← Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind
01:37:15
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- [00:01]
A
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 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. Generally, just the numerology works out. 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, 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, 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 interdisciplinary 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, et cetera. 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. Rachel Powell, welcome to Mindscape podcast.
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B
Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.
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We're going to be talking, of course, about one big question in evolution. Contingency versus. I don't know what to call it. I think you like to call it convergence, or people might call it predictability or whatever.
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B
Or necessity.
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Necessity, inevitability. 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, I have an evil twin, biologist, Sean Carroll, who studies evolution, and he wrote a whole book about contingency in evolution. So that's still out there.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So I think this is unresolved. 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 it right now at this point is to basically 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. And so I guess one way that I would come at this, when you're asking, what's the state of play? I think historically there was an enormous amount of crosstalk between physicists in general. I mean, like astronomers and seti, SETI researchers and everyone, and evolutionary biologists. And that's what I kind of want. And when I say crosstalk, I mean sometimes there was non communication.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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B
And so this is something that I think it's a helpful way of thinking about, you know, how to think about contingency and evolution and how that has affected the way physicists have thought about extraterrestrial life versus biologists and all the various research programs surrounding them. And it helps illuminate some of the key differences between physics and biology, I think. And so I think this is like a nice way of doing that. And partly as a tour through the Fermi Paradox and how biologists have viewed it very differently, largely because of the contingency phenomena. So maybe that's a place I can start.
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A
Yeah, that'd be great.
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B
Yeah. Okay. So basically, I think, and this is something that you were saying, we can't edit out insults of colleagues. I won't name any colleagues specifically, but I would say that I'm going to say something which I think would irk a lot of philosophers, at least the classic kind of old school philosophers, and that is that I think that the most profound worldview shattering insights in modern human history haven't come from philosophy, they haven't come from religion or anything. They've come from science. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, I assume, but a lot of people would probably take issue with that. But I'm firmly convinced that I'm always asking people at conferences everywhere, please someone 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. 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, kind of like an intuition shattering wrecking ball that science has, where basically it's taking 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 microphysical structure of objects, the mechanistic origins of adaptation, the nature of organisms and their ontology and stuff like this. So there's a lot of talk about like biases in science, but really the deep kind, you know, in methodology, in data collection and so on. But you know, I don't want that to distract us from the main plot, which is that science really is about exploding our most cherished assumptions about the causal structure of the world. And the second kind of arc that these insights have taken, in my view, is sort of this decentering project which is sort of, this is the kind of thing that Freud described as a dethroning, sort of as inflicting like a narcissistic wound on our collective ego by shattering the way humans essentially understand their place in the universe. And so the idea is like you have this great decentering project of science that goes from like, you know, the work of the likes of Copernicus or Hubble or Darwin, which is moving humanity from a privileged position, whether we're talking about the center of the solar system or galaxy or the pinnacle of the history of life, and moving it, translocating us to some kind of unremarkable periphery in this larger system that is not tailored in any way to human existence, okay? And that gives rise to all sorts of principles that, you know, are various ways of formulating that idea. Some of them are sort of heuristic, like the Copernican principle. 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 a special place in the living cause or physical cosmos right, to human beings. And I think that this is where 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. And, you know, I think, and, you know, maybe you'd be better off saying, whether you agreed or not, because it's not my specialty, but I think that the Copernican stuff holds up quite well in physics. 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. 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 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, For a bunch of reasons. And continuity is going to be one of the big ones. But I think what's happened, especially in the 20th century, where evolutionary biology 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 SETI and extraterrestrial life. And it was always sort of a foo foo 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, you know, like Ernest Meyer Dobzhansky Gigi Simpson, they were all very negative about Bassetti project. Interesting. Yeah. And so, you know, it's interesting because meanwhile you have, in the mid 20th century, right, you know, this, the Fermi paradox is coming out, right, where it's like, well, look, you know, if we're going to go by something like a Copernican 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 in the history of our visible cosmos. Right. There's no stellar engineering, there's no ships, there's no bots, all this stuff. 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 Copernican like orientation. And but of course, the, the evolutionists, like the, the, the Gigi Simpsons and the Ernest Myers and all these, you know, influential theorists. And I'll talk about Stephen Jay Gould in a minute because he's going to be like the first big articulation of this concept of contingency. But they weren't very moved by the paradox. Like they would say there's not much paradox to talk about. Why? Right. Why is that? I mean, you have all the large numbers on your side, you've got all of the, the planetary science on your side. Why? And it's because they just saw and they hadn't like fully really articulated very well yet. But because I'm talking in like 1960s, you know, there were some papers that came out by, by some of them being quite negative about the SETI project. And I'm sure SETI researchers took it a little bit personally and, you know, it was not helpful to funding their projects and so forth. But I think what they saw was that when you have this big picture history of life on Earth, as some of these evolutionists did, what they saw was a historical sequence of events that involved 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 science fiction of the 20th century, you know, where you have, you know, the Star Trek's humanoids and Star wars, you know, Everything is humanoids. It's like, you know, I'm, and actually this is sort of still goes on today. So like, I don't remember when the film Arrival came out, but that was definitely 21st century movie. So this is a movie where it's essentially the exact same thing as the bipedal humanoids. It's just put into the body plan of a coleoid mollusk. Okay. So it's like what you're doing is saying, oh, and it's great because you're like, oh, like octopuses and, you know, and cuttlefish. And so for 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 bundle. We treat evolution as these like bundles of traits.
