Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind | Mindscape 342

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. We talk a lot about complex systems here at Mindscape. And one of the interesting things to me about complex systems is there's a little bit of a tension between the fact that on the one hand the space of possibilities is mind-bogglingly large, right? when you have a b bunch of small constituents that can come together in different Combinations different patterns to make some kind of aggregate which is a very typical thing that happens to get complexity. Uh generally just the numerology works out

that the number of possible aggregations or ways to aggregate things is ginormous. You cannot even possibly imagine searching through all the possibilities. And yet the tension is with the fact that in some environment, if we're talking about a complex system that persists and Adapts and flourishes and whatever that is somehow fitting into the environment where it exists, there's kind of natural features that we see happening over and over again. Power law distributions are just one famous example of this. But in specific complex systems like biology, in evolution, we see what is called convergence. Right? You

have different developments of sight, vision, and the eyeballs in different kinds of organisms may have developed in completely Different ways, but end up looking very much the same. If we just thought about all the different ways you could arrange the molecules in the eyeballs, they would be just again un unimaginably large. But there's the right way to do it to actually achieve the purpose that you're trying to achieve. So both of these facts, the fact that the space of possibilities is ginormous and the fact that there is nevertheless sometimes convergence onto the best way to

achieve Some purpose or some goal or some adaptation if you wanted to call it that is very much alive in real world biology. And we can talk about that not only at the level of organs or different features of the physiology of an organism, but also culture, thinking, social organization, things like that. And these are exactly the issues we're going to be talking about today on the episode with Rachel Powell, who is a philosopher who thinks about these Things in a comprehensive and interdiciplinary way, bringing them all together. How is there co-evolution between social traits

and biological traits? Is there some sense of convergence onto different forms of social organizations? Are we a little bit overly anthropocentric when we look at the ways that other kinds of species have decided to organize themselves? you know, we know a little bit about humans and we tend to View what other species have achieved and how they've organized themselves through that human lens. And as Rachel points out here and there in the conversation, all of this, in addition to being very illuminating when it comes to life here on Earth, may even be relevant to thinking

about other forms of life, whether not on Earth or completely artificial or something like that. So I urge you to stick through to the end where we have some provocative Thoughts on the future of humanity. You can't predict anything. That's one of the things about biology and society etc. There's no absolutely firm unimpeachable predictions. But one can speculate about this large space of possibilities. And in the case of the future of humanity, the space of possibilities is very large indeed. So let's go. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Rachel Powell, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. >>

Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. >> We're going to be talking, of course, about one big question, evolution, contingency versus I don't know what to call it. I think you like to call it convergence or people might call it, you know, predictability or whatever this or necessity. >> Necessity. Yeah. Inevitability. Um, exactly. >> Before we get into all the fun details, why don't you give us your take of the big picture state of the argument right now? I mean, as you might know, um, I have an evil twin biologist, Sean Carroll,

who studies evolution. He wrote a whole book about contingency in evolution. Yeah, that's still out there. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I think this is unresolved. Um, and there are massive Methodological problems and conceptual problems that stand in the way of its resolution. So I think the best we can do at right now at this point um is uh to basically you know think about the questions that we're asking and try to formulate better questions and then figure out what it would take to answer them. Um and so like I guess like one way that I

would kind of come at this when you're asking like sort of what's the state of Play? I think historically there was an enormous amount of cross talk between physicists in general. I mean like astronomers and SETI SETI you know researchers and everyone um and evolutionary biologists and that's what I kind of want and when I say cross talk I mean sometimes there was non-communication. >> Oh yeah. Um, and so this this is something that uh I think it's it's a helpful way of thinking about uh you Know how to think about contingency and evolution um

and how that has affected the way physicists have thought about you know extraterrestrial life versus biologists and all the various research programs surrounding them. Um and it it helps illuminate some of the key differences uh between physics and biology I think. Um and I so I think this is like a nice way of doing that and part you know partly as a tour through the fairmy Paradox and how biologists have viewed it very differently largely because of the contingency phenomena. >> Um >> so maybe that's so if that's a place I can start. Um >>

that'd be great. >> Yeah. So okay so basically um I think uh and this is something that you were saying we can edit out insults of colleagues. I won't name any colleagues specifically, but I I I would say that I I'm going to say something which I think would irk a lot of philosophers, at least the the the classic kind of old school philosophers, and that is that I think that the most profound world views shattering um insights in modern human history haven't come from philosophy. They haven't come from religion or anything. They've come from

science. >> Yeah. Um I I mean I'm preaching to the choir here I assume but u a lot of people would probably take issue with That but I I'm firmly convinced and I'm always asking people you know at conferences every please someone you know give me something that's on the level of these kinds of insights that science has given coming from other disciplines and it just doesn't happen um and as I see it and this is why this is going to become relevant so I see the kinds of insights these these profound insights coming from

science as sort of falling along two arcs. Like one is This, you know, um kind of like an intuition shattering wrecking ball that science has uh where basically it's taking uh a destructive kind of demolition approach to common intuitions that we have about the world around us about the causal structure of the world. So like you know relativity of space and time the microfysical structure of objects the mechanistic origins um uh of adaptation the nature of organisms and their ontology and Stuff like this. Um so there's a lot of talk about like biases in science

but really the deep kind of you know in methodology uh in data collection and so on but you know I I don't want that to distract us from the main plot which is that science really is about exploding our most cherished assumptions um about the causal structure of the world. Um and the second kind of arc that these insights have taken in my view is sort of this desentering Uh project which is sort of this is the kind of thing that Freud described as um a dethroning uh sort of as inflicting like a narcissistic wound

on our collective ego by shattering the way uh humans essentially understand their place in the universe. And so the idea is like you have this great dentering project of science that goes from like you know the work of the likes of Capernicus or Hubble or Darwin which is moving Humanity from a privileged position whether we're talking about the center of the solar system uh or galaxy or the pinnacle of the history of life and moving it transllocating us to some kind of unremarkable periphery in this larger system that uh is not tailored in any way

to human existence. Okay. And that gives rise to all sorts of principles that are, you know, are are various ways of formulating that idea. Some of them are sort of puristic like the capernac Principle. >> Uh others are more statistical like the mediocrity principle and so on. But the common thread to them is that you know the point is we should expect our situation to be run-of-the-mill. we should be suspicious of theories that afford uh a special place in the living cos or physical cosmos right to human beings. Um and I think that this is

where the the biology and physics start to come apart. Okay. And this is where The contingency comes in. So this is where I was going with that. Um, and you know, I think, and you know, maybe you'd be better off, uh, saying whether you agreed or not, um, because it's not my specialty, but I think that the Capernac stuff holds up quite well, uh, in physics. Um, you know, you have the universality of physical laws. The same laws that govern terrestrial affairs also govern the celestial phenomena like like Newton showed. Um, everything that We can

tell seems to suggest like we have, you know, we're living in a garden variety solar system, you know, with inner rocky planets, outer gas giants, a garden variety main sequence star in a sort of unremarkable location of the galaxy, which is just, you know, one uh among many in the observable universe. Now, that all seems to work. But then when you extend those principles, those ways of thinking, those modes of inference that are very familiar in the Physical sciences to biology, things start to break down pretty quickly. Okay. >> Mhm. [gasps] >> For a bunch

of reasons. Um, and continuency is going to be one of the big ones. But I think what's happened you know especially in the 20th century where you know evolutionary biologists were largely not part of I don't know if I can say historically excluded but they weren't Sort of active participants in discussions about uh about SETI and uh uh you know and extraterrestrial life and it was always sort of a foofu question in biology whereas in the physical sciences started to be taken more seriously and then the interesting question is why and why were biologists not

playing a big role and part of the reason is they were very skeptical and they would be real they would be naysayers at these conversations. So Like the most prominent evolutionists of the 20th century like that were involved in the major evolutionary synthesis it's called um you know like Ernest Meyer um uh uh Dub Jans uh Dub Janssky uh Gi Simpson they were all very negative about the SETI projecting >> and yeah and so you know it's interesting because meanwhile you have in the midentth century right? You know, this the the fairmy paradox is coming

