olfaction in humans

and it's a 19th century myth by the way that we are not good smellers so recent science in the last 10 or 20 years has shown that actually our sense of smell is probably as good as a rat's sense of smell that we can detect trillions of odors or trillion odors I mean it's just astonishing and the region of our genome

that's responsible for our olfaction I think about 400 or 500 genes is about as variable as the region that's responsible for our immune system and for similar reasons, that we need to have great variety to confront the complexity of the olfactory signals in our environment or the microbial threats.

So actually what happened is, we published this result that you're alluding to, actually not the political group, that was other work, but we published a result I think in 2010 or 2012, I can't remember on an olfactory gene homophily in humans, showing that you tend to, when given the choice,

you tend to befriend other people who genetically appear to have a similar sense of smell as you do. In other words, you and your friends see the world similarly from an olfactory point of view. You like coffee and your friends like the smell of coffee. You just like the smell of coffee and your friends just liked the smell of coffee. And then we did some theoretical work about this.

With my colleague, Fen Fu, who's an applied mathematician at Dartmouth, we did some work on the evolution of homophily, like why would humans have evolved to prefer the company of people they resemble? Like, what's the reason we take it for granted that we prefer the company of people we resemble? But why is that? And just to give it an answer. And most of the answers that had previously been offered were tautological. Like, we prefer the company people who resemble because we're more comfortable in the presence of those people.

Why are we more comfortable because they resemble us? That's not really a scientific answer. But in that theoretical paper, we show that actually there's reason to believe that we use other similar individuals as heuristics for a survivable environment. In other words, by hanging out with people that are like us, we use them as proxies for environments which we can survive in. So, like, you like, you dislike certain toxic foods because you don't like bitter things. And I don't like, I also will not do well by eating those bitter things.

So I should hang out with you because wherever you are is probably a place where there are things of that kind of bitterness. So, so, so what this forms the back. backdrop to a new body of work we're beginning in my lab with support we hope to get from a number of foundations we're in conversations with right now on human social

chemo signaling. And so we've done some work on the genetics of this now. We're beginning to look at the physiology of this. But of course many other scientists have been looking at this area and you alluded to one finding, which is why we might prefer the company of people

and this was work that Rose McDermott and others did, where they They took, they had people of different political persuasions wear these t-shirts. And then they, they, they gave these t-shirts to other people to blindly smell. And people preferred the t-shirts of people of their same political ideology. Amazing. Amazing. Now, we don't think that you evolved to have a political ideology, but probably natural selections shape your, your, your obedience to rules.

whether you're or a liberal in that regard. Yes. And so anyway, yeah, there's interesting. Yeah. Let me throw another one out that on the surface seems weird. We marry our fourth cousins.

Yeah, so this has to do with this was work done by a group in using data from Iceland where basically the whole country was genotype. Yeah. And some work that we

published using a different database that on average people resemble their spouses at the level of third or fourth cousins. Yeah. And this may have been shaped my natural selection as well, and it's a little complicated to explain, but basically over the course of evolution, you have to think of a gene in a kind of Richard Dawking sense as having a... a life of its own, and that gene evolves to perform, given the co-occurrence of other nearby genes on the chromosome. So gene XYZ spends eternity near gene ABC. So as gene ABC starts doing its thing, optimizing for its performance, gene XYZ has to somehow accommodate that. So genes,

this is known as co-adapt, these genes co-adapt to nearby genes on the chromosomes at which they are found. So now, of course, when you inherit your genes from your parents, those genes have come down by descent and they're co-adapted to those nearby genes. So therefore, if you reproduce with your, with your, so that's one idea. Now, if you reproduce with your cousin, you know, most people understand that you might inherit a leelic, you might become homozygous for like some kind of very a bad gene, a toxic variant of a gene. And that's bad. But if you if you reproduce with someone that's too different from you, now these nearby genes might be so different.

You might get version X, Y, Z from one parent, but version of gene X, Y, Z from one parent. But version of gene ABC that comes from a different parent that never ever spent any time in ancestral past near gene, X, Y, Z, and therefore might not be co-adapted to perform as well. So the argument is that these forces are balanced and that the optimal survival of your offspring is when you reproduce with people who are genetically not too similar from you, but not too dissimilar. Now, let me hasten to add that I'm not making some kind of crazy eugenic argument. I'm not prescribing who people should choose to love or mate with, they should do whatever they want. I'm just saying that natural select, there's some evidence that natural selection has shaped us to, in a very small extent,

choose when given the choice among people with whom to reproduce, pick people who are not too dissimilar or too dissimilar from us. Yeah, and this is not, you're not normative. This is, this is, I threw it out because it's fun's fun, but it's a scientific thing. You can ask how genetically related on average are people, and you find out whether it's not a statement what's good or bad. You find out on average people are about as genetically related to their spouses as they would be to their fourth cousins. That's, you know, it's just a fact.

And that's and this paper that was published by this other group in the journal Science, I believe, either science or nature, showed that looking data for hundreds of years, that children produced by mating pairs of people who were about third or fourth cousins different, those offspring had higher survival than offspring that were produced by first or second cousins or offspring that were produced by, let's say, fifth, sixth or unrelated people. Fifth, six cousins or unrelated people. There's an interesting parabolic curve, and that's some of the kind of evidence for the claim that I am described. No, that's what we would call natural selection, isn't it?

I mean, survivability. But we call science, right? We go to the world. The world is not as we wish it to be. The world is as it is, whether we like it or not. But the science tells us that, yeah, natural selection says if you're not a survivable, you're unlikely to reproduce. Now, I want to move to the most heartwarming, one of the more heartwarming parts of your discussion,

which is about friendship. But as you're my new friend, I want to tell you that I didn't, I already disableness. your rule. I was going to break in and tell you when we're in an hour and 30 minutes, when we're at an hour and 30 minutes, but it was so interesting. I want to break it. Just so you know, we're in an hour and 45 minutes. No, that's fine. We can keep going. Now let's move to, for me, one of the most heartwarming parts of the book is the notion of friendship. Because friendship is heartwarming, but, but the notion of it, of its importance in social networks. And explaining the differences of friendship is really fascinating to

me. And of course, the part that's particularly touching of human-animal friendships, but also animal-animal friendships. And I think this may have been the place, or it might have been in the pair bonding where I learned about, I now have a whole different view of voles because they, you know, they mourn when they, when they aren't with friends. But this notion of, of, of, of, friendship being an essential part of social networks and, and different. between societies, say, being related to the availability of friends and the availability of having a network. And I think you talked about African versus Asian elephants as examples of this.

