Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over time, but also repeated convergence to forms and mechanisms that are unmistakably useful. We see this clearly in eyes and fins, but the basic pattern also holds for brains and forms of social organization. I talk with philosopher Rachell Powell about what these ideas mean for humans, other terrestrial species, and also for forms of life we have not yet encountered.
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Rachell Powell received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University. She is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Society at North Carolina State University.
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0:00:00.7 Sean Carroll: 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.
0:01:31.5 SC: 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. And these are exactly the issues we're going to be talking about today on the episode with Rachell Powell, who is a philosopher, who thinks about these things in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary way, bringing them all together. How is there coevolution 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?
0:02:54.3 SC: 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 Rachell 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, etcetera. 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.
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0:04:05.9 SC: Rachell Powell, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:08.1 Rachell Powell: Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.
0:04:10.6 SC: 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, you know, predictability or whatever.
0:04:22.8 RP: Or necessity.
0:04:23.8 SC: Necessity, yeah. 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.
0:04:47.7 RP: 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 at 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 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 researchers and everyone. And evolutionary biologists. And that's what I kind of want. And when I say cross talk, I mean sometimes there was non-communication.
0:05:37.2 SC: Oh, yeah.
0:05:40.1 RP: And so this this is something that I think it's a helpful way of thinking about... How to think about contingency and evolution, 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. And it it helps illuminate some of the key differences between physics and biology, I think. And I 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 phenomenon. So maybe that's a place I can start.
0:06:28.6 SC: That'd be great.
0:06:29.7 RP: Yeah. So, okay, so basically, I think, and this is something that you were saying we could 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 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 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.
0:07:58.3 RP: So like, 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 in methodology, in data collection and so on, but 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 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 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.
0:09:28.1 RP: Okay. And that gave rise to all sorts of principles that are 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... 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 or physical cosmos, right, to human beings. 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. And I think... And I mean, 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 have the universality of physical laws, the same laws that govern terrestrial affairs also govern the celestial phenomena, like Newton showed. Everything that we can tell seems to suggest like we're living in a garden-variety solar system with inner rocky planets, outer gas giants, a garden-variety main-sequence star in a sort of unremarkable location in the galaxy, which is just one among many in the observable universe.
0:10:35.1 RP: 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 contingency is going to be one of the big ones. But I think what's happened, especially in the 20th century where 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 SETI and extraterrestrial life. And it was always sort of a foo-foo question in biology, whereas in the physical sciences start 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 naysayers at these conversations. So like the most prominent evolutionist of the 20th century, like that were involved in the major evolutionary synthesis, it's called. Like Ernest Meyer, Dobzhansky, G.G. Simpson, they were all very negative about the SETI project.
0:12:20.3 SC: Interesting.
0:12:21.7 RP: Yeah. And so it's interesting because meanwhile, you have in the mid 20th century, the the Fermi paradox is coming out, right? Where it's like, well, look, if we're going to go by something like a Copernican principle, then 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, 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. But of course, the evolutionists, like the G.G. Simpsons and the Ernest Myers and all these 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 planetary science on your side.
0:13:45.2 RP: Why? And it's because they just saw and they hadn't like fully really articulated it very well yet. But because I'm talking in like 1960s, there were some papers that came out by some of them being uh, quite negative about the SETI project. And I'm sure SETI researchers took it a little bit personally and 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 in other physical sciences. And so if you take like the science fiction of the 20th century, and actually it it continues, there's not much different. But if you take the science fiction of the 20th century, where you have the Star Trek's humanoids and Star Wars, everything is humanoids. It's like... 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.
0:15:20.2 RP: 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 was great because you're like, oh, like octopuses and cuttlefish and and so forth 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... We treat evolution as these like bundles of traits.
0:16:20.1 SC: Yeah.
0:16:21.1 RP: In physics, when you get these bundles, they look... 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. So it's like...
0:16:27.1 SC: So, basically you're saying people are able to imagine primates or cephalopods.