out, right? Where it's like, well, look, You know, if we're going to go by something like a capernic principle, then, you know, we should expect intelligent life to be pervasive in the universe. Yet, we haven't found a single shred of extraterrestrial life, whether on Earth or uh in the history of our visible cosmos, right? There's no stellar engineering, there's no ships, there's no bots, all this stuff. >> Um, and so, so, you know, this seems paradoxical. How do we explain it? And I Think that it's paradoxical when you assume a sort of physics-like orientation to

the world, a Capernacinike orientation. Um, and but of course the the evolutionists like the the uh the GG Simpsons and the Ernest Meyers and all these uh you know influential theorists and I'll talk about Steven Jay Gold in a minute because he's going to be like the first big articulation of this concept of contingency. Um but they weren't very Moved by um the paradox like they would say there's not much paradox to talk about. Um why right why is that? I mean you have all the large numbers on your side. You've got all of the

the the planetary science on your side. Why? And it's because they just saw and and they hadn't like fully really articulated very well yet. But um because I'm talking in like 1960s, you know, there were some papers that Came out by by by some of them being uh quite negative about the SETI project. And I'm sure city said researchers took it a little bit personally and you know it was not helpful to funding their projects and so forth. Um but I think what they saw was that they when you have this big picture history of

life on Earth as some of these evolutionists did, um what they saw was uh a historical sequence of events that involved All sorts of form all sorts of formative quirky outcomes that could easily have been otherwise. And that results in these sort of unique evolutionary sequences and trajectories that we cannot just project out into the cosmos the way we might about you know in other physical sciences. And so like you know if you take like the science fiction of the 20th century and actually it continues there's not much different but if you take the the

the science fiction Of the 20th century um you know where you have you know the Star Treks humanoids and uh Star Wars you know everything is humanoids it's like you know um and uh and actually this is sort of still goes on today. So like I I don't remember when arrive the film Arrival came out, but that was definitely 21st century movie. >> So this is a movie where it's a it's essentially the exact same thing as the bipeedal humanoids. It's just put into The body plan of of a kolioid mollisk. Okay. So it's like

what you're doing is saying, oh, and it's great because you're like, oh, like octopuses and uh you know, and cuttlefish and and so forth uh show surprisingly sophisticated cognitive abilities. So maybe they could have been the intelligent species on Earth. So that that's the logic. But here's the problem. The problem is that and this is something that I call like the bundling fallacy >> because I couldn't think of a better word for it. But we tend to bund we treat evolution as these like bundles of traits. Yeah. >> In physics when you get these bundles

they look you know they might look like natural kinds or something like this. In biology, it's this hodgepodge of highly contingent, non-replicable traits mixed with perhaps some lawike stuff weaved into it. The problem is people tend to just project the whole bundle. >> So basically, you're saying you people are able to imagine primates or seeopods. >> Yeah. Exactly. Or or whatever the going kind of animal is, right? uh you know and and so there's it's this idea that um that the outcomes these earthly outcomes are just projectable out into the universe to some extent and

that somehow they all come together right so like you get when you get the body plan of a of a sephalopod in these respects You're going to also get intelligence and when you get a a bipeedal situation you're you know you're going to get the kind of intelligence we're talking about and the problem is that none of that is really parsing traits in evolutionary history in accordance with whether they're contingent or whether they're replicable. Um and so basically I mean and and so then the big question I guess you know sort of heading into these

Discussions of contingency is like well why exactly would we think that the capernac principle approach breaks down when it comes to biology? Like what's going on there? what's the what's different about the evolutionary process and and so forth, right? So, there are some like general things that are a big problem. Like, for example, the observer selection bias, right? So, if we're going to even be sitting around talking about the the possibility of Extraterrestrial life, we obviously came from a planet in which extraterrestrial uh sorry, with terrestrial intelligence evolved. So, we know it's consistent with the

laws of physics, but but we that doesn't tell us anything about how common it is, right? But then the problem is this. In physics, you have all of these contentful laws. Laws that you have to go out and discover and then allows you to make predictions. In biology, there are arguably no or very few universal laws. >> Mhm. >> And so just to give you like one example of this, right? I mean it's not even this is not a peripheral example. This is a central one. The principle of natural selection. Okay, that's the about the

closest thing to a law that we get in biology. Okay, >> very basic. Yeah, >> it's very basic. Um, you can there are different ways of sort of formulating it. So like it might be like well um you know wherever you have variation that's differentially connected to survival causally connected to survival and reproduction you will tend to get evolution by natural selection. Okay. Um or you might say, well, we could formulate it in something like, you know, if A is is better adapted than B in environment E, then A will out Reproduce B. The problem

with all of this, right, and this is why there are these um there have been decades of debates in philosophy of biology about what kind of laws these are or whether they're laws. They're very different than laws of physics that have specific contents because like if you think about the the principle of natural selection like it almost looks like an a priority truth. It really skirts being an a priority truth and people have like bent Over backwards to try to figure out no to try to say oh this is actually empirical. Some some philosophers of

biology have said you know forget about it it's not empirical it's just a mathematical model. It has application conditions, but it's again it's all very different than physical laws. Um because it does seem like something you could you could come up with from the armchair, right? You didn't have to be Darwin doing the beagle thing, right? Um And um so so yeah so I mean so that's the so the problem is that when you couch natural selection as this universal thing even if we assume it it has standard like empirical law content. It doesn't say

anything specific. There's no content in it doesn't tell you what's fitter than anything else. There's no predictions right? It does apply everywhere but it's very generic. It's like a schema and um and so what you're you know we know that there are No traits that are you know always the fitter traits. Evolution does there's no evidence evolution pushes towards certain kinds of traits as being always being the fitter ones. So sometimes being intelligent could be fitness enhancing and sometimes being stupid and just grazing on an easy food source can be fitness enhancing and it just

you know it it just totally depends on local environments. So the big problem is there are no globally optimal traits Meaning traits that are always going to be fit always going to be optimal. So as a result you just don't get any specific laws falling out of the principle of natural selection that's not going to tell you what evolves. And that seems like a really interesting fact, but that's a a fundamental reason uh or one of the fundamental reasons why uh you know why uh the history of life is not amendable to the same kinds

of projections or predictability Uh or at least we just don't have any evidence yet that it is. Although the convergence people are going to come and say well maybe there is maybe there is some evidence. So let me just let me just now just give you the the Gulian take on contingency and then I'll tell you the convergence response and sort of where things stand now and then we can just talk you know more freely. Um but so you know Steven Jay Ghoul the a paleontologist and evolutionist um you Know he came along in the

in the late 80s early 90s and he he was sort of first really robustly articulating this notion of there being contingency in the history of life and he was really pushing back against the sort of like progressivist narratives that people have you know tended to imbue to the evolutionary process. progressivist. I mean, in in in uh I sort I guess in like in common culture, it's like, you know, you see the what The the quadripedal, you know, creature, then the the knuckle walking creature, then the creature walking upright, and it looks like a single linear

trajectory of progress. We know that all of that is false. That's not the way we think about evolution. Um and uh and so Steven Jul was very much keyed into that and his contingency thesis was very much aimed at kind of demolishing the idea that there are these kind of progressive forces in Evolution. And by the way the assumptions of progress in evolution unlike in physics I think that they have uh infiltrated thinking about biology very profoundly and I probably even in 20th century thinking about SETI. Um so but anyhow like so this is what