So I don't know if you remember that, but, but I'm not sure I know, I'm not sure I understand the question you're asking, but the difference, the difference ways that, that different networks arise because of density of friends and, and the ability, the ability to build friendships and have friends that have friends with other friends, et cetera? Yeah, so there are different, different, first of all, what I would say is that what one needs to realize is this thing that we take for granted, which is that we have friends, which is scientifically you would say that we form long term, we form volitional, long-term non-reproductive unions with unrelated cons specifics.

Namely, we have friends. The crucial part there is that they're unrelated. So, for example, packs of dogs or herds of horses, they'll be cousins to each other or siblings. Or half-siblings. But we form non-reproductive unions with unrelated members of our species. And this is extremely unusual in the animal kingdom. We take it for granted that we do it, but it's unusual.

do it, certain other primates do it, elephants, both African and Asian, the two living species of elephants, and certain cetacean species like dolphins and orcas and so on, have friends. Probably sperm whales too. So, and why do we do that? And it's, again, it's been shaped by natural selection. It enhances our fitness. We're better able to survive if we, if we form ourselves into if we have friends, if we live among our friends, if we can rely on them, we can work together with them, and not just with our kin. If you think about it, from a genetic point of view, we also have a bit of a, yes, we want to help our kin, but we also have a little bit of competition with our kin, you know, like you're in some kind of, for example, the canonical example is

you're in competition for your mother's attention with your siblings in a way that you're not in competition with your friends. Your friend has a different mother. He or she's getting attention from that person. You can be quite friendly with your friend and help them a lot. and you don't have to worry about it. So we've been endowed by natural selection with this extraordinary phenotype. And what's interesting is that we have evolved it independently of elephants and whales, of course. Our last common ancestor with elephants is about 85 or 90 million years ago. It was a small shrew-like mammal that, as far as we know, didn't live socially.

And so by convergent evolution, we and elephants have evolved. all this capacity for friendship. By the way, elephants and dolphins and chimpanzees also have names for each other. They have individual identity. Elephants will signal who they are and can detect the unique identity of other elephants. Which is, by the way, something you said that hadn't really hit me, that many animals don't think of unique identities. I mean, that that's unusual. I tend to think, well, they all recognize individuals, but it's not generally the case, right? And it's not necessarily the case that they have to recognize individuals. They might have to recognize classes of other people.

This is an older animal. This is a dangerous animal to me. This is a potential reproductive mate. But they don't necessarily have to uniquely track specific individuals the way we do. And we, by the way, a significant part of our brain is devoted to this. By the way, another thing is we use our faces to communicate our individual identity. And the fact that all of our faces look different, All of our pancreas to do their job in principle should look and work the same,

but our faces to do their job need to look different. And the regions of our genome that are responsible for the structure of our faces are highly variable precisely for this reason, so that we all can have different faces. And not only do we have different faces, but other members of our species can detect that difference, using, again, a significant part of our brain power. So all of this is an evolutionary luxury,

and it all is in the service of friendship. and of mating and of group living. So, yeah, so we, we form friends. But what's interesting is that these other animals also do that. And what's amazing is that the mathematical structure of their networks, with some wrinkles, are very similar to ours. Oh, that's it. By independent convergent evolution.

And yeah, that's pretty amazing to my eye. Yeah, and absolutely. And by the way, I will ask a question. I wasn't going to ask, but, you know, in the book, you show a picture of people and penguins. I've been down an art again. I love penguins. And of course, the penguins all look the same.

But I've always, but I guess I've always assumed that's my opi. That's sort of ant. I mean, to a penguin, maybe they don't all look the same. I don't know. Well, to a penguin, we know that they don't all smell the same. Yeah. Or sound the same. We know that they use, they use their voices to signal.

So like when a male or female penguins take turns, taking care of their newborn or their eggs, one of them will go off hunting and come back with food, and when they join these huge colonies of hundreds of thousands of penguins, they have to find their mate, and they do it apparently with signaling. And bird larynxes, they have something called the syrinx where the two halves of their larynx can fire independently,

and that gives them a tremendous vocal range and variety. And so birds can use their calls. Birds are actually birds most, I think 90% or 95% of bird species are monogamous. So that's another whole interesting thing.

I wouldn't use birds necessarily. But yes, so the penguins can probably tell the difference from one another. But not from faces, from sounds. Here's a quote from you. I want you to elaborate on because I think it's at the end of the discussion of friendship.

You say, friendship lays the foundation of morality. And that's quite a statement. So I thought I'd give you a chance to elaborate. Maybe you don't remember writing it. But it, no, I, let me, I remember. Let me give you the paragraph it's in. Maybe that'll help you. You're looking at me.

It's not that, it's not that I can't defend the statement. It's that I'm, I'm trying to think, how can I make a quick remark about that? Okay. Well, a hero, let me, let me, I think it's fair. I mean, I wanted to be provocative by just saying it, but it's a short few sentences. Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we can. we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people.

No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you're kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality. Maybe that answers the question I ask. Yeah, I mean, here I'm talking about how many virtues are social, not all virtues. For example, you can bravery is a virtue. You can manifest bravery towards wild animals or towards meteorologic challenges.