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Yeah.
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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 law, like stuff weaved into it. The problem is people tend to just project the whole bundle.
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So, so basically you're saying you people are able to imagine primates or cephalopods.
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Yeah, exactly. Or, or whatever the going kind of animal is. Right. You know, and, and so there's this idea 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 cephalopod in these respects, you're going to also get intelligence. And when you get a bipedal situation, you're going to, 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. 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 Copernican 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 so for. 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 possibility of extraterrestrial life. We obviously came from a planet in which extraterrestrial. Sorry, with terrestrial intelligence evolved. So we know it's consistent with the laws of physics, but 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 it allows you to make predictions. In biology, there are arguably no or very few universal laws. And so just to give you, like, one example of this, right? I mean, it's not even. It's not a peripheral example. This is a central one. The principle of natural selection, okay? That's about the closest thing to a law that we get in biology. It's very basic. There are different ways of sort of formulating it. So, like, it might be like, well, 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. Or you might say, well, we could formulate it in something like, if A is better adapted than B in environment E, then A will out reproduce B. The problem with all of this, and this is why 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 if you think about the principle of natural selection, it almost looks like an a priori truth. It really skirts being an a priori truth. And people have, like, bent over backwards to try to figure out, not 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 again, it's all very different than physical laws 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, Right. And 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, and 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, 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 that 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 fundamental reason or one of the fundamental reasons why, you know, why the history of life is not amenable to the same kinds of projections or predictability, 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 now just give you the Gouldian 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 more freely. But so you know, Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionist, 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, I sort of, I guess in like, in common cultures, like, you know, you see the, what the quadrupedal, you know, creature, then 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. And so Stephen Jay Gould 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 and evolution, unlike in physics, I think that they have infiltrated thinking about biology very profoundly. And I probably even in 20th century thinking about SETI. But anyhow, so this is what Gould said. It's really a beautiful argument and I'll tell you sort of what I think the state of it is and then what the responses are, why the responses are not adequate and kind of where we are now. So Gould basically said, okay, let's do a thought experiment. So in physics, right, thought experiments have played interesting roles in biology. No, not that I know of, which is interesting in itself. Why is that? Right, but Gould's thought experiments were profoundly important in the field and thinking about contingency and law, like necessity, in the history of life and hence in life elsewhere. So Gould 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 from different initial conditions with small changes occurring and then how would that affect the outcome, right? And Gould basically said, and there were a couple of Gould's thought experiments, 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 bilaterian animals, okay. Like the vast majority of all modern animal phyla arose with, you know, geological rapidity around 550 plus million years ago. And Gould says, you know, was inspired by this fossil assemblage which is known as the Burgess Shale, which is in the Canadian Rockies. But it's also since been become confirmed as a global fauna in China and elsewhere where there was this whole sort of coming out of these fossils in the Burgess Shell was this sort of chronicle of this parade of science fictiony beasts, okay, that didn't seem to bear all that much relation to the kinds of animal phyla that we know today. And so Gould basically said like, well, if we were wound the tape to the time when the first animal phyla 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 phyla 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 and 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. And so like Gould'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 sort of genetic underpinnings of a complex developmental cascade in embryogenesis, meaning you're going to start in embryogenesis with a single cell and you're going to start differentiating into all of these systems and subsystems. At the beginning, those early nodes, they're going to be highly determinative of what happens subsequently. And once those early nodes are laid down, and then you lay down all 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. And that was the idea of why you don't get repeated origins of new phyla at that scale of organization. And so the idea is, which I think is very profound found is that like, well, you know, if things had gone just a little bit different in the cat, in the, you know, the base of the Cambrian period, when all of these, you know, the vast majority of phyla originated, then if things had just gone a little bit