Gold said and it's really it's really a beautiful argument and then I'll tell you sort of what I think the state of it is and then um what the responses are why the responses are not adequate and Kind of where we are now. Um so Google basically said okay um let's do a thought experiment. So in physics right thought experiments have played interesting roles uh in biology no not that I know of right it which is interesting in itself why is that right but G's thought experiments were profoundly important um in the field and thinking

about contingency uh and lawike necessity in the history of life um and hence you know in life elsewhere and so Um so gold basically said, "Okay, well, imagine if we rewind the tape of life and let it play again." Right? Now, there's all sorts of ways we can modify this for reasons that we might need to that are sort of more arcane philosophical reasons, but imagine replaying the tape of life uh from different initial conditions with small changes occurring and then how would that affect the outcome, right? Um and G basically said and there were

a couple Of gold's thought experime these kinds of evolutionary counterfactual thought experiments that were really important. One was rewinding the tape of life to the origins of the of the first uh bilaterian animals. Okay. like the the vast majority of all modern animal fila arose with you know geological rapidity around 550 or plus million years ago and Gul says you know was inspired by this fossil assemblage which is known as the Burj which is in in uh the Canadian Rockies but it's also since been become uh confirmed as a global fauna in China and elsewhere

um where there was this whole sort of coming out of these fossils in uh in the Burge of Shell was this sort of chronicle of this parade of science fictiony beasts, okay, that didn't seem to bear all that much relation uh to the kinds of animal fila that we know today. Um, and so Gould basically said like, well, if we were around the Tape to the time when the first animal filo were evolving, would we have bet that vertebrates would have become dominant in the way that they did? Would we have on would we have

known which filo were going to become the shape of life and which ones were not? And you know at the time Gould had said well like I don't think there's anyone would be betting on the vertebrates uh and uh you know or some of these many of these other groups and groups that You would have thought would have been doing extremely well didn't make it through. Um and so like G's idea is you know look in the early and this is sort of a way that we can understand this from a causal mechanistic developmental point

of view is that early when you're first laying down the the sort of genetic underpinnings of a complex developmental cascade in embryogenesis. meaning you're going to start an embryogenesis with a single cell and You're going to start you know differentiating into all of these systems and subsystems at the beginning those early nodes they're going to be highly determinative of what happens sub subsequently and once those early nodes are laid down and then you lay down all the the the downstream machinery you can't change the early nodes without disrupting the whole system. So once you get

going you kind of get locked in Place. Um and that was the the idea of why you don't get repeated origins of new fila at the at that scale of organization. And so the idea is like which I think is very profound is that like well you know if things had gone just a little bit different in the c in you know the base of the Cambrian period when all of these you know the vast majority of Pho originated then um if things had just gone a little bit differently then our Shape of life that

we know you know mollisks analid worms and like you know blah blah blah you know vertebrates and arthropods that that shape of life would be sort of confined or relegated to uh you know science fiction possibilia and some other shape would have come into existence, right? Um and so for Gould that was you know a very fundamental expression of this idea of continuency in the history of life, but you could do counterfactuals that rewind to all sorts Of different uh you know levels of fogyny and history of evolution and run the sort of same kind

of analysis. And um so like you know I think I mean the other most poignant one although it's slightly tropey at this point but it's still nevertheless the the most poignant to me is the end cretaceous extinction >> uh of all non-avian dinosaur fauna and every and you know so much else. um you know so there's yet another example Where well like you know you know here we are these intelligent mammals doing our mammal thing but like you know there was no evidence that that was ever going to happen if we hadn't vacated all of

these niches abruptly even though all of these dinosaur lineages and others were doing extremely well and succeeding just fine for the most part somewhat controversial but for the most part I think that remains through um and and so there's like yet another focal point of Contingency in uh you know um in in the history of life and that's one that's particularly relevant to our own origins right the problem is of course and this gets into the methodological I mean these are just thought experiments right this is how do we know how are we going to

we can't actually rerun tapes of life right we're dealing with an n equals 1 and the n equals 1 problem is presum presumably the biggest problem that we're dealing with when it comes to the Contingency question. Right? If we had extraterrestrial data sets, oh my, then we could start to get a sense of what's lawike and what's contingent, but we do not. >> Right. >> Right. And so you might think it's hopeless in a way like it's kind of just speculation but the you know over the last you know maybe decade or two uh some

evolutionists have been sort of pointing To this phenomena of convergent evolution where you get the independent replication of similar biological forms and functions and saying that these replications these convergences these repetitions can essentially be treated as tantamount to natural experimental replications in the history of life. So yes, we cannot actually go back in time, make some, you know, musher around with the environment and the genetics and everything and then See what happens. Um but we can you know but thankfully nature has done that for us >> by running these tapes over and over again at

smaller scales and we see repetition and that is indicative of a law like necessity that is inconsistent with the contingency thesis and kind of gives us a data set that we can work with in the absence of extraterrestrial information. And um the problem with this though is that you know this is a The way that it had been convergence had been sort of looked at is it as a like a monolithic homogeneous phenomenon. There's repetitions therefore gold is is wrong. And you know I think that's a a a mistaken way of uh of thinking about

it. And I think that it's critical that you sort of look at what the underlying causes of the repetitions are. >> And what happens is that certain kinds of repetitions start to look like well maybe these really do fly in the face of Of a Gulian contingency theory. Uh whereas other kinds of repetitions don't. So we, you know, I think we need to really be careful in in parsing that data set um before we can make any conclusions about um you know uh any grander conclusions about a cosmic biology um and that sort of thing.

So I will just say um for what it's worth very quickly this could get us off on a big tangent but >> even on the physics Side I have questions about the whole capernacypicality point of view and we we'll talk about that offline but I I do think that it's one of those things that sounds humble but it's really actually presuming an enormous amount about the universe. Agreed. If you think you're a typical observer, what you're really saying is you think typical observers are like you. And that's actually >> Yes. >> fair. [laughter] >> Yeah.

No, no, that's right. That's right. And in fact, you know, um I mean, it's interesting though because the convergence phenomenon is supposed to cut against the Gulian picture. Okay. Um that's how most people interpret it. Um uh but actually like I think that looking at the at the the uh the nature of life or the living universe through a convergenceist lens is actually critical to many of the projects that Gold was Trying to promote like anti-progressivism >> because it gets us outside of ourselves, >> you know. So I mean in a way you're right the

the the Capernac principles and so forth it's all sort of indexed to us. >> So in a way it's like you're trying to get out of anthropocentricism but you're sort of falling back into it. And I think Ghoul did the same thing uh in a sense when he was saying you know um Look if there were no if there was no asteroid from the or cloud I don't know if he knew that Orort cloud was likely back then as the originator of that um but if there was no asteroid that hit contingently there would be

no intelligent mammals there's no intelligent mammals there would be no intelligent humans and so blah blah blah um there would be no intelligence in general and and interestingly that's It's a contingency thesis, but it's also Quite anthropocentric. So once you bring convergence to the picture, you say, well actually like that, you know, the the aven and non-avian dinosaurs were probably extraordinarily cognitively adept and sophisticated. And if you just look at evolution like in in birds or in sephalopods or in arthro even in insects post KT event, you see complex cognition kind of everywhere. So you

know there's a sense in which convergentism although speaking to necessity can also Speak against anthropocentricism. So it's it's it is a weird balance how these things are playing out. I agree >> and this leads me exactly where I wanted to go next. What do we know about convergence visav questions of intelligence and minds? uh you know we from our perspective as human beings it can be easy to say we're what is being converged to we're better than anyone else cuz we're smarter than everyone else. Uh obviously being smart has its Advantages but just like you

know armor it probably has its disadvantages too. >> Yeah. No, absolutely true. I mean look I mean ultimately I think and this is sort of jumping the gun. probably a better thing to conclude with, but it's like I think ultimately extraordinary levels of cognitive flexibility and intelligence is probably a liability in the long run. I mean, none of us are going to be here to know how that bet turns out. Okay. But that would be my guess. And you Know, I there's going to be a lot Yeah, hopefully. I there's going to be plenty of

uh uh uh of much stupider animals peppering the the strategraphy of the earth long after we're gone. Um so I think it is it is quick to we are quick to tout the things that we take to be one unique to us or close to unique to us and two to be morally important >> and so there are values based assumptions sort of playing a role there but I agree with you 100% and that's why Like I think the big challenge and there has been a movement to think about like cognition and mind in very