You know, can you climb an icy mountain in the gale force winds or whatever? And bravery is certainly a virtue. But most virtues are social. We think of kindness, justice, love, empathy, you know, mercy, and so on. These are virtues which require the presence of another person. and to the extent that you are kind to people that are genetically related to you, we may think of that as the kind of dumb workings of natural selection via kinship's kin selection. In other words, you know, that your genes are enhancing their survivability by, you know,

if you sacrifice your life to save your children as other animals do, the argument is, well, that's just your genes evolved to do that because, you know, you share 50% of your genes with your offspring. But why do you sacrifice your life to save your friends? That's like a really interesting. Yeah, no, in fact, it's a question you raised. And it's always these, this all, I mean, from the time of Darwin on, the notion of altruism has always been seemed confounding, although ultimately understandable, but certainly seems on the surface to be confounding because. That's where friendship comes in. So we evolved this capacity to form long-term non-reproductive unions with unrelated conspicuics

and therefore to cooperate with them in ways that are beneficial to us. And therefore manifest this wonderful quality, this altruistic cooperation that we manifest, which is amazing and a part of a good society. And in fact, you mentioned earlier, I think it was a research of two being cosmonidiase, but ultimately that there is an evolutionary reason, And it's exactly that. In fact, it's this reciprocal relationship. You know, having friends actually confers an evolutionary advantage because you can turn to them during times of reversals that will help you. So there may be instances where you're sacrificing, but ultimately you can

hope that when you need survival aid, that you'll get it. Well, the other thing that's amazing about friendship, correct, but the other thing that's amazing about friendship is that the exchange between friends, it's not a tit for tat exchange, right? Like, it's not like, it's not the kind of exchange it can be executed by strangers. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

And it's not, and it doesn't have to be of the same goods. It doesn't have to be, I'll give you some meat today. You'll give me some meat tomorrow. It can be, I'll give you some meat today. And in a year, you will warn me when a lion is coming.

Or you will, carry me on your back when I have broken my leg. So the favors we exchange with our friends are very different and that persists. And you don't, you would never say to your friend, listen, I'm flying out to Prince Edward Island.

Can I stay at your house for the weekend? My wife and I are there to have some fun. And, oh, by the way, how about I'll exchange my house for yours in a week that you can come and stay in Vermont? that's not the kind of phrasing you would use with a real friend, right? A real friend, you don't have to have an immediate exchange, and it doesn't have to be the same thing.

You know, like, I might say to you, you know, Lawrence, can I hang out? You know, we're visiting that your neighborhood, can we hang out with you for a week? And you're like, sure, come and hang out. And then a year later, you're like, I have this niece that needs a job. And I'm wondering if you could talk to her about opportunities of, you know, I'm like, of course. Yeah. You know, it's this kind of, it's not the same amount of goods. It's not the same kind of goods.

It's not in the same time frame. It might never be repaid. This is the other thing. You never know, but there's the probability. Yeah. And, you know, as you're talking, reminded me how appropriate is that, you know, of the truth and fables. And there are that famous fable about the mouse and the,

and, you know, taking the, the nail or whatever it is out of the lions, you know, one day, yeah, one day you'll, you know, save me. Anyway, very easy, easy for the mouse to do, but very helpful for the lion. That's exactly what, what, what, John and Lita, Tubia and Cosmides, were talking about. Yeah, exactly. One thing you say, which I, which is interesting to me, you know, one of the other propensies and one part of your social suite, which you argue is good, which is intriguing to me is liking one's own group. which is intriguing to me because it automatically sets in groups and outgroups. And one immediate goes from there to thinking of xenophobia.

In fact, back when I ran this project at the University, the origins project at university, we had a long workshop on the origins of xenophobia, which can be very useful and are very useful for survival in species. But in modern times, one tends to think of sort of as maladaptive. But you're arguing that the liking of one's in group is ultimately good. So you want to explain that? Well, yeah, that's a sensitive point. It's very depressing to come to that realization,

looking at the scientific literature. It's good in the sense of that it is a certain amount of in-group preference or certain amount of tribalism is beneficial for group functioning. I think the evidence is compelling. So it's good in that sense. I don't necessarily have to take a moral stance on it. Here I use some of the work of moral philosopher Philip Afoot through kind of

explain what I mean by good in this sense that I'm using good. But let me, for the listener, cultivate an intuition about the ways in which some evolutionary biologists and theorists, and here I'm thinking of Sergei Gavriletz's work, Feng Fu's work, Martin Nowak's work, and work by a bunch of people. David Rand has done a lot of work on this at MIT. on how in-group preference might help cooperation.

Can I go on a bit of a digression for a moment? You can, absolutely. All right. So imagine that you have a group of a thousand people. And they're amorphous. They're indistinguished. And you get up on a big ladder with a bullhorn. And you say to this thousand people,

okay, all of you guys work together, cooperate to do something. Well, everyone is going to be looking around the people around them, and this is going to seem an insurmountable task. The group is too big. Maybe I'll be nice to you today, and then we'll keep milling around, and I might never see you again. You might never reciprocate the kindness. So why would I be nice to you? You know, there'd be an opportunity for, and I can't track you. I can't even remember you. I interact with you today, and there are a thousand other people in this group. So you should have the sense. You should have the intuition hearing this story that amongst this group of a thousand people, there might be very low levels of cooperation that these people won't really work together. It's not functional. Now I imagine that instead I say, okay, I'm going to divide this group of 1,000 people into 10 groups of 100. And I'm going to give you little flags, a purple flag and the yellow flag and a green flag.

And I'm going to say now to the 1,000 people, you know what? Just cooperate with the people that have your color flag. Now, even listening to this, you should feel like, that's much easier, right? There are 100 people. I can ignore all the other 900. If I bump into a green flag, I don't have to do anything for them. If I bump into a purple flag, those are my guys, I'll be nice to them. It doesn't mean you have to kill the guys with the green flag, or be mean with them,

just ignore them. And just be nice to the guys of the purple flags. And now intra-group, intra-purple flag group cooperation will arise. And you can track these other hundred people because you have the brain capacity to track 100 faces in the way you can't track 1,000 faces. So now at the overall population level of 1,000 people, you should have the intuition. There'll be a higher level of cooperation. what you've done there is you've done something called adding structure to the group.

Instead of a well-mixed population, you've created a structured population. By the way, physicists often, you know, they just do mean-field approximations. You know, they spinizing models, and they can be, well, imagine it extends to infinity. Of course, in real data that there's a boundary, and when you get to the edge of the boundary, all kinds of interesting things happen, which be back into the middle. So it's not quite so simple. That's why we do physics. That's why I do physics. It's so much easier.