differently, then our shape of life that we know, you know, mollusks, annelid 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, you know, science fiction, possibilia and some other shape would have come into existence. Right? And so for Gould, that was, you know, a very fundamental expression of this idea of contingency in the history of life. But you could do counterfactuals that rewind to all sorts of different, you know, levels of phylogeny and history of evolution and run the sort of same kind of analysis. And. And 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 most poignant to me is the end Cretaceous extinction of all non avian dinosaur fauna and everything, you know, so much else, 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 true. And so there's like yet another focal point of contingency 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 actually rerun tapes of life. Right. We're dealing with an n equals 1, and the n equals 1 problem is 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 law like 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, 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, mature around with the environment and the genetics and everything and then see what happens. But we can, you know, but thankfully, nature has done that for us by running these tapes over and over again at smaller scales.
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And.
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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 the problem with this, though, is that, you know, this is 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, ruled as is wrong. And, you know, I think that's a mistaken way 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 a Gouldian contingency theory, whereas other kinds of repetitions don't. So we, I think we need to really be careful in parsing that data set before we can make any conclusions about any grander conclusions about a cosmic biology and that sort of thing.
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So I will just say, for what it's worth, very quickly, this could get us off on a big tangent. But even on the physics, astrophysics side, I have questions about the whole Copernican typicality reality point of view, and we'll talk about that offline. But 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.
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Agreed.
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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.
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Yeah, no, no, that's right, that's right. And in fact, you know, I mean, it's interesting though, because the convergence phenomenon is supposed to cut against the Gouldian picture. Okay, that's how most people interpret it. But actually, like, I think that looking at the, at the nature of life or the living universe through a convergence lens is actually critical to many of the projects that Gould was trying to promote, like anti progressive because it gets us outside of ourselves, you know. So I mean, in a way you're right. The, the, the Copernican 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 Gould did the same thing in a sense when he's saying, you know, look, if there were no, if there was no asteroid from the Oort cloud, I don't know if he knew that Oort cloud was likely back then as the originator of that. 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, there would be no intelligence in general. And interestingly, that's like, 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, the avian and non avian dinosaurs were probably extraordinarily cognitively adept and sophisticated. And if you just look at evolution like in, in birds or encephalopods 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 anthropocentrism. So it is a weird balance how these things are playing out. I agree.
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A
And this leads me exactly where I wanted to go next. What do we know about convergence vis a vis questions of intelligence and minds? 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 because we're smarter than everyone else. Obviously being smart has its advantages, but just like, you know, armor, it probably has its disadvantages too.
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Yeah, no, absolutely true. I mean, look, I mean, ultimately, I think, and this is sort of jumping the gun is 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, there's going to be a lot. Yeah, hopefully there's going to be plenty of much stupider animals peppering the stratigraphy of the earth long after we're gone. So I think 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 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. Because this is what we know. So we start with ourselves. And that seems natural. Right. But I think that the more we learn about the forms of cognition and minds 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 law, like, structure of the universe as opposed to the contingent aspects. So like, I mean, this is, and so I, I'll come back to the, the mind question in a second. But like, just to give you an example of like how that plays out, I mean, you know, you know, take a question like, you know, questions about like burying the dead, right? You say, okay, like the angels were 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 intelligence. Right. And that's all plausible, right? I mean, 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 not, they don't have rituals around it. They're not, you know, they don't have representations of the supernatural presumably, right?
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I don't think so.
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So what's the 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 proximate. Causes that just happen to be around, 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, 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, mean, 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 I think that this is one of those times. Now if you go back to the mind question, sorry, just to sort of.