biological ways okay but the big challenge of course is like how do we get outside of ourselves, right? Um because this is what we know. So we start with ourselves and that seems natural, right? >> Um but I think that the more we learn about the forms of cognition and mind in more especially in more distantly related lineages, Including things like slime molds, right? the more we can understand what the nature of our own cognition happens to be and where it kind of fits in the lawike structure of the universe as opposed to the contingent

aspects. So like I mean this is um and >> so I I'll come back to uh the mind question in in a second but like just to give you an example of like how that plays out. I mean, you know, uh, you know, take a question like, um, you Know, questions about like burying the dead, right? You say, okay, like the androls are burying the dead. That's that's interesting. So, why were they doing that? What's the implication? Oh, they have supernatural beliefs and that suggests stuff about symbolism or or intelligence, right? Um, and that's all

plausible, right? I mean, um, but then you see all sorts of social insects burying their dead. And you're like, "Whoa, hold on a Second. What's going on?" Obviously, they're not, you know, they're don't they don't have rituals around it. They're not, you know, they don't have representations of of the supernatural, presumably, right? >> I don't think so. >> So, what's in common between them? Well, epidemiology, etc., right? And >> and so evolution is just working with what it has on hand. It's working with the contingent approximate causes that Just happen to be around that that

it can work with in in social insects. You know, you're not going to have representations of the supernatural, but you have very predictable kind of like flexible fixed action patterns that you can work with if you're evolution humans. Tougher tougher case because like we are very flexible and you got to fool us a different way. So what happens like we we have we come up with these elaborate justifications which are Actually they are the proximate cause but they are not the evolutionary cause and there is there arguably at least this is if it works out

this way there is a common evolutionary cause and really that's what it that's what the trait is. It's not that the supernatural attribution that's kind of just a confabulatory way for evolution to get at what it needs to get at, namely the function. And so I think if we start thinking about, you know, uh human Traits that way, it's it changes quite dramatically how we think about ourselves. And what I just said would be probably offensive to a lot of people like, you know, not not in the circles that I'm arguing with, but like you

know, like, oh, you're saying, you know, that really it's just all about epidemiology and we're the same as ants and so well, but you know, I mean, this is this is the problem with humanities, though. The humanities wants to keep Humans at the center and there's times when you sort of need to do that, but there's times where that really holds back knowledge and understanding and um and I think that this is one of those times. Now, if you go back to the mind question, >> sorry, just to just to sort of be on your

side a little bit. Um, sure. As you as you indicated, there's >> multiple levels of perfectly legitimate causal explanation going on here, right? Like maybe we do it for epidemiological reasons, but also for symbolic sacred reasons. >> But the reasons exactly. So that's why like like everything and this is something that sort of falls out of modern philos, you know, contemporary philosophy of science. It's all question relative. the explanations are question relative. Yeah. Right. And so that's why you end up getting so much cross talk because you know if you're trying to Explain Neanderthal behavior,

right? >> Well, you know, then a complete picture is going to involve things like maybe, right? I mean that's even that's contested, but it's like a complete picture would involve those kinds of approximate mechanisms. Um, but if you're trying to sort of understand what the trait actually is, why it arises in evolution, what's going on, that requires a bigger, more convergentist like approach perspective. Um, and I Think it sheds light on deeply like on human, you know, the metaphysics of human institutions. like I've I've run the same kind of argument about the uh you know

the nature of social norms and what the structure of normative societies are and um you know and I think the same kinds of lessons um apply there >> but but going back to the oh should we go back to the mind thing that you were talking about earlier >> yes >> yeah I mean so I think like and and this is interesting um so I think that the I think that there's overwhelm well I don't know I don't want to it's hard to characterize things. But there's very there's strong evidence, right, that brains and active

bodies and minds evolved multiple times independently early in animal evolution. First, the arthropods. >> Mhm. >> Devastating seek and destroy predators going on in the Cambrian before vertebrates even got going. Before vertebrates probably even had heads. Okay. [laughter] Um and [snorts] uh you know that triggered all sorts of arms races and then you got several other a couple of other lineages that also developed what we would talk about as brains. I mean brains are like you know on a continuum of neural complexity Right >> um so you have like ganglia and nerve nets and so

forth and you have brains like when does ganglia become a a brain? Well, I mean, evolution doesn't care, right? [laughter] So, that's the [clears throat] question we can talk about, but we don't want to get too uh too, you know, uh bogged down in in artificial um distinctions. >> We did have Peter Godfrey Smith on the podcast, just so you know. So, >> Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, exactly. So I mean you do get the repeated evolution of brains in uh in sephalopod mollisks in in vertebrates and arthropods in reverse order. Um and I

think that there's you know this is where you get into some of the uh uh the ongoing work in comparative cognition. And this is by the way why the convergentist approaches are so important. I mean historically there was this like focus in comparative Cognition a very heavy focus on homology. So it's like well where's consciousness in humans? It's in this part of the brain. No of course it's not the the pineal gland right [laughter] that that that carta but um you know here's a portion of the brain that that that we associate let's look for

that brain and other lineages. Oh they don't have that kind of brain that portion of the brain then they don't have consciousness. It's a ridiculous way of Thinking because of course they could independently evolve a structure that has the same function, right? But I know it sounds so simplistic, but it actually was a stumbling block for a long time. And it was a stumbling block with birds and that presumably it would have been with their their ancestors uh in the dinosaurs if we therapod dinosaurs if we were able to to reconstruct their cognitive world and

and you know um and uh and so I think that comparative Cognition sort of moved away to some extent from just looking at our closest living relatives and like you know what can chims do can chim read um and you know start to look at all sorts of other animals and so like birds were early examples um but the most astounding is in my view is bees >> and it's like you know if you you show someone like you know oh here I got you know I got my uh you know my grals to make

this this object or color Discrimination and x number of trials you know the bee people will say oh like our bees did that in you know half the time right I mean it's actually quite remarkable There's there's there's I think compelling evidence for abstract concepts in bees uh like sameness difference and then actually transmitting that across sensory modalities like so same different shape then same different smell I mean it's like quite remarkable um and more than That there's a lot of evidence for like holistic kind of worldviews where you know the world view uh of

uh you know um of a bee or arthropods. It consists of like you know you know uh a unified sort of field with objects spatially distributed bound with all sorts of properties and space and time which is like that's our experience that's our wealth. We have our own quirks of our own wealth but that's essentially what we how we perceive the world. And I Think that there's a lot of evidence that that was uh recreated essentially in these other lineages. Um which suggests that there's something quite lawlike about that. You know, once you get into

phenomenology, >> science kind of reaches the end of what it can tell us right now, right? Um like, you know, I'm talking about the experiential qualities to things and so forth. Um but if you think that that experience is maybe we don't know how or Why but it just somehow falls out of that kind of a world view right where you have this unified field that you've stitched together where you have objects in space and time and you learn how to navigate them and more importantly uh classify them based on their relevance to you presumably

based on fitness >> right you know predators prey objects to avoid things to eat you know so forth um that's that has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life and That I mean that to me is a big deal. Um and this oh this is a critical thing we mentioned observer selection effects very early on right so yeah like obviously we can't just project ourselves because it's the only way we we could even be asking this question is to come from a world where this happened but it could never have happened again the

big difference with convergence which I think is beautiful about it is that we don't have to hail from a world Where consciousness intelligence complex problem solving whatever you want to talk about evolved multiple times that starts to really look like you're getting around observer selection effects and you're looking at a more lawike type of phenomenon. Um then the big problem comes uh when you get to human cultural capacities >> good >> and that's going to be that that takes You into a whole different realm. So, so far we've been like, well, you know, there's there's

all this historical contingency embedded in in in, you know, in the evolutionary process that gives rise to bodies, but there's quite a bit of convergence going on uh in the mental sphere, which is really interesting and is suggestive of some kind of a lawike uh pattern that, you know, we that we might actually be able to glean some like contentful laws of biology. ology That are universal to some extent. Um you know contrary to sort of the classic view of there being no laws in biology or there being no contentful ones. Um but then it