I know. Just abstract a way. Just imagine that there's no friction. Okay. Assume the cowers a sphere is a title of one of my life. Exactly. Assume that there's no mass. And then what happens.

That's right. So, exactly. But of course, the interesting physics is where, you know, those assumptions don't hold. Oh, it's, anyway. We can talk about that at some point. But yeah. So what happens now is, is, is you've added structure to the population.

Another way you can add structure instead of group. And so you should have the intuition, you see that this in-group bias is now deeply related to cooperation. When and only if we have in-group bias, cooperation rises or is sustainable in the population. So the argument is that there's this deep connection between in-group bias and cooperation. And I think the evidence, it's mostly theoretical and modeling evidence, although there's some empirical evidence. I mean, there's certainly in the kind of experiments I do, there's evidence. I've done experiments like that that show that that's the case. But to connect those

real-life experiments to our evolutionary past is more difficult. You would need other species and animals and systems and so on. People have done also experiments with bacteria, by the way, using something called quorum sensing, which is another whole interesting topic. But anyway, so what you've done is you've added structure. Now, another way you can add structure, instead of dividing the group into 10 groups of 100, is instead you tell each person, each of you can have a certain finite number of friends, two, three, four, five, six, seven friends.

That's adding a network, right? So now you tell people, just be nice to your friends. But the whole group is interconnected in this network and everyone just has the simpler task of being nice to their friends. But as a result of that, this group of 1,000 can now work together and be cooperative. And we have done many experiments in my lab testing. What precise structure of network is necessary to allow cooperation to emerge. So both of these are a kind of in-group bias.

Either you prefer your own kind of people, your own group, or your own friends. It's adding structure. And so that's the argument. Now, there's a lot more I can say. I'll just say one thing and then I'll stop, which is that there's a, One of the big unsolved questions is, okay, liking your own group is one thing, deciding that the out group needs to be put in furnaces and killed in the Holocaust isn't or enslaved is another.

Yeah. So where does that come from? Why isn't it enough just to like our own group? Why must we have hostility to the out group? And this is a more difficult puzzle and conundrum. Yeah, I mean, that's what we actually were looking at in this origins of xenophobia. And, you know, I won't go into too much detail, but it has biological organs. I mean, the immune system in some sense is a very basis of xenophobia, right?

The idea is to look for, it's for white blood cells to exactly do, to not just reject the other, but get rid of the others. But anyway, here, but in a not. Can I say one more thing about this? Sure, of course. By the way, this perspective on the social suite and this little fable I've just told also provides a way out of tribalism. So one of the problems we're facing in our society today

is that we have become very tribalistic, which is natural to us. So the question is, how do we get out of it? Well, one way, which Alexis de Tocqueville writes about, is we can go up a level to the group of the whole thousand. We can say, well, we're all Americans. You know, we don't belong to these little groups. we can use our minds to see our membership in this higher group,

and that will efface the differences that are now interfering with our ability to work together. So that is a kind of de Tocqueville kind of solution to the problem. And it's also seen in many kind of science fiction movies, where all the peoples of the earth are fighting, and then the aliens invade. Now we have a shared enemy, so we all work together to, like, repel the enemy. So we're all humans. who cared that we were with the divisions before. But another solution is to go down a level to the level of individuals.

So instead of seeing other people as members of the purple group or the green group, you see them as individuals. And remember, we've been talking about today how we are also endowed with this capacity to see each other as individuals, to be individuals. And this is also part of the American political tradition. This is best encapsulated, of course, by Martin Luther King, who says he looks forward to the time when his children will be judged by the content of the character and not the color of their skin as individuals, right?

So I think one of the, we do have problems of tribalism in our, in, around the world and in the United States today. Right now for sure. But we've also been endowed by our evolution with these capacities to transcend it. Which is, yeah, which is lovely. I mean, because we need to. In the related, not entirely unrelated vein, you make a statement, which again, I'm going to take out of context because it sounds strange, but it's provocative and interesting. You say, inevitably conflict for scarce resources is required for altruism to exist, which again sounds completely non-intuitive, and that's why I picked it. So remind me the, the crap, that sense is it? I know. I hate, you know, when I write something, I can't even remember when I've written it a few weeks.

Well, I try to come to a conclusion that's a sentence that works, but I just don't remember where that was. You see, a century later, evolutionary theorist Sam Bowles and Yonkutjoi used mathematical models to argue that conflict between groups for scarce resources was actually required for altruism to emerge in our species evolutionary past, even though. it follows I don't know if you ever did, love and hate relationships within and between in groups and out groups are entwined.

So it's not as if it's just in-out. So that's where you're heading. Yeah, did Bulls, did you ever meet him at Santa Feud? I've never met him. Yeah, I met him once. Yeah. So he's someone I haven't yet met.

He's sort of a hero of mine too. So, yeah. So what Bulls and others like him have further advanced the idea we were discussing earlier that suggests that actually, it's not simply enough to like your own group, that actually a disdain for the out group when there's a budget constraint. If resources are limitless, then you don't have this

problem. But if they're not limitless, and of course they are, they are not. There is always limited resources. Yeah. Then a kind of antipathy towards the out group, it is theorized, and certainly the modeling suggests it's the case, is required for the emergence of cooperation, which is a kind of a sad truth about the world. Yeah, yeah. And that leads, it is a sad truth, but, but nevertheless cooperation exists. And we've already talked about it. You have a next chapter is about the evolutionary paradox of altruism and cooperation.

But one of the, one of the things that arises out of it, which is really interesting, which leads into a fascinating thing, which, again, maybe 20 years ago or when I was growing up, it seemed that you could differentiate between humans and animals because humans, that culture. And again, there's a whole, you proceed to the fact that animals have culture and in fact, animals have social learning. And the example of chimpanzees is one example you give. So elaborate on that a little bit because I think it's fascinating that ultimately this characteristic of culture, which is so important for our own right now, our own evolution, if you want to call it that, is not just unique to humans. My friend Dan Gilbert, the social psychologist at Harvard,

who's a dear friend has, I think, a very funny line. I'm going to butcher it a little bit. But, you know, he says that, you know, all social scientists at some point are tempted to, you know, use the sentence. And the sentence is, you know, only humans do this. Basically, only humans use tools. Only humans have language. Only humans have culture.