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Be on your side a little bit, as you indicated, there's multiple levels of, of perfectly legitimate causal explanation going on here. Right. Like maybe we do it for epidemiological reasons, but also for symbolic, sacred reasons.
- [39:46]
B
But the reasons, exactly. So that's why like, like everything. And this is something that sort of falls out of modern, you know, contemporary philosophy of science. It's all question relative. The explanations are question relative. 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 proximate mechanisms. 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. 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, you know, the nature of social norms and what the structure of normative societies are. And you know, and I think the same kinds of lessons apply there. But, but going back to the. Oh, should we go back to the mind thing that you ask?
- [40:59]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:00]
B
I mean, so I think like, and this is interesting, 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 in the arthropods, devastating seek and destroy predators. Going on in the Cambrian before vertebrates even got going, before vertebrates probably even had heads.
- [41:39]
A
Okay.
- [41:41]
B
And 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, like, you know, on a continuum of neural complexity, right? So you have like ganglia nerve nets and so forth and your brains, like when does ganglia become a brain? Well, I mean, evolution doesn't care, right? So that's the question we can talk about. But we don't want to get too, too, you know, bogged down in artificial distinctions.
- [42:16]
A
We did have like Peter Godfrey Smith on the podcast, just so you know, so.
- [42:20]
B
Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you do get the repeated evolution of brains in encephalopod mollusks, in invertebrates and arthropods in reverse order. And I think that there's, you know, this is where you get into some of the ongoing work in comparative cognition. And this is, by the way, why the convergence to 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 pineal gland, right. That Descartes. But you know, here's a portion of the brain 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.
- [43:12]
A
Brain.
- [43:13]
B
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 in the dinosaurs, if theropod dinosaurs, if we were able to reconstruct their cognitive world. And, and you know, 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 chimps do? Can chimps mind and, you know, start to look at all sorts of other animals? And so like, birds were early examples, 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, you know, my grackles to make this, this object or color discrimination and X number of trials, you know, the bee people will say, oh, like Arby's did that in, you know, half time, right. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable. There's, there's, there's, I think, compelling evidence for abstract concepts in bees, 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. And more than that, there's a lot of evidence for like, holistic kind of worldviews where, you know, the worldview of, you know, of a bee or arthropods is, consists of like, you know, you know, a unified sort of field with objects spatially distributed, bound with all sorts of properties in space and time, which is like, that's our experience, that's our own 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 recreated essentially in these other lineages, which suggests that there's something quite law like about that. You know, once you get into phenomenology, science kind of reaches the end of what it can tell us right now, right? Like, you know, I'm talking about the experiential qualities to things and so forth. 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, 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. That's, that has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life. And that, I mean, that to me is a big deal. 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 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 law like type of phenomenon. Then the big problem comes when you get to human cultural capacities.
- [47:14]
A
Good.
- [47:15]
B
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, you know, in the evolutionary process that gives rise to bodies. But there's quite a bit of convergence going on in the mental sphere, which is really interesting and is suggestive of some kind of a law like pattern that, you know, we, that we might actually be able to glean some like, contentful laws of biology that are universal to some extent, you know, contrary to sort of the classic view of there being no laws in biology or there being no contentful ones. 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 cetaceans, you know, dolphins and whales, or we're talking about cephalopod mollusks, 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. 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 accoutrement. All the stuff that we would tout today, you know, language, morality, mind reading, mental time travel, like whatever, you know, imitation all these capacities that we think, you know, highly cooperative, that would have gone into 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 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 ontogeny, 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, is obviously not going to be a space faring, you know, detectable extraterrestrial type of species. And humans were that kind of species for 99% of their time. Yeah.
- [50:21]
A
And so we had the biology, we didn't have the culture yet.
- [50:27]
B
We don't know. I think that. So this is a, it's kind of a parlor. 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 have cultural traditions, you have robust forms of cooperation that allowed humans to become essentially apex predators, which is, is astounding for something like us. And you had all that, but 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? And then subsequently, right with about 10,000 years ago with agriculture, that's when you get the real explosion of technologies. And, and all of these things were like the most recent eye blink of human history. For 99% of our existence as ourselves, as I'm sure full persons in all respects. For 99% of that history, we essentially had the ecological footprint of other social carnivores. I mean, there was nothing. Our numbers were tiny. 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, 75, 70,000 years ago, you have an effective human population down to what, 2000? 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. I mean obviously we will, we wouldn't know and we can never know. But where we are now is such a far cry from what we were all this time that I think like it's really, 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 with 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 efficient form of locomotion than the knuckle walking. Not quadrupedal, 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. And so I think, you know, talk going into the nature of cumulative 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. 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 focal point of contingency lies. And that's the closest I can come to anything even approaching a Fermi paradox resolution on genuinely biological grounds.