0:16:30.5 RP: Yeah, exactly. Or whatever the going kind of animal is, right? And so it'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 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 so then the big question, I guess, 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? What's going on there? What's different about the evolutionary process 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 possibility of extraterrestrial life, we obviously came from a planet in which extraterrestrial... Sorry, 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.
0:18:31.1 SC: That's pretty basic. Yeah.
0:18:34.2 RP: Okay. It's very basic. You can... There are different ways of sort of formulating it. So like it might be like, well, 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 is better adapted than B in environment A, then A will out reproduce B. The problem with all of this, right? 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.
0:19:18.0 RP: Because like if you think about the principle of natural selection, like 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, no, it's to try to say, oh, this is actually empirical. Some philosophers of biology have said, 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 come up with from the armchair, right? You didn't have to be Darwin doing the Beagle thing, right? And 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 has standard like empirical law content, it doesn't say anything specific. There's no content in it. 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 so what you're... We know that there are no traits that are always the fitter traits.
0:20:32.2 RP: 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 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 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.
0:21:50.0 RP: But so, Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionist, he came along in the late '80s, early '90s, and 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 tended to imbue to the evolutionary process. Progressivist. I mean, in... I guess in like in common cultures, like you see the what the quadrupedal 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 probably even in 20th century thinking about SETI.
0:22:18.4 RP: So, but anyhow... So this is what Gould 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 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, thought experiments have played interesting roles. In biology, no, not that I know of, right? 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. And so, Gould basically said, okay, well, imagine if we rewind the tape of life and let it play again. 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 experiment... 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. Like the the vast majority of all modern animal phyla arose with geological rapidity around 550 or plus million years ago. And Gould says, 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 Shale 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.
0:25:32.6 RP: And so Gould basically said, like, well, if we rewound 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 known which phyla were going to become the shape of life and which ones were not? And at the time Gould had said, well, like, I don't think there's anyone would be betting on the vertebrates, 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 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 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 the the downstream machinery, you can't change the early nodes without disrupting the whole system.
0:26:59.2 RP: 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 like, which I think is very profound, is that like, well, if things had gone just a little bit different in the base of the Cambrian period, when all of these... The vast majority of phyla originated, then if things had just gone a little bit differently, then our shape of life that we know mollusks, annelid worms, and like, blah, blah, blah, vertebrates and arthropods, that that shape of life would be sort of confined or relegated to science fiction possibilia, and some other shape would have come into existence. And so for Gould, that was 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 levels of phylogeny and history of evolution and run the sort of same kind of analysis.
0:27:51.0 RP: And so like, 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 every and so much else. So there's another yet another example where, well, like, here we are, these intelligent mammals doing our mammal thing, but like, 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 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?
0:29:12.3 RP: 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 one. And the N equals one 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. And so you might think it's hopeless in a way, like it's kind of just speculation. But over the last 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 muture around with the environment and the genetics and everything and then see what happens.
0:30:27.9 RP: But we can... 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 the problem with this, though, is that 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, Gould is is wrong. And 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 of a Gouldian contingency theory, whereas other kinds of repetitions don't. So 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.
0:31:04.3 SC: 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 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.
0:32:15.7 RP: Agreed.
0:32:18.4 SC: 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 fair.
0:32:25.0 RP: Yeah, no, no, that's right, that's right. And in fact, I mean, it's interesting though, because the convergence phenomena 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 the nature of life or the living universe through a convergentist lens is actually critical to many of the projects that Gould was trying to promote, like anti-progressivism. Because it gets us outside of ourselves. So, I mean, in a way, you're right. 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 anthropocentrism, but you're sort of falling back into it. And I think Gould did the same thing in a sense when he was saying, look, 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.
0:33:49.9 RP: 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, 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 in cephalopods or in even in insects, post KT event, you see complex cognition kind of everywhere. So, there's a sense in which convergentism, although speaking to necessities, can also speak against anthropocentrism. So, it is a weird balance how these things are playing out. I agree.