Only humans look. And all of those have fallen by the wayside as we've just gone out into the world as scientists are wants to do and done a little observation. So that's correct. You know, first of all, it's important to distinguish between culture and traditions. And a tradition, you know, an animal group might have a traditional hunting ground or a bird might have a traditional song. But that's a very kind of simplified type of culture. Culture is more complex.

But there is culture, not just in us. There is cumulative culture even, some new examples in chimpanzees where we've observed, scientists have observed over time the innovations in nut-cracking technology, where first the chimp puts a nut on the ground and then is just banging it. And then over time, in subsequent generations, they see that they add an anvil to the hammer. They put a rock and then the nut,

and then they hammer it. And then that gets transmitted then to laterally to other chimps and temporally to the subsequent generations. So the essential feature of culture is that it is knowledge that can be transmitted across time and space. Now, it's clear that our species does this to a vastly greater extent than any of them. Yeah, of course.

It's the root of our, one of the roots of our, you know, what E.O. Wilson is called the social conquest of the earth. Yeah. And it is certainly a source of our wealth. And one of the thing that's amazing to me is, so just, so, you know, most animals learn through what is known as independent learning through contact with the environment, right? Like a little fish can learn that if it swims up to the light, it'll find food there. Yeah. But we also learn socially. So, for example, you put your hand in the fire and you learn that it burns.

That's independent learning. You've learned that fire burns, but you've paid a price. You have a burnt hand. Or I could watch you put your hand in the fire, and I gain almost as much knowledge, fire burns, but I don't burn my hand. That's extremely efficient social learning. and many, not many, some smaller set of animals than by far than engage in independent learning, engage in social learning. But we do something even more remarkable than that is that we teach each other to build a fire. We teach each other things.

And this is exceedingly rare in the animal kingdom. Although you do provide an example of it with a mother and child again with nutcracking. Yes, I mean certain other animals do it, but we do it. It's very rare teaching, and certainly the extent to which we do it is extraordinary. And it allows us to preserve and disseminate knowledge. And so the reason I, the example I give about this is that, you know, when you and I were born, Newton had already invented calculus. By the way, dear listeners, Newton invented calculus over the course of a year at the rate the rest of us are taught it. And then he kept it as his own private mathematics for like 20. 20 years. I mean, it's just mind-boggling. He was definitely mind-boggling. He would be in the same asylum today. But anyway. So, so, you know, so, so, so, but when we, when we were born, calculus had already been invented and animals had already been domesticated. And the heavens had

been mapped and roads had been built. And all of this stuff was just given to us. All this knowledge, all these assets were just given to us as a kind of capital, kind of intellectual and practical capital, which is what allows us in a lifetime or in a day to be so much more productive than people born a thousand or 10,000 years ago. So you have to think about culture as a kind of capital endowment that is just given to us. And it's almost unstoppable. All the musical forms, the writing, the languages, all of this stuff is just a vast wealth that is just given to us. And in a way, it's not surprising that we evolved to have this capacity because to be capable of culture, let me say one more thing. There's a deep theory about why we evolve to be capable of culture.

It's a very interesting idea. And the reason is theorized that animals such as us that evolved in a time when the environment was more variable, if we could evolve an apparatus, that would allow us to cope with variability in the environment through non-genetic means, we would do so. In other words, if the environment changes very slowly, we can use natural selection and genetic evolution to cope. You know, across time, some of us would survive, some of us would die,

and the animal would change its body form and life ways to cope with a colder or hotter environment. But if the environment is changing, let's say, hot and cold every thousand years, if we could evolve, if you're an animal and you can't invent clothing, you die. You know, suddenly it gets cold. But if you're a human and you can involve the capacity to be able to manufacture clothing, now you have a way to cope with a variable environment.

So one of the theories about the evolution of the capacity for culture is that it's connected to environmental variability. So, anyway, that's, we're endowed with this extraordinary capacity. and it's a source of our ability to survive, and it's a source of our humanity. And a source of genetic change. I think this was one of the examples where, again, this counterintuitive notion of behavior producing genetics becomes important. I think you call the Baldwin effect, and where culture eventually and the behavior associated

with culture gets imprinted in our genes. You want to go on. Can be. Yeah, the Baldwin effect is another. So we gave an example earlier about gene culture co-evolution with a lactase story. These ideas are all superficially related, but they're actually distinct ideas. So the Baldwin effect is something different. But the famous example about the Baldwin effect is bird's song.

Yes. So imagine that you have a group of birds and that for whatever reason, initially singing a particular song enhances the sexual appeal of this bird. And so the birds learn to sing this song. They transmit. So the birds that are, you know, the birds transmit the song. Birds are born. They hear this song.

And this becomes the song that they are taught to sing in order to attract mates, let's say. but you should imagine that some birds might, by dumb luck, have had some genetic variants that allowed them to more easily sing the song, perhaps to express the first note in the song more easily, or perhaps to have a different rhythm or different pitch or something that makes it slightly easier for them

to sing this culturally transmitted song that enhances their survival. And with each succeeding generation, those birds that are better able to sing that song, will have better and better, we'll have better fitness. So across time, the thing that was formerly transmitted culturally now is completely genetically encoded. So you can't help but sing this song now, whereas in the, you know, in the ancestral past,

it was something that was culturally or taught. It was taught by a social learning. So that's the idea of the Baldwin effect. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's a great example. Once again, you can see that of that feedback of how you'd imagine it's not, as I say, it's not the landmark in adaptation in that sense. It's just, it's not. But it sounds like it on the surface and then you realize that their mechanism makes

sense. By the way, I meant to say earlier, just for listeners and also to clarify, although one's talking about society and groups, I was happy to see throughout, I mean, we're talking about natural selection on genes and in individuals. We're not talking about group selection, which is a much more dubious, I would say, or at least I tend to think it's a dubious claim that somehow there's group selection, not individual gene selection. Do you want to come in on that at all? Or is that a... Well, I mean, multi-level selection is contentious. You know, we, I skirted a little bit in the book,

although we've had some findings in my lab that can provide some support. You know, there are now some, very few examples, principally I think in microbes of this, maybe some other examples. But we have some findings in my lab that suggests that to the extent that genes in me can act on the world around me, for example, one of our findings is that we show that if you have Tom, Dick, and Harry in a room, whether Dick is friends with Harry depends not just on Dick's genes or on Harry's genes, but on Tom's genes. So those two people being friends with each other depends on my genes. Okay.