- [54:25]
A
So in other words, there was this transition. I mean human beings did start passing down culture and sharing ideas and educating each other as well as doing many other things. But if I heard you correctly, always correct me if I'm wrong. It wasn't like a thing, a genetic mutation that allowed us to do that. This accumulation of all sorts of different things that were kind of individually unpredictable and just came together in the right way.
- [54:52]
B
That is the signature of contingency in macroevolution. And you see that in, in lots of cases like in the history of Life, like, where it takes 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 sort of, like, 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 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, 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, 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, a kind of contingency.
- [56:19]
A
And when I asked the question originally about minds and intellect and the extent to which one does converge towards those biologically or through evolution, I think people get that question. They understand what is going on. Is there as much effort put into the social version of that question? Is there a natural convergence to different kinds of social, cultural organization?
- [56:48]
B
Well, that's a. Yeah, that's an awesome question because normally. Right. I mean, when we're talking about convergence, at least like classically we're talking about like morphological convergence or convert, you know, convergence and anatomy. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, like, you know, the sort of, the fish, like shape of, of, you know, sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins, which is. Is remarkable. But when you get into other kinds of traits, like behavioral traits, maybe that harkens back to the, 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. But there's an example of convergence. Behavioral traits are a little harder to kind of 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 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, 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 fait accompli and you're just sort of going through the motions. But of course, no one and 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 are unique realizers of a social normative structure. If you give up on that and you say forget about it. Social normative structures are social structures that are multiply cognitively realizable, meaning many different cognitive forms could give rise to the same functional structure. Then you 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, 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 the stuff which I don't think anyone has great answers to. 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 happens when you, you know, think about these functional structures as being multiply reliable. 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, you know, imagine like, you're like, okay, look, and this goes back to the evolution of brains in say cephalopod mollusks, 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 our arthropods, vertebrates, encephalopods, all have, you know, visual ecologies 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, cephalopod mollusks, 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. And so like I think for example, like going back to 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, of human beings is actually not in the animals you might expect. Like it's not, it's not, I mean in my view it's not in, you know, cetaceans 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 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 where 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. 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, 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 sheer 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 in our ability to learn, 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 and all of those things. And so I think that when you start to think about traits in a deeply biological way where you don't tie them to very specific, uniquely human, very anthropocentric cognitive causes, 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 prison, the prison of anthropocentrism. 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. 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 operate a single way in a certain way that's particularly altruistic in humans. It's harder to do that.
- [65:32]
A
So in some sense, ants have in common with humans, but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement.
- [65:40]
B
Yes. And I, I mean, that is absolutely. They do have police forces and they, you know, they do have what I would call an institutionalized form of norm enforcement, whereas it's, it's far. I'm not saying that it's like, it's absolutely ruled out in chimpanzee societies, but there's not a lot of strong evidence for subordinate enforcement of rules. And which would explain why chimpanzee 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 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 evol. Distant from us. Their life ways are so alien in many ways. Their life cycles, their, you know, it's very hard to wrap our mind around them. They operate on timescales that we can barely process. And so like we're, you know, it's easy, it's much easier for us to think about chimpanzees, you know, societies than, and it would be about. But you know, despite it's, it's actually, it's not despite these radical differences in their life ways and their life cycles and their development and their, 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 evolution, you know, about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture.
- [67:23]
A
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, 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 aren't we like agents making choices? Isn't that different somehow?
- [67:47]
B
No, you're right. I mean, like the objection is something like, you know, look, if you're gonna. I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the, the contemporary effort, FSB version in, in Ukraine. But I'm thinking of like the NKVD barrier troops, right? You know, forcing Soviet infantry to sort of keep moving forward and they'll shoot them if they try to turn. Right. 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 we 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 ontogeny, 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. So, you know, it's highly likely that, 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 as much as the fact that it has occurred and the function is predicting produce.