sort of swings back and I think when you get so like you know getting intelligent living things whether we're talking about social insects or we're talking about citations you know dolphins and whales um or we're talking about sephalopod mollisks. It is a very very distant place from getting a Species with cumulative culture >> and that is a respect in which we are unique. >> But it's worse than that. It's a lot worse than that. >> So let me say why I think it's worse than that. >> Um it's a lot worse than that because it's

not just that we're unique. We weren't even that for the vast majority of our history, right? We were not that. We didn't even have robust cumulative Culture. And we were human beings with all the same accutra, all the stuff that we would tout today, you know, language, morality, mind readading, mental time travel, like whatever. Uh, you know, imitation, all these capacities, um, that we think, you know, highly cooperative that would have gone into, uh, becoming a cumulative cultural species. All of that stuff was around for possibly hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even more, maybe

even well Over a million before our culture kind of started to become cumulative and really start to take off. And by cumulative I mean like allowing for the retention uh and incremental improvement of innovations down generations so that you don't have to reinvent the proverbial wheel every time because otherwise what you're limited to is you know as a species essentially is innovations that one individual in their own anttogyny in Their own lifetime could just happen to stumble upon but they can't really build on anything and they can't retain it. that's going to be a highly

limited species in terms of its ecological impact. It's obviously not going to be a space fairing, you know, detectable extraterrestrial type of species and and and humans were that kind of species for 99% of their time. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, >> so we had the biology, we didn't have the culture yet. >> We don't know. I think that so this is a it's kind of a par, but you're right. All the anatomy, let's put it this way, all the anatomy and everything looks like it's in place. And you do have culture like

you you you have cultural traditions, you have robust forms of cooperation that allowed humans to become essentially apex predators, which is astounding for Something like us. >> [laughter] >> Um and you had all that but you you didn't you know it becomes like a parlor game of possibilities to try to explain why did you know what they call behavioral modernity or the upper paleolithic revolution uh and then subsequently right with um about 10,000 years ago with agriculture that's when you get the real explosion uh of technologies and all of these things Were like the the

most recent eyelink of human history for 99% of our existence as ourselves as I'm sure full persons you know uh in all respects for 99% of that history we were we essentially had the ecological footprint of like other social carnivores I mean there was nothing our our numbers were tiny >> like you know I mean we were scrappy we made it but like you wouldn't be betting on us like you know the Toba super eruption whatever over 75 70,000 years Ago. You you have an effective human population down to what 2,000 and then like you

have a human population hovering at 20,000 global for like tens of thousands of years afterwards. I mean that is not an inevitability waiting to just explode, right? I mean it could have easily disappeared. We could have easily went extinct just sarcastically. And what would happen with the rest of them? I mean obviously we will we Wouldn't know and we can never know but um where we are now is such a far cry from what we were all this time that I think like it's really um it's a sobering thought and you know that there's nothing

inevitable about this outcome and that you know people will list and this is what I meant by like there's it's a parlor game we can list like we could probably come up like 30 or 40 orthogonal adaptation Major or adaptations that are all relevant to creating cumulative culture you know I mean just you can even go back and say you need some pre-existing anatomy like you need fine motor manipulation how you know so you need freed up hands but you don't get freed up hands to get fine motor manipulation so you get some other quirky

reason that you got freed up hands because bipedalism was more um uh uh efficient form of locomotion than than knuckle Walking not quadrup beetle, but knuckle walking. So, you can get to this new adaptive peak in the right environment, but then a long time, millions of years go by, right, before you're making really good use of those fine motors. And so, there's so much like that, right? Um, and so I think, you know, talk going into the the nature of of cumive culture, I don't think humans are that smart. And let me just say what

I mean by that. I don't mean to be like Iconoclastic, but I genuinely believe this to be true. I do not think humans are, however you would operationalize this. Um, I don't think humans are smarter than say dolphins. I don't I don't believe that. I do believe that we benefit from cumulative culture. And that is a tremendous tremendous difference. >> And I think that that's where the a Focal point of contingency lies. And that's the closest I can come to anything even approaching a fair me paradox resolution on genuinely biological grounds. No. >> So in

other words, there was this transition. I mean, you know, human beings did uh start passing down culture and sharing ideas and educating each other as well as doing many other things. But if I if I heard You correctly, always correct me if I'm wrong. It it wasn't like a thing a genetic mutation that allowed us to do that. There's accumulation of all sorts of different things that were kind of individually unpredictable and and just came together in the right way. >> That is the signature of contingency in macro evolution. And you see that in in

lots of cases like in the history of life like where it takes an enormous amount of time for some innovation to Suddenly pop out. And you know when you look down at like even at very basic genetic levels like trying to understand how innovations arise that's what it looks like has to happen. And so that introduces an enormous um sort of uh like uh I don't I can't think of a good word for it but an enormous sort of point in which contingency arises at every level of biological organizations. It could be at the mutation

level. It's the genetic Backgrounds interacting with other aspects of genetic backgrounds, genetic backgrounds interacting with stochastic environments, different biotic lineages interacting with each other strategically. It's kind of endless. And that's the thing is like >> you know all of these things clearly are are important like you know pedagogical structures and everything that goes into that right which is a huge suite of cognitive capacities. Although weirdly Ants can actually do some teaching too with you know using very different methods but um but yeah so like you know I so I think that that you know that's

the kind of thing that really bespeaks a kind of uh a kind of contingency >> and when I asked the question originally about you know minds and intellect and and uh the extent to which one does converge to towards those biologically or through evolution um I think people get the question, you know, the sort They understand what is going on. Is there an anal is is there as much effort put into sort of the social version of that question? You know, is there a natural convergence to different kinds of social cultural organization? >> Well, that's

a yeah, that's an awesome question. Um because normally right I mean when we're talking about convergence at least like classically we're talking about like morphological convergence or conver you know Convergence in anatomy morphology. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um you know like you know the the sort of the fish-like shape of you know sharks, Ichthyosaurs and dolphins which is is remarkable. >> Yeah. Um, but when you get into other kinds of traits like behavioral traits that maybe that hearkens back to the um to the undertaking the the burying the dead that I talked about earlier. There's

a behavioral trait, right? You have to Think about it in behavioral terms. Um, but there's an example of convergence. behavioral traits are a little harder to kind of um uh to delineate than visual quantifiable morphology, but we still are able to do that. Then you get into social traits and that's that you know poses its own set of problems. But here's where things get really interesting. So like I for example think and have argued um that You know so humans are sort of quintessentially normative creatures living under social rules that sort of regulate behavior in

our communities and our groups and it's critical to human cooperation. >> Yeah. Um and you know punishment of norm violations is critical to stabilizing cooperation in human groups for example. Now when people ask like well what other do other animals have social norms like You know like if you build complex cognitive features that humans use to follow social norms into our definition or delineation or specification of social norms. No one else is going to have them, right? I mean, >> and so it's kind of like a it's a a feta comple and you're just sort

of going through the motions, but of course no one no other animals are going to have what you have because you're just Picking out the things that are unique to us that you our unique realizers of a social normative structure. If you give up on that and you say forget about it, social norormative structures are social structures that are multiply cognit cognitively realizable. Meaning many different cognitive forms could give rise to the same functional structure. Then you it sort of opens the door to start thinking about well where else Might we see the same kind

of functional structure. And as you do that, you start to kind of um uh you revise your understanding of what that structure even looks like >> because you're starting so this was sort of going back to your early question about how do you get away from some of the anthropological thinking about some of this stuff which I don't think anyone has great answers to. Um but like you start with something that looks like Something that works in your theories in your research programs and then you start looking for it elsewhere and you start realizing it

takes on very different forms. So then you go ahead and you revise the way you thought about the original structure and and that's what I think um happens when you you know uh think about these functional structures as being multiply realizable. So like I mean to give you an example of like how silly it would be Just to build human specific mechanisms into our understanding of these social configurations like uh you know imagine like you're like okay look and this goes back to the evolution of brains uh in say sephalopod mollisks okay they evolved independently