So that means that my genes can change the shape of the group around me. Returning to this idea we abandoned earlier in our conversation today about transitivity and your friends being friends with each other. Yeah. And to the extent that that's the case, you can imagine that there are group level structures which might enhance my fitness. as an individual. So a gene and me shapes the group around me, and that group might, you know, perform differently than other groups. So it's, I don't want to take a strong stand on this,

but I, let me just say that I, I, I think I'm keeping, I'm reserving judgment on multi-level selection. Okay, but, but, but and you talk, I mean, later, well, we'll skip to, we, you call it remote control, but it is true that genes can affect spatially removed individuals, not, you know, they're not just affecting you. They're affecting people who are a spatial removed from you in a variety of ways. Maybe you want to elaborate on that a little bit. Well, I mean, this is, I mean, this is, this is, this is again, fantastic science done mostly by other scientists. The, the example that some people may be familiar with is the zombie ant example. Yeah. I love the zombies. Tell a story of the zombies.

Yeah, I mean, it's also like in the science fiction movie The Last of Us with Pedro Pascal and I forgot the young actress in it. But the idea is that there are these, not the idea, it is the case. In fact, both Darwin and Wallace observed this in their travels in the 19th century, which is amazing, power observation. They noticed that there were these ants that when infected with this fungus,

the fungus, which doesn't have a brain, takes over the behavior of the animal with the brain, the ant, and obliges it to climb up a leaf and then climb up a plant and then underneath a leaf and then use its teeth to bite into the vein of the leaf. And then the fungus kills the ant and then sprouts a little mushroom out of the ant's head and then sporulates and drops the fungal spores onto the forest floor, which then fall on new ants and repeat the cycle. So the fungi control the ant in the furtherance of their own reproduction.

We actually have evidence from plant fossils going back tens of millions of years with plant veins showing these characteristic bite marks underneath them, showing that this is a very ancient phenomenon. and where an organism controls the behavior of another organism. And there are many examples of this in the animal kingdom. One example that's been in the news lately because of RFK Jr. is the toxoplasma example. And so here, these microorganisms, when they infect rodents like mice,

they make the rodents lose their inborn aversion to the smell of cat urine. So the rodents now aren't as afraid of cats as they ought to be, thereby setting them up to be consumed by cats, which then the toxoplasma, that's the next obligate host in the intestine of the cat. So in the furtherance of its own survival, the toxoplasma controls the behavior of their rodents. So once you see these examples, these amazing, examples of the animal kingdom, it raises all kinds of questions about action at a distance,

where one animal controls the behavior of another animal. By the way, I ran ahead to this example where one animal controls the behavior of another animal, but there are simpler examples where animals, their genes in an animal, causes it to modify the world around it. The simplest example is a spider web. So the spider has genes. We all agree that, specify its propensity to make webs and webs of a particular type. And that thing that the spider makes is a physical object outside its body, and it leaves it there. And that object advances the spider's fitness. Or power birds.

I like, I mean, which you talk about, which I first learned about for my wife, these amazing birds that make these incredible, incredible architectural structures to a act mates. Yeah. Or beaver dams. where the beaver modifies its environment by damning the river in a way that allows it to hunt for food and survive more. So the point is that all these examples in the spider, in the beaver, in the bowerbird, in the fungus, all of these are examples of genes in one organism controlling the behavior of another organism. And it's possible or likely that we can begin to see humans this way too.

For example, my genes may affect the age of menopause of my wife, or my wife's genes may affect the onset of baldness in me. So these are what we call exophenotypes and an action at a distance, where the genes in one body are affecting the physical expression of others. And of course, Richard Dawkins, of course, wrote a book about this in the 80s called the extended phenotype. But evidence for this, including from my lab, has been amassing in the last, you know, 20 years. Well, you know, as long we're talking about toxic things, I can't resist mentioning,

it's the first time I've ever read it where you argue that the evolutionary utility of religion, which I view is toxic. And you say certain kinds of religions became more useful on this term pressure on, the kinds of genes and brains prone to such religions. The religions are small-scale societies generally involve less moralistic and more capricious gods are often seen as part of the natural world. So you say that basically we're kind of, that religion becomes useful in urban communities and therefore makes us, and those people who are more prone to religion tend to, you know,

those genes tend to survive. Well, the thing you have to understand is it's very delicate and you have to be very careful when you make these arguments, not for fear of offending people, but just to be very scientifically precise and not lean out over your skis too much and know where the evidence is. So, for example, Joe Henrik has made lots of arguments about the evolutionary advantages of monogamy from a cultural evolution point of view. And we evolved certain rules about monogamy that may be beneficial or religion. So the argument is not that there are genes coding for particular kinds of religions.

Yes. The argument is that as we change the world around us, for example, by inventing cities or agriculture and so on, we may co-evolve the capacity for certain kinds of religious beliefs, whatever the particular God that is instantiated by those beliefs, That's not encoded in our genes, but let's say the appeal of a kind of monotheistic religion may be different in a large society than in a small society, let's say. And so the argument is we change the environment of our nirannas, and over periods of thousands of years, not decades or hundreds of years, this may shape our evolutionary trajectory. You know, I think just like we discussed earlier with lactase persistence or with climate change, I think some of these things are quite possible. Now, having evidence for them is another matter.