- [69:49]
A
Yeah.
- [69:50]
B
And ultimately, like I said, yeah, humans might have more flexibility, but I can, I would bet everything that these, 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 commandeer in the biosphere today. Right. And, 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 you know, both fungi and animals. And so I have, I really don't have much doubt for good or for worse. Just as a statement of fact, I think that humans are going to be long gone and you're going to have social insects peppering the fossil record for another hundred million years plus. And I, you know, I'm not 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, they had a functional germ theory of disease 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, of not dissolving but like, kind of like disarming potential conflicts between 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? When you eventually, when you ask that question compared to chimps, then you're going to get a particular answer like, 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 explanatorily powerful answer, but it's very narrow in scope because it only applies to that one, one off kind of human case, which for all we know could be highly contingent. There's no sort of law like 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 endpoints? Now, you know, you might come up with some underlying common causes that look like they have a more sort of deeper or more law like structure to them, which is like, like you're saying, like, I mean, they're just, they're different questions. And I'm not saying that one is more important, you know, than another. 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.
- [73:21]
A
Well, you mentioned a couple times the word normative. And I mean, you are a philosopher, after all. So we got to go there and dig in a little bit. I mean, I'm presuming I always get in trouble when I make these presumptions. But you're not making some ought from is kind of statement. But you're trying to. 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. 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?
- [74:00]
B
So I. Yeah, no, that's, that's a great and a very important question. Which sort of. 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, again, like, what are we going to learn from, you know, aggressive colonialists? I mean, you know, it's not that different but, but I think, but it's a really important question. And you know, I have a book that I co wrote with the political philosopher Alan Buchanan 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 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, or not sustainable because of the highly kind of parochial, tribalistic moralities that we are the legacy of. 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 groups, sort of a group level selection process that selects for groups that are moral, but the only reason that they're, that they're, that that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other group. So you have essentially what amounts to like in group favoritism and out group antagonism, which is extremely universal in humans. Right. 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, look, right now everything's up for grabs, right? I mean, yeah, well, the things that we wouldn't have even thought about as in question, like the rule of law, human rights, et cetera. But like the things that we normally take to be progress, like the increasing inclusion 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, rule of law, abolition of slavery 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 to make that conclusion. But I think like 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. That's not, that's kind of open ended. 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 allow them to interrogate and improve our moral systems. And so like, you know, I think there is a legitimate, I mean, I'm trying to avoid, avoid very thorny territory in the sort of the Humean Kantian debates about the nature of morality and so forth.
- [78:13]
A
We're all humans here at the Mindscape podcast. Just so, you know.
- [78:15]
B
Yeah, no, I, yeah, I would figure, I would figure. But, but you know, but, but you know, actually to that point it was really interesting because I, you know, when I teach moral philosophy, like, like when you get to Kant, it's bizarre. It does, like if the grounding is weird, none of it like makes a lot of sense. Whereas Hume is just like very, I mean for us sciencey people it's really on point. Right. Whereas Kant is bizarre. But then like you sort of get to the, the bottom of Kant where sort of, you know, 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 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 are, there are rights and wrongs that transcend our own self interest and that it's just not sufficient to say, you know, I don't desire that. So it doesn't have any grip on me. Once you're in the realm of reason given thing, right, you know, you're within the realm of morality and you could be 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, 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 action sexual or perceptions of scarcity, intergroup competition, predation of one group by another and doesn't matter whether they're real because culturally we could, you know, people can use that polemically to make people believe that and bam. Trigger these highly exclusivist, highly sort of out group xenophobic attitudes.
- [80:41]
A
So you're saying this sort of a vulnerability in our moral structures that you know, when, when everything is going well, we can be, we can be good people, but there's a set of situations that we're not really equipped to keep it up.
- [80:57]
B
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. Even if 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 just the way these emergency 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? 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, trophy, but it's like, you know, the light of reason and, you know, etc. Etc. And, you know, like, we're. 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're susceptible to this. And that's what I mean, you know, that is what we're seeing. 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.
- [83:08]
A
Well, that's too bad, because that was the last question I was going to ask. I mean, you've been wonderful at saying, look, we might not last. We might not be the robot robust version of a social species here on Earth. And also, it is hard to predict. Biology does not give us laws that are that determinant. 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, 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. You know, give us your honest take here. What do you think should be the kind of prospects that we should keep in mind for the future of humanity?