0:34:33.6 SC: 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...
0:34:52.1 RP: Anyone else.
0:34:52.2 SC: Than anyone else because we're smarter than everyone else. Obviously, being smart has its advantages, but just like, armor, it probably has its disadvantages too.
0:35:01.9 RP: Yeah, no, absolutely true. I mean, look... I mean, ultimately, I think, and this is sort of jumping the gun, it's 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.
0:35:27.2 SC: Hopefully.
0:35:30.5 RP: But that would be my guess. And I there's going to be a lot, yeah, hopefully. I there's going to be plenty of much stupider animals peppering the 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 like... I think the big challenge, and there has been a movement to think about like cognition and minds in very biological ways, okay? But the big challenge, of course, is like, how do we get outside of ourselves, right?
0:36:13.1 RP: 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'll come back to the mind question in a second, but like, just to give you an example of like how that plays out, I mean, take a question like... Questions about like burying the dead, right? You say, okay, like Neanderthals were burying the dead. 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? 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... They're don't they don't have rituals around it. They don't have representations of the supernatural, presumably, right?
0:37:36.0 SC: I don't think so.
0:37:37.5 RP: So what's the common between them? Well, epidemiology, etcetera, right? 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 social insects, 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 case because like we are very flexible and you got to fool us a different way. So what happens? Like we come up with these elaborate justifications which are actually, they are the proximate cause, but they are not the evolutionary cause. And there are 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 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, not in the circles that I'm arguing with, but like, oh, you're saying, that really it's just all about epidemiology and we're the same as ants and stuff. Well, but I 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...
0:39:26.7 SC: Sorry, just to sort of be on your side a little bit, as you indicated, there's multiple levels of perfectly legitimate causal explanation going on here, right?
0:39:32.3 RP: Absolutely.
0:39:35.4 SC: Maybe we do it for epidemiological reasons, but also for symbolic, sacred reasons.
0:39:46.5 RP: But the reasons... Exactly. So that's why like, like everything, and this is something that sort of falls out of modern, contemporary philosophy of science, it's all question relative. The explanations are question relative. And so that's why you end up getting so much cross talk because if you're trying to explain Neanderthal behavior. Well, 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... The metaphysics of human institutions. Like I've run the same kind of argument about the nature of social norms and what the structure of normative societies are. 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 were talking about earlier?
0:41:00.2 SC: [0:41:02.6] ____.
0:41:06.1 RP: Yeah, I mean, so I think like... And this is interesting. So 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 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. And 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, 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. So that's the question we can talk about, but we don't want to get too bogged down in in artificial distinctions. But like...
0:42:16.6 SC: We did have Peter Godfrey Smith on the podcast, just so you know, so.
0:42:20.3 RP: Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you do get the repeated evolution of brains in cephalopod mollusks, in vertebrates and arthropods in reverse order. And I think that there's... This is where you get into some of the ongoing work in comparative cognition. And this is, by the way, why it 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 pineal gland, right? The Descartes. But here's a portion of the brain that we associate. Let's look for that brain in other lineages. Oh, they don't have that kind of brain, that portion of the brain. Then 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 presumably it would have been with their ancestors in the dinosaurs, theropod dinosaurs, if we were able to to reconstruct their cognitive world and so I think that comparative cognition sort of moved away to some extent from just looking at our closest living relatives and what can chimps do? Can chimps mind? And 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 if you show someone like, oh, here I got, my grackles to make this this object or color discrimination and X number of trials.
0:44:18.8 RP: The bee people will say, oh, like our bees did that in half the time, right? I mean, it's actually quite remarkable. 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 the worldview of a bee or arthropods is consists of like, 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 umwelt. We have our own quirks of our umwelt, but that's essentially 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. Once you get into phenomenology, science kind of reaches the end of what it can tell us right now, right? I'm talking about the experiential qualities to things and so forth.
0:45:48.4 RP: 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 of a worldview, 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? Predators, prey, objects to avoid, things to eat so forth. That has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life. And I mean, that to me is a big deal. And 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.