and they connected in a very important way with the evolution of vision by the way and I should have mentioned that earlier so arthropods vertebrates and sephalopods all have you know visual ecologies Uh connected to brain processing and active bodies. Okay. And imagine you're like okay let's define an eye or visual ecology in terms of human specific mechanisms about like what goes into what human eye looks like precisely and like what goes into the neural processing and like how it works >> and then you say oh look sephalopod mollisk they don't have eyes. Yeah, >>

like they can't actually see. They're not visual foragers. Like that's Obviously laughable, right? I mean, from a biological standpoint, but that is kind of what goes on when you take defining human traits and and specify them in a way that makes them essentially non-replicable. Um, and so like I think for example, like going back to the the the the issue of like social norms. So I think of social norms essentially as you know rules of conduct that regulate behavior in social groups in order to stabilize Ultra cooperation. And I think that that can you can

get that through many different cognitive avenues. And one of them I mean the humans are the obvious example but the best case I think for social norms outside of human beings is actually not in the animals you might expect like it's not it's not I mean to in my view it's not in you know citations like dolphins and whales it's it's not even in chimpanzees our closest living Relatives and you know it's actually in social insects where you get a robust instit institutionalization of rules of conduct that are enforced by subordinates against everyone in the

colony. And even chimps don't manage really to do that very well. Chimps are still structured in highly hierarchical ways. um where uh you know you can get turnover of dominant individuals through alliance making and so on but you don't Get rule of all by all and I think in social insects there's a strong argument to be made that that's precisely what you get um and that's because you can see that it's critical that when you're talking about like how social norms are enforced you need to in order For there to be social norms, you need

to see them enforced by subordinates. This is not just dominant individuals coercing other individuals to behave. That's pervasive in >> in animals. But that's not what what a normative society is. A normative society is precisely what the word means, which is a society that's law governed and governed by rules, not share power, not self-interest. And I think that that's precisely what you get in all sorts of rules in social insect societies. Most of them surround reproduction. In humans, we have lots of different rules, lots of different norms because we're Far more open-ended uh in our

ability to learn uh you know, different normative contents and so forth. But I think ultimately they're playing the same functional role, which is to stabilize highly cooperative social structures where you're essentially cooperating in every avenue of life. right? Like, you know, foraging and food sharing and warfare and collective defense and pedagogy and industry um and all of those things. And so I, You know, I think that when you start to think about traits in a deeply biological way where you don't tie them to, you know, very specific, uniquely human, very anthropocentric, uh, you know, cognitive

causes. um then you could start to really appreciate the depths of convergence on social structures and that helps you really get well beyond I think the prism the prison of of anthropocentricism and it might cause Us to go back and say well what is our what is human morality oh actually that's just what it is >> it just happens to be working with what humans got because you know we're not we can't just be operated on by natural selection through simple mutations that are going to cause a behavior like we need to remain flexible in

many ways. Um so what do we do? Well, you know, we have all sorts of complex learning environments and you know so like you Know social insects you don't need to you know you could you could have a mutation that gets them to to operate a single way in a certain way that's particularly altruistic. In humans it's harder to do that. So in some sense ants have in common with humans but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement. >> Yes. And I I mean it is absolutely they do have police forces and they

you know they do have what I would call an Institutionalized form of norm enforcement. um whereas it's it's far I'm not saying that it's like it's absolutely ruled out in chimpanzeee societies but there's not a lot of strong evidence for subordinate uh enforcement of rules and which would explain why chimpanzeee societies are not that cooperative I mean if you read a book on if you read a book on human cooperation you'll or or you know you'll often it'll often start with something Like apart from the social insects. Humans are the most cooperative animal on Earth.

And and then, you know, I'm like, well, wait a minute. Let's go back to that. What's going on there? Why is why what's going on with the social insects? Like, but it's as if like they're not relevant because they're so evolutionarily distant from us. Their lifeways are so alien in many ways. Their life cycles. They're, you know, it's very hard to wrap our mind around Them. They operate on time scales that we can barely process. Um and so like we're you know it's easier it's much easier for us to think about chimpanzeee you know societies

than it would be about but you know despite it's it's actually it's not despite these radical differences in their lifeways and their life cycles and their development and their um their cognition. It's not despite that, but it's actually because of that that we can start to glean Really big lessons about the evol, you know, about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture. >> I maybe I'm running the danger of being anthropocentric myself here, but I guess I think what what many people would say in response to this is >> sure

social insects and human beings have high degrees of cooperation and social organization, but isn't it different? Because aren't the ants kind Of just hardwired with instincts and and aren't we like agents making choices? Isn't that different somehow? >> No, you're right. I mean, like the objection is something like um you know, look, if you're going to I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the the contemporary FSB version in uh in Ukraine, but I'm thinking of like the NKVD barrier troops, right? you know, forcing Soviet uh infantry to sort of

keep moving Forward and they'll shoot them if they try to turn right. Um like, you know, social insects don't need an insect equivalent of the NKVD for the most part because, right, they can just be, you know, in defense of of the motherland, right? You know, they can uh evolve these relatively stable mutations that then generate certain kinds of behavior. But the reality is that and first of all I want to say that I don't really care how in how these functions emerge in Development. Genetics and environment and culture are just all resources that bend,

shape, bias certain outcomes in anttogyny. Mhm. >> There's nothing special about I mean, well, there's debates about this, but I'm not sure that there's anything special about genes in that regard. They're just yet another important resource that could be used to shape an ontogenetic outcome, which could then affect evolution. And humans are subject to that exact same thing. Um so you know it it's highly likely that human morality has genetic components probably quite substantial ones through a process of gene culture co-evolution humans evolved these highly cooperative societies right so it's not like we're immune to

the idea that there are genetic influences but I think at the end of the day you know how that how that biasing occurs Doesn't matter matter as much as the fact that it has occurred and the function is produced. >> Yeah. >> Um and ultimately like I said, yeah, humans might have more flexibility, but I can I would bet everything that the the social insects which are probably I mean they're sort of equivalent in even just the ants are probably equivalent to humans in their in the fraction of energy that they commoner in the Biosphere

today, right? and you know or biomass and everything and that includes their their domesticates by the way. I mean we have a lot of domesticates but so do they and um you know both fungy and animals and so I I am I I really don't have much doubt um for good or for worse just as a statement of of of fact I think that uh humans are going to be long gone and you're going to have social insects peppering the fossil record for another 100red million years Plus. And I you know I'm not saying that

that makes them better in any way. In fact, there's nothing like morally robustly morally normative in any of this. Like it's not like people sometimes ask me like, "Oh, well, if if these are normative societies, what can we learn from them about how we ought to structure our society?" I say, "Nothing. Nothing." I mean, well, you know what? We we could have learned faster how to inoculate because they do that. Yeah. >> You know, things like that. Quarantine. You know, they had a they had a functional germ theory of disease before we before we did.