- [83:57]
B
Well, okay, so there's like short term and very long term.
- [84:02]
A
Yeah.
- [84:03]
B
And this is where you get into like sort of debates about long termism as an ethic. Right. 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 here reading, you know, reading, learning about the, the solar system and star life cycles. And I'm starting to get real worried about the, the sun bloating. Right. And whether it's going to swallow the earth or you know, or what, you know, in the, in a red giant phase. And like, that's all freaking me out. And this whole, so people, you know, anyone worrying about like, you know, where are humans going to be at that time? Will they have made it into space and colony? 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 even in shorter term term questions about human survival. 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, you know, is another matter. But like, here's one thing, thing. I mean, so an interesting question I think is like when you're, if you're, I don't want to get into the zeitgeist 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, we'll be laughing about talking about it maybe, I don't know. But like, you know, I guess like one thing that I want to, I, I do take the robots seriously. And I don't think most biologists would, 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.
- [86:29]
A
Yeah.
- [86:30]
B
And I'm worried. And so I guess like an interesting question to me is like, you know, to think about is, and this might be something that we can learn from looking at other, other animals. So I might mention that social insects, one of the things that they were, you know, that they've done repeatedly many times is 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 an interesting question is like, when does it look like. So there's a conceptual question, is like, 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 because this might be something that we want for ethical reasons to battle. But I think at the end of the day, I personally, and this is, look, this is like kind of the macro evolutionist in me. 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 ethics and stuff like that, but I really loved macroevolution 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, and I think there's something wonderful about that. And I think from a macro evolutionary perspective, you know, if there's any inference you're going to make from induction, it's that our, you know, all of every species, time is limited. And I don't think that there's, 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. And it's just so deeply sad. Not just because of like just sheer pain, suffering, destruction, but like there's an entire vibration 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 Attenborough'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? Is it better simply because there's maybe there's highly self conscious species? Is that alone going to give us the 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 feel 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 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 mucking up some kind of like a natural, beautiful harmonious state. And 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, right? And is of course this same thing in the natural living world. It is a horrific, horrific place.
- [92:16]
A
Red Claw.
- [92:18]
B
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 we have like a bazillion aquariums. And I've been breeding, breeding all sorts of fish, like many, many generations, years and years. And, and all I could tell you is like, you know, it's like, okay, you're gonna, you're gonna have fish that breed. Oh my God, wait a minute. You just had, you just had 500 babies. What am I gonna 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. Yeah, right. And so. And you immediately realize all these horror shows on the fold, 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?
- [93:18]
A
Of course.
- [93:19]
B
But here's. I'm going to give you my take on Groundhog Day that I 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 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 guess the reason why is because. So, okay, let's go to Groundhog Day for a second. The Bill Murray movie, right? Where he just keeps reiterating that same day over and over again. I think this is 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 gonna, he knows everything that's gonna happen, so he's gonna manipulate the world to his end, right? So he tries to sleep with the girl, 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 and 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 thank me. And then like, you know, and then like. But you know that he's still. There's still people that die. He can't say. 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. He doesn't care about cell 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 and empathize with the world around us. While at the same time giving yourself space to experience the world and flourish. And that kind of looks very virtue ethicsy. Even though I hate to say it.
- [96:01]
A
I think I'm extremely sympathetic to this. My thing about virtue ethics is maybe it's ripened, but maybe it's not ethics. Like it's not quite comparable to.
- [96:11]
B
It's like aesthetics. More like aesthetics.
- [96:14]
A
It's an approach to life. Right?
- [96:17]
B
That's right.
- [96:18]
A
Something like that. I don't know.
- [96:19]
B
I think that's right. I think that's right.
- [96:21]
A
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.
- [96:28]
B
Before I go, I just want to tell the audience that the voice they've been listening to to. Is the voice of a stunningly beautiful woman. They wouldn't know that. They don't know, but it's true. Wink, wink. Self deprecating.
- [96:39]
A
Very self deprecating. You know, that's. That's the evidence they have. They have no choice but to go with it.
- [96:46]
B
All right, thank you, Sean. This was great. All right. Bye. Bye.
- [96:58]
A
Sa.