Okay. Actually, now as we head towards the wrapping up a little bit, I want to get back to the issue, talking about speculative things and also coming back to the question of goodness, which ultimately, you know, it's in the title of your book, origins of a good society. Good means something. But what is good is an interesting question. And I wrote myself a note,

and then I was really happy to see that, again, five pages later, you'd start talking about it. This question from a scientist's perspective of getting aught from his. You know, ought is through what's good. Is is what is. And a very famous quote, I think it was from Hume,

who said you can't get ought from his. I want to read a quote from you because I think, although you may be even stronger than me on this, I think we agree to a fundamental perspective on this. You would say I would even argue the best way to avoid morally bad outcomes is to be fully aware of the scientific reality. My argument is I don't think you can get off from it, from purely science. But without science, I don't think you can get odd. Because unless you know what the consequences of your actions are, which is what science tells you,

unless you are fully aware of the scientific reality, which is what you say, you're inevitably going to, your aughts are going to be ridiculous. So I wanted to ask you that your view of aught from his. Well, I'll say two things there. First of all, what I'm arguing there in a sense is,

you know, I think these days it's called sub-tweeting or something. I can't remember. Basically, what I'm, I'm, I'm kind of sticking it to both the far right and the far left that would sooner have us avoid scientific discovery than engage in what is fundamentally an ideological or ethical debate. So whether it's climate change or, or the reality of gender or a gun violence or moral relativism, I mean, you, you know, a cultural variation. You know, the right and the left, the far right and the far right have their favorite hobby

horses where they would, they prohibit research. They don't want research in this area because they just don't want to know the findings. They would rather suppress that than actually do the hard work of having an actual ethical or ideological argument. Yeah. And to me, as a scientist, that is Jejun. You know, like, honestly, we should just grow up. Yeah.

And the world is as it is. We, you know, whether we're right or not. Yeah, and we're going to find whatever we find, and then we can discuss what to do about it. You know, climate change is anthropogenic or it's not. Okay. By the way, to harken to a conversation we're going to have on another day, it's why we should explain to the editors of nature behavior, that why scientific results, even if they're offensive, should still be published, if they're right. I was disappointed in the stance, and I know a lot of the editors at Nature Human Behavior, and I publish in that journal.

It's a good journal. Yeah, I know. But I think they, I think they misfired in this regard. Yeah. Because it also calls into question. Now you can't, it subverts, as some people have been showing, it subverts a scientific record. Like if you, if you believe that scientists will only say those things or editors will

only publish those things that comport with ideological commitments and how do you believe anything you need. Absolutely. That's then science becomes ideology. And it defeats the whole purpose of the end result is it is the way it is, not whether you want it to be or whether someone else wants it to be or whether someone else likes it, nature doesn't give a damn whether you like it or anyone else liked it. Yeah.

But wait, this is one of the reasons I tell my students, nature is a cruel mistress. I don't mind you having moral commitments. I don't mind you believing that inequality is bad for hell. Yeah. I don't mind you believing that poverty has these effects on a person's body. I don't, I want you to really be committed to improving end of life care. I don't mind you believing that friendship is a magnificent thing that is beneficial. You can have these moral beliefs.

But then you go to the data and you try as hard as possible. And in fact, the result you should fear the most is the result you expect because then you'll accept it. Whereas the result, we don't accept that. It calls into question. So I want my young scientists in the lab to have moral commitments. I want them to be animated and motivated, but I do not want them to, I want them to try hard to extirpate those biases from their work. And the reason is that nature is not as we wish it to be.

It is as it is. Yes. And there's that very famous quote from, was it, Aldane, in a different context, almost the same context, but it was about religion, where he explained why he was an atheist. He said, when I go in the lab, I don't, I'm an atheist. I don't think, you know, whatever I believe outside, I don't think anything is God is twiddling the knobs for me. And my view is, well, if he's not in the lab, he's not outside.

But the idea is that, you know, and I have no problem. I know a lot of colleagues who are religious, but God never enters into the conversation where we're doing physics. Well, you know, it's very, it's very funny. You must know this. You know, Einstein had a real hard time accepting quantum mechanics. Yeah. And he famously said, as most people have heard, God does not lay dice with the universe.

But you probably know, but many people don't know. know, and what I didn't know until about five or ten years ago was Neil's response to Einstein, which was Boers magnificently says, Mr. Einstein should not tell God what to do. Exactly. Which is just incredible. It's just incredible that this is the conversation these guys are having. Yeah.

That was probably the last time God was mentioned. Einstein made the mistake. I mean, saying God when he meant other things and everyone thinks he was going to do. I know. I know. No, but the point, all the point I'm saying is what you just said. It's scientists are human beings, a secret that we perhaps should let people know. And so scientists will always have biases.

We'll always have moral goals and maybe in conflict with others. But the whole point of science is to overcome those. Yes, it's training. And to be self-correcting and to realize we all want to believe. We all want to believe. We're all Fox Mulder. And science trains us to hopefully to learn that our beliefs are sometimes wrong. And that's what's the beauty of it.

That's the great thing about science. To discipline yourself as an individual and as a community to self-correct. And I mean, I think, I mean, this is, you know, we've talked a little bit about a scientific life today. And I just, you know, and there's this old understanding, you know, like, mathematicians and physicists peak in their 20s and chemists in their 30s and biologists in their 40s and social scientists in their 50s.

And a little bit that's been the case in my life. I think the first time I saw something that no one had ever seen before, like I made a discovery where it's, you know, in my late 40s. Because I had done a lot of good work before then, but it was mostly normal science, you know,

adding little tweaks to what things other people had already seen and stuff like that. But once you have drunk from that well, like once you have made an actual discovery, it's unlike any other feeling I have had in my life. It is it is such an overwhelming, powerful, seductive, moving, transcendent feeling that you just want it again. I mean, you have that feeling of discovery and then you want it again. And if you're lucky, if you're lucky, you have maybe five of those. If you're lucky, you have one of them. Just one, yeah, one discovery.