I know. It's funny, but it's actually kind of true. And so, like, you know, so, and going back to your question about about levels of explanation, which I think is important because it's kind of a way of um uh um of not dissolving, but like kind of like disarming potential conflicts um between [music] thinkers when we're talking About this. I mean, if you're asking right this question, why did humans become so cooperative? Why did they become apex predators? Why did they start to spread around the globe, right? Why did they invent agriculture? Why did you

know all these things? Um, when you eventually and you ask that when you ask that question compared to chimps, >> then you're going to get a particular answer, right? And that's going to Involve lots of human specific adaptations that played a role. >> But that's what you that's what I would call like a divergentist explanation. like why did humans diverge from these other close cases? Here's an answer and it is powerful but it's it's it's an explanatory powerful answer but it's very narrow in scope because it only applies to that one oneoff kind of human

case which for all we know could be highly contingent. There's no sort of Lawike lesson from it. But if you go broader, right, and you think about convergentist explanations, instead of saying why did this lineage differ from this other lineage, what you're asking is why did these two lineages arrive at similar >> end points. Now, you know, you might come up with some underlying common causes that look like they have a more sort of deeper or more lawike structure to them, which is Like like you're saying like and they're just they're different questions. And I'm

not saying that one is more important, you know, than another. Um, but if you want to think about more broadly about evolutionary patterns and process as opposed to like human specific quirky evolution, then it is important to go broader. >> Well, you mentioned a couple times the word normativity, and I mean, you are a philosopher after all, so we you got to Go there and and dig in a little bit. I mean, I'm presuming I I I always get in trouble when I make these assumptions, but you're not making some um ought from is kind

of statement, but you're trying to uh by the way, normativity is a word philosophers used for when we talk about what you're supposed to do or should do, not just what things do do, right? So, morality comes under that. But obviously, our morality evolves. Um and and one can then ask like is the Morality that evolution has left us with what it should be? And then what does even that mean? So I yeah though that's that's a great and a very important question which sort of it it does it does touch upon that what I

just said a second ago which is that like when people ask well what do we learn from social insects about how morality ought to be it's like nothing >> I mean do you see how they treat each other but you know then again like what Are we going to learn from you know aggressive colonialists I mean you know it's not that different but um uh but I think But it's a really important question and you know I have a a book that I uh co-wrote with the political philosopher Alan Buchanan um from 2018 called the

evolution of moral progress. And basically like that book is essentially an argument that it sort of poses this sort of question. Um given you know if we take the standard Evolutionary picture about why and how human morality evolved it looks like there are certain types of there's certain space of moral possibility that looks like it's extremely difficult to achieve or um not sustainable >> because of the highly kind of parochial tribalistic uh uh moralities that we are the legacy of. Um and there's a whole story behind that. But the idea is like in order to

Get the kind of altruism within the groups, you need these intergroup conflicts. And so you have group sort of a group level selection process that selects for groups that are moral. But the only reason that there that they're uh that that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other groups. So you have essentially what amounts to like inroup favoritism and outgroup antagonism which is extremely universal in humans, right? Um and and so like That's the evolutionary picture. But then you say look at you know look at especially post enlightenment look at like these tremendous examples

of progress that we would normally identify as progress like the rule look right now everything's up for grabs right >> I mean things >> yeah that well the things that we wouldn't have even thought about as in question like the rule of law human Rights etc um but like the things that we normally take to be progress like the increasing inclusion usion of, you know, women and minorities and people with disabilities and, you know, LGBTQ and like, you know, the ethical treatment of animals and going back before that, the rule of law and the abolition

of slavery. It kind of goes on and on and you can come up with a really long list of these things. And how are we able to do all of that given the kind of Evolutionary legacy of morality that we have? And some people would want to say, well, we ultimately won't be able to sustain those ways of being, which you might say, oh, this what's happening at this moment in the world is kind of evidence of, but I I personally think you got to see the bigger arc and the bigger trajectory. I think it's

a little too fine grained um to make that conclusion. But I think like the the sort of upshot is that humans have a Capacity for normativity. This is going back to your question about normativity for understanding for thinking about what's right and what ought to be. Um that's not that's kind of open-ended. Um and in you know under certain kinds of circumstances humans are able to step back critique the kind of norms that they're following and you know make consistency judgments and other things that um allow them to interrogate and improve our moral Systems. And

so like you know I think there is a legitimate [sighs and gasps] I mean I'm trying to avoid very thorny territory in the sort of the humian contian debates about the nature of morality and so forth. Um >> we're all we're all humans here at the Mindscape podcast just so you know. Yeah. No, I Yeah, I would figure I would figure um but you know but but you know actually to that point it which is Really interesting because I you know when I teach uh moral philosophy like when you get to Kant it's bizarre. It

does like the grounding is weird. none of it like makes a lot of sense. Whereas Hume is just like very I mean for us sciency people it's really on point right whereas Khan is bizarre but then like you sort of get to the the bottom of Kant where sort of you know at at a at the basics where he's saying like you know what you know there are Certain things that are right and wrong irrespective of what our desires or preferences are. Hume ultimately rejects that. But in a more kind of in a more philosophical

way, I mean, what Kant to me is saying is just so important is that like there there are rights and wrongs that transcend our own self-interest. Uh and that it's just not sufficient to say, you know, um I don't desire that, so it doesn't have any grip on me. um Once you're in the realm of reason giving right um you know you're within the realm of morality and you could be um swayed and so like I think that critical though for humans to be able to do that is that you create certain kinds of social

conditions that don't replicate the um the the kinds of cues and triggers in the early ancestral environment that are that we respond to without group Antagonism. And that's a big process that create it means we have to create surpluses that we have to educate that there's so much going on and it's very easy to turn back the tide and regress rapidly when there's per there's actual or perceptions of scarcity intergroup competition predation of one group by another. And it doesn't matter whether they're real because culturally we can, you know, people can use that Pimically to

make people believe that and bam trigger these highly exclusivist, highly sort of outgroup xenophobic um uh attitudes. So you're saying there's sort of a vulnerability in our moral structures that you know when when everything is going well uh we can be we can be good people but there's a a set of situations that we're not really equipped to keep it up. >> I I I think that's right and I think that but I mean this is the scary part. Okay. The scary part is that even and this is the part that kind of would keep

me up at night. Um, even if uh we knew all of the causal levers that go into human moral psychology development >> and evolution. Like even if we sort of knew what that big picture story looked like or at least the key the key aspects of it, we might still be feckless to do anything about it because of the just The way emer these emergent pattern, you know, like so we we might know the playbook of a demagogue, but that doesn't mean we're going to be able to successfully battle it. And that's the that's the

scary thing, right? And I mean now of course you're dealing with social media problems and other things which create >> new problems. So it's kind of an arms race between parasitic demagoguery that could stand to benefit in some Narrow way from moral regression and I hate to say something tropey but it's like you know the the light of reason and you know [laughter] um etc etc. And you know like we're [snorts] reason is powerful and empathy is powerful but it's limited and it could be steered in the wrong directions very quickly. And you're right that

to say I think that these gains are fragile because because we are susceptible um to this and that's what I mean you Know that is what we're seeing. We're we're looking right now down the barrel of the fragility of our institutions. >> Yeah. big time and it is easy to take them for granted and you know maybe we'll get to a point in human history where they're where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with but right now it is quite precarious like we honestly don't I would not have said

this like 15 years ago but like you know I really don't Know where we're going to be 30 years from now I really don't >> well that's too bad because that was the last question I was going to ask [laughter] >> I mean you've been wonderful at saying um uh look we might not last uh we might not be the robust version of a social species here on earth. Um and also it is hard to predict. Biology does not give us laws that are that determinate but also you know one gets some feelings Some wisdom

out of looking at all these different examples of the space of possibilities where we could go. Um are we going to become the Borg? Are we going to evolve into something else? We're going to upload ourselves into computers. Are we just going to crash and burn? uh you know be give us your honest take here. What what do you think should be the kind of prospects that we should keep in mind for the future of humanity? >> Well, okay. So, there's like short term and very long term. >> Yeah. [snorts] >> And this is where

you get into like sort of debates about long-termism as an ethic, right? Mhm. >> I mean, you know, anyone who's, you know, when I was little, I remember being worried, and I'm sure this is true for a lot of people when they're young and they're hearing reading, you know, reading uh learning about the the solar System and star life cycles. And I started to get real worried about the the sun bloating, right? And whether it's going to swallow the Earth or, you know, or what um you know, in the uh in a red giant phase.

