Chickens, Cooperation and a Pro-social World
The Great Simplification #56 with David Sloan Wilson
This week…
There are a number of important advances in evolutionary biology in the past few decades, one of these being the resurgence of multi-level selection - or the fact that organisms - and humans evolve from selection pressure at multiple scales - not just the abilities/behaviors of the individual organism. Today, I am pleased to have a conversation with a leading scholar in this field, David Sloan Wilson, to unpack how evolution can be used to explain and understand modern human behavior, particularly with respect to cooperation and pro-social behavior.
David Sloan Wilson is one of the foremost communicators about evolution to the general public. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology Emeritus at Binghamton University and President of the nonprofit organization ProSocial World, whose mission is "To consciously evolve a world that works for all". His most recent books are This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (with Paul Atkins and Steven C. Hayes), and his first novel, Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III.
How can an evolutionary idea, first thought of by Darwin and subsequently ignored until recently, shed light on human’s inherent balance between competition and cooperation? And how might our improved knowledge of where we come from inform our behaviors and collective governance in the decades ahead?
These topics - evolution and human behavior, cooperation and cultural evolution - have always fascinated me, so I did perhaps slip into a few nerdy academic rabbit holes in this conversation. I hope you learn from and enjoy it!
In Case You Missed It…
In last Friday’s Frankly, I walked through an idea that I’ve mentioned in previous videos but never fully unpacked - a Mordor economy. In the default scenario, I see us heading towards a system where higher energy/extraction costs and complexity require us to devote more and more energy to providing the same amount of energy we’ve had historically. We will increasingly conflate ‘gross energy’ (what GDP measures) and ‘net energy’ the benefits to the rest of society. This explanation is rather dense and involved topics like energy quality, debt and credit, and thinking about what areas in the margin of society will no longer have the energy available to be supported.**
**Note - this is a very complex topic - here I just present a broad brush philosophy of how these things fit together. Even measuring this is complex and nuanced - this all requires more research - but the path we’re on is clear.
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