0:47:16.0 SC: Good.
0:47:16.8 RP: And that's going to be... That takes you into a whole different realm. So far we've been like, well, there's all this historical contingency embedded 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 we might actually be able to glean some like, contentful laws of biology that are universal to some extent, 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, getting intelligent living things, whether we're talking about social insects or we're talking about cetaceans, 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.
0:48:44.9 RP: 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. 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, language, morality, mind reading, mental time travel, like whatever, imitation, all these capacities that we think, 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, as a species, essentially, is innovations that, 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 spacefaring, detectable extraterrestrial type of species. And humans were that kind of species for 99% of their time.
0:50:21.8 SC: Yeah.
0:50:22.4 RP: And so that's why...
0:50:24.8 SC: So we had the biology, we didn't have the culture yet.
0:50:28.2 RP: 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 have cultural traditions, you have robust forms of cooperation that allowed humans to become essentially apex predators, which is astounding for something like us. And you had all that, but you didn't it becomes like a parlor game of possibilities to try to explain why did what they call behavioral modernity or the Upper Paleolithic revolution? And then subsequently, with about 10,000 years ago with agriculture, that's when you get the real explosion of technologies. 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 were... We essentially had the ecological footprint of other social carnivores. I mean there was nothing... Our numbers were tiny, I mean, we were scrappy, we made it. But you wouldn't be betting on us. Like 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.
0:52:09.8 RP: I mean, that is not an inevitability waiting to just explode. I mean, it could have easily disappeared, it could have easily went extinct, just sarcastically. And what would happen with the rest of them? I mean, obviously, 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 it's really... It's a sobering thought and that there's nothing inevitable about this outcome and that 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 adaptations that are all relevant to creating cumulative culture. I mean, just... You can even go back and say you need some preexisting anatomy, like you need fine motor manipulation 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 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.
0:53:37.3 RP: And so I think 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.
0:54:27.2 SC: 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?
0:54:54.1 RP: That is the signature of contingency in macroevolution. And you see that in in lots of cases, like in the history of life, where it takes enormous amount of time for some innovation to suddenly pop out. And 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... 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 organization. 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 all of these things clearly are important, like pedagogical structures and everything that goes into that. Which is a huge suite of cognitive capacities. Although, weirdly, ants can actually do some teaching too, with using very different methods. But yeah, so I think that's the kind of thing that really bespeaks a kind of contingency.
0:56:20.5 SC: And when I asked the question originally about minds and intellect and the extent to which one does converge towards those biologically or or through evolution, I think people get that question. They understand what is going on. Is there as much effort put into sort of the social version of that question? Is there a natural convergence to different kinds of social cultural organization?
0:56:50.1 RP: Well, that's a... Yeah, that's an awesome question. Because normally, I mean, when we're talking about convergence, at least like classically, we're talking about like morphological convergence or convergence in anatomy, morphology.
0:57:17.2 SC: [0:57:17.3] ____.
0:57:17.4 RP: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like the sort of the fish-like shape of sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins, which is remarkable.
0:57:19.2 SC: It is. Yeah.
0:57:20.3 RP: But when you get into other kinds of traits, like behavioral traits, maybe that hearkens back to the undertaking, the burying the dead that I talked about earlier. There's a behavioral trait. You have to think about it in behavioral terms. But that'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 poses its own set of problems. But here's where things get really interesting. So I, for example, think and have argued that... 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. And punishment of norm violations is critical to stabilizing cooperation in human groups, for example. Now, when people ask like, well, do other animals have social norms? 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.
0:58:48.4 RP: 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 other animals are going to have what you have because you're just picking out the things that are unique to us, our 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 this stuff, which I don't think anyone has great answers to. But 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 that's what I think happens when you think about these functional structures as being multiply realizable.