And like that's all freaking me out. And so people you know anyone worrying about like you know where are humans going to be at that time or will they have made it into space and colon I mean this is just the scales that we're talking about are so Vast that from a macroevolutionary standpoint it's like I you know on the other hand I think that there is like there are some interesting things to think about um even in shorter term questions about human survival. Um, and then I'll say something about the ethical side too because

I think that ultimately like what's driving this question, what makes it so poignant or compelling is like that it means something to us >> and then trying to figure out what it means and you know why extinction would be bad or good for some people I guess. Um, you know, is is another matter. But like here's one thing. I mean, so an interesting question I think is like when you're if you're so I don't want to get into the zeitgeists because I but maybe we have no choice and that's what happens, right? So like now

I'm going to talk about AI because like that's what's going on right now And probably 50 years from now it's going to be something different and I don't know we la we'll be laughing about talking about it maybe. I don't know. Um, [clears throat] but like you know I guess like one thing that I want to uh I I do take the robots seriously. >> Mhm. >> And I don't think most biologists would. >> They'll they'll think, oh, you know, robots are clunky. You know, they're Brittle. They're not flexible. Like, you know, you could tell

the whole story. At the end of the day, I don't know. I'm worried about functional convergence, you know what I mean? I'm worried about distributed intelligence. Yeah. And um I'm worried. And so I guess like an interesting question to me is like, you know, to think about is um and this might be something that we can learn from looking at other uh other animals. So I had mentioned that um social Insects one of the things that they were uh you know that they've done repeatedly many times is um uh domesticate fungi and animals and other

insects. And so there's an interesting and they're the only other ones that have done that as far as I know. Okay. besides humans and and an interesting question is like when does it look like so there's a conceptual question is like when can we say which can we make a principal Distinction between a domesticator and a domesticate >> it's a process of co-evolution that's going to be a whole a whole interesting argument in itself right >> but then the question is like say we can do that >> now is there a way that we can

think about artificial intelligence and other types of computational technologies. Should we think about them as our domesticate or is there going to be a Point where we're not even going to realize it and we're going to become we're going to become the domesticate? And I think that that's actually important um because this might be something that we want for ethical reasons to battle. Um, but I think at the end of the day, I personally, and this is this is like kind of the macroevolutionist in me, like one of the reasons I love macroevolution and got

into it as Someone like, you know, I came from a background in law and um and ethics and stuff like that. But I really loved Macrovolution because it's kind of amoral, meaning like it doesn't it doesn't say anything. it doesn't care. It just is. But that's beautiful and it helps us transcend ourselves and transcend our problems and like um and I think there's something wonderful about that. And I think from a macroevolutionary perspective, you know, If there's any inference you're going to make from induction, it's that are, you know, all of every species time is

limited. And I don't think that there's um I'm not sure that there's an ethical imperative for existence at any cost or in any form. And and so like I mean I guess this is kind of like more this gets into a more sort of emotional Buddhist type of thing going on in me >> which is like I I'm okay with disappearing and you know like I think like there's you know look if you were in the end Cretaceous watching the asteroid come and hit which is to me is like one of the sad is like

probably the saddest events in life in Earth's history. >> Mhm. Um, and it's just so deeply sad. Not just because of like just sheer pain, suffering, destruction, but like there's an entire vibrant and Modern world, which we don't normally think of that way, but I would I recommend all the listeners out there to watch David Adamro's prehistoric planet to see what we think these ecosystems and these animals look like now. and oh is it vibrant and colorful and >> and and smart and and social and like all of this and you know if you saw

that that asteroid coming you say this is this is the apocalypse but then of course like well what what came out of That? Is it something better than what was before? Um is it better simply because there's maybe there's a highly self-conscious species. Is that alone going to give us the a greater value of the entire biosphere? I mean all of this is going to rest on these insanely controversial questions right about how to parse value in nature about how we put together the value of say rational persons against sentient Non-persons and then add it

all up and figure out some kind of right is it and and there is no agreement on this like once you get to aggregates and ethics no one knows what they're no one knows what to do so like you know human extinction might overall for for sentient life be a huge boon but maybe not you know the you know the reality is and this is something people don't realize and this is like you know this is what I always like always kind of made me a little bit Reluctant to go sort of like vegan vegetarian

in the sense that like I mean the it's as if like they and this is kind of like the colonialist narrative it's like there's bad guys and the bad guys do something bad and the rest of it is and all they're doing is mocking up some kind of um like a natural beautiful harmonious state [laughter] and um but of course that wasn't true in colonialism. I mean colonialism was a problem for other moral reasons but like Point being there wasn't some kind of harmony that was being disrupted [laughter] right and is of course the same

thing um in the natural living world it is a horrific horrific place >> right claw >> yeah and like but it's like I mean just you know like doing little things can give you insights into this like I ra I've you know I've always been into aquariums and when I finally moved out of my My parents house I could have all the animals I want. Right? So like, you know, now if we have like a bazillion aquariums and I've been breeding all sorts of fish for like many, many generations, years and years and and all

I can tell you is like, you know, it's like, okay, you're going to you're going to have fish that breed. Oh my god, wait a minute. You just had you just had 500 babies. What am I going to do with this? And you're like, well, actually only I Mean, if you want a stable fish population, you're only going to get two living, right? Mhm. >> And so and you immediately realize all these horror shows unfold, right? Like what happens to these little little creatures is horrific and even you do everything in your power to try

to, you know, as many can survive and and you can't. So like, you know, this reminds me of Groundhog Day. You remember that movie? Of course. >> But here's I'm gonna give you my take on Groundhog Day that I've haven't heard anyone else do. Okay? And this goes back to the nature of ethics and it's relevant to this question because I think, you know, I'm at I'm at a at a a senior enough state in my career where I feel like I could just say things like this. >> I think virtue ethics ethics is stupid,

>> but I think it's right. And I [clears throat] guess the reason Why is because So, okay, let's go to Groundhog Day for a second. the the um uh the uh the Bill Murray movie, right, where he just keeps reiterating that same day over and over again. I think this it's a really really interesting movie from an ethics perspective because so the way it starts is he starts out being an egoist. So now he knows he's going to he knows everything that's going to happen. So he's going to manipulate the world to his end, right?

>> So he tries to sleep with the girl, blah blah blah blah blah blah. And like it doesn't work out well for him anyway in all of those cases. And he keeps getting reborn, recycled, right? This starts again. He at some point moves from this kind of egoist mentality to what essentially is a utilitarian mentality like maximize util maximize utility meaning maximize pleasure over pain which is a deeply selfless thing but it's also futile. And so like he's running around trying to save the kid from, you know, he knows where the kid's going to fall

out of the tree. He knows like, you know, he's like, "You never thanked me." And then like, you know, and then like, but you know, that he still there's still people that die he can't save, >> right? >> And it's like he's still there's still so much horror that he can't fix. And then at the very last phase of the Movie, he becomes he basically moves into virtue ethics territory where he stops trying to maximize good. >> Mhm. >> He doesn't care about self act, you know, he doesn't want to manipulate anyone. He just develops

his own talents and flourishes in the world that he has. And I think there's something important and beautiful about that because at the end of the day we don't know how to aggregate and maximize our lives in that Way and whether that would even be a good thing is not clear and so I think there is something deep about just trying to understand the and empathize with the world around us while at the same time giving yourself space to experience the world and flourish. Um, and that kind of looks very virtue ethicsy, even though I

hate to say it. >> I think I'm extremely sympathetic to this. Uh, I my thing about virtue ethics Is maybe it's right, but maybe it's not ethics. Like it's it's not quite comparable to >> uh it's like aesthetics, more like aesthetics. >> It's a approach to life, right? >> That's right. >> Something like that. I don't know. >> I think that's right. I think that's right. Rachel, this has been quite a ride that you've taken us on and we appreciate it very much. Thanks very Much for being on the Mindscape podcast. >> Before I go,

I'm gonna I just want to tell the audience that the voice they've been listening to is the voice of a stunningly beautiful woman. They wouldn't know that, >> but it's true. Wink wink. Self-deprecating. >> Very self-deprecating. [laughter] But, you know, that's that's the evidence they have. They have no choice but to go with it. [laughter] >> All right. Thank you, Sean. This was great. All right. Byebye. >> [music] >> Yeah. Yeah.