But, you know, you have that feeling. And I can honestly say that, you know, I still, like, I just, I can't discuss it because it's still very early. But just this last week in the lab, one of my postdocs came to me with this just incredible discovery. Like no one had ever seen this thing before. We're the first to see it. I know we're the first to see it. And it is, I was just all day. was floating. I was just feeling so happy that I knew that it's like, okay, I can't invent

calculus and keep it secret for 20 years. But I know this little thing, this secret little thing that nobody else knows. And it's just an incredible feeling. So, okay, but going back, to the morality thing, so one point was, the is from the ot, one point is, nature is a cruel mistress and, you know, we have to submit. But, another point is the way I kind of try to land that plane in the book is as I said earlier taking advantage of moral

philosopher Philippa Futz's ideas and she had, she's well known for these magnificent thought experiments that she can, like in the way our best philosophers do, you know, where they make these simple examples that really clarify distinctions that are otherwise we just mere mortals

like us just blow by. So Philip O'Foot writes this magnificent as a very famous sentence in one of her essays or short books, which goes something like, in moral philosophy, I think, it is helpful to think about plants. Yeah, oh yeah, that's right.

Such a terrific sentence. They're like, plants? Moral philosophy, where is she going with this? And she talks about how you can think about how plants can have good roots and that the roots of a plant can be thought of as good when they further the ability of a plant to be a plant. And then she talks about clocks.

Like you can speak of a good clock. A good clock is a clock that tells time properly. That fulfills the being a clock. And that's what I mean when I talk about the evolutionary origins of a good society, that these are qualities that in any, us to be our most human, that enable us to realize, you know, the is

of what it means to be human. And as I close the book, I talk about, at the end of the book, I talk about how the arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness. Yes, I was going to quote you there. I was going to allow you the last word at the end of the conversation. It's the last line of the book. And I think it's important, but let me read another quote, right?

I mean, it's perfect because, you know, it's a great segue. When you talked about the plants, it exactly, because I was going to ask you to elaborate on this sentence, which you say quite the contrary, I think that human beings are fundamentally good. And that, as we've seen, we are pre-wired to make societies that are filled with the sorts of things moral systems see as good. The social blueprint is a non-theological human independent source for the good things in life that we value. And I wanted to ask you, what do you mean by good? And I think you've given the answer, which is, in principle, you say, society helps us be more human. Is that what you're? Yes. Or helps

us realize these, you know, our fundamental humanity. That's right. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, I, you know, I was going to, I was going to head off to AI for a little while because you've just written it, you know, I enjoyed a piece of the road for the economist, an AI and the social effects that's going to have. Why don't we spend two minutes on it? Because I kind of view AI in a sense as, as, you know, you point out it in here and in some of your work, you know, in your work using bots, how bots inserted into a human interactions when the humans don't know their bots will change the way humans behave. And that naturally suggests that, of course, AI will do the same thing. And it does. and it will change what it means to be human.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. I guess that's my point. Culture changes what it means to be human. It changes our genetic structure eventually and changes what it means to be human. AI will affect social interactions in ways, some of which will be terrible, perhaps. Some will be good.

But just because it's different, it doesn't mean it has to be bad. I guess we have to be aware of the possibilities, as Louis Pester said, fortune favors the prepared mind. So we should be, we should think about some of those possibilities. But anyway, I wanted to throw that out to you and ask you what you thought. Maybe, maybe we should plan on another shorter conversation where we can just talk about AI because you're right. We're doing a lot of work in the lab on, on AI right now. All of the work in my lab is about human social interactions, whether it's social contagion and

complex networks, whether it's group structure and cooperation, whether it's the, the microbiome spreading from person to person or chemo signaling, whether it's AI and these hybrid systems of humans and machines. It's all under the rubric of networks and social interactions. But there's a whole conversation we could have about AI. Since you've been, well, let me just ask you one question. And we will, I hope we'll have a bunch of conversations in the future. But are you optimistic or pessimistic? Okay, so that my answer on this, and if we do another talk, I'm going to repeat this story. So listeners who hear this one and the next one should should give me a pass. Okay.

Is this magnificent scene in Fiddler on the roof where, where Reptevia is in this town square and someone makes an argument and Reptevia goes, you're right. And someone makes another argument at Reptevia says, well, you're right. And someone else says, Reptevia, they can't both be right. And he goes, you're right too. Okay. This is how I feel. I study AI, but I study, I don't study super computationally intense AI.

I don't produce or study large language models, for example, or AlphaGo or Alpha Fold or any of those kinds of technologies that Deep Mind or Open AI are developing for various reasons that should be obvious, principally, that I'm not a computer scientist. But I listen to people who are very smart and who are deeply engaged. And you have one group of people I admire who are really smart. and they're saying AI is very dangerous and we don't really understand it and we should be very worried. And there is another equally smart group of people who say, no, it's the best thing since sliced bread.

It's great for humanity. You don't need to fear it. And I feel like ripped heavy. So I am reserving judgment on the big arc of AI. But my lab is doing, I think, useful experiments that do show how AI can reshape human social interactions and therefore how over thousands of years the invention of AI may come to be seen eventually similar to the invention of agriculture or cities or some of the other

things we've discussed today. Absolutely. That's great. Yeah. And let me throw in an invention of something else because when I talk about AI and again, we'll repeat this story when we do. But maybe as the invention of writing, because how do you know, when the Phoenician Alphabet, was picked up by Greece, your ancient ancestors, the ancient Greeks thought it was awful. It was going to destroy storytelling. It would destroy memory. Well, it changed the world, but it didn't necessarily.

It changed what it meant to be human. It definitely does. In fact, you and I can read and write makes us very different than the people. At different brains, that's right. But, you know, it didn't necessarily make it worse. And I think, so it remains to be seen. So, but let me, let me, let me end with just reading the whole paragraph that your arc said, that you quoted from before, the last paragraph of your book.

We should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts. Fortunately, we do not need to exercise any such authority in order to have a good life. The arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness. And I thank you for having a good life. And I hope that the discussions and the work you do,

and I'm convinced they will help the rest of us have a good life. certainly made my life better today. I really enjoyed our discussion. Thank you very, very much. Lawrence, thank you so much for having me. What a long and wide ranging conversation. I look forward to more of them. Me too. And thanks again for what you do. Thanks. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people, and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future

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