1:00:20.2 RP: So 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. Imagine you're like, okay, look... And this goes back to the evolution of brains in say, cephalopod mollusks. 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 cephalopods all have visual ecologies connected to brain processing and active bodies. And imagine you're like, okay, let's define an eye or visual ecology in terms of human-specific mechanisms about what goes into what human eye looks like precisely and what goes into the neural processing and how it works. And then you say, oh look, cephalopod mollusks, they don't have eyes. They can't actually see. They're not visual foragers. That's obviously laughable, I mean, from a biological standpoint. But that is kind of what goes on when you take defining human traits and specify them in a way that makes them essentially non-replicable.
1:01:33.5 RP: And so, I think, for example, going back to the issue of like social norms. So I think of social norms essentially as rules of conduct that regulate behavior in social groups in order to stabilize ultra-cooperation. And I think that 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. It's not... I mean, in my view, it's not in cetaceans, like dolphins and whales. It's not even in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. And 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.
1:02:59.8 RP: 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 animals. But that's not 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 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. Like 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 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 we're not... We can't just be operated on by natural selection through simple mutations that are going to cause a behavior. We need to remain flexible in many ways. So what do we do? Well, we have all sorts of complex learning environments and... So like social insects, you don't need to... 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.
1:05:33.8 SC: So in some sense, ants have in common with humans, but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement?
1:05:42.2 RP: Yes. And I mean, that is absolutely. They do have police forces and they do have what I would call an institutionalized form of norm enforcement. Whereas it's far... I'm not saying that 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 human cooperation, it'll often start with something like, apart from the social insects, humans are the most cooperative animal on Earth. And then I'm like, well, wait a minute, let's go back to that. What's going on there? Why? What's going on with the social insects? But it's as if, like they're not relevant because they're so evolutionarily distant from us. Their life ways are so alien in many ways. Their life cycles, it's very hard to wrap our mind around them. They operate on timescales that we can barely process. And so it's easy... It's much easier for us to think about chimpanzee societies than it would be about. But despite... It's actually, it's not despite these radical differences in their life ways and their life cycles and their development and their cognition. It's not despite that, but it's actually because of that that we can start to glean really big lessons about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture.
1:07:25.5 SC: Maybe I'm running the danger of being anthropocentric myself here, but I guess I think 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 aren't we agents making choices? Isn't that different somehow?
1:07:48.9 RP: No, you're right. I mean, the objection is something like look, if you're gonna... I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the contemporary FSB version in Ukraine. But I'm thinking of like the NKVD barrier troops. Forcing Soviet infantry to sort of keep moving forward and they'll shoot them if they try to turn. Social insects don't need an insect equivalent of the NKVD for the most part because they can just be in defense of the motherland. 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 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.
1:09:14.6 RP: And humans are subject to that exact same thing. So 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. 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 how that biasing occurs doesn't matter as much as the fact that it has occurred and the function is produced. And ultimately, like I said, yeah, humans might have more flexibility. But 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 or biomass and everything. And that includes their domesticates, by the way. I mean, we have a lot of domesticates, but so do they. And both fungi and animals. And so 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 100 million years plus. And 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. People sometimes ask me like, oh, well, 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 could have learned faster how to inoculate because they do that.
1:11:11.4 SC: Yeah.
1:11:11.8 RP: Things like that, quarantine. They had a functional germ theory of disease before we did. I know it's funny, but it's actually kind of true. And going back to your question about, about levels of explanation, which I think is important because it's kind of a way 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 this question, why did humans become so cooperative? Why did they become apex predators? Why did they start to spread around the globe. Why did they invent agriculture? Why did all these things? When you eventually... When you ask that question compared to chimps, then you're going to get a particular answer. And that's going to involve lots of human specific adaptations that played a role. But that's what I would call like a divergentist explanation. Why did humans diverge from these other close cases? Here's an answer and it is powerful, but it's an explanatorily powerful answer. But it's very narrow in scope because it only applies to that 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 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 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 you're saying, they're different questions. And I'm not saying that one is more important 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.
1:13:23.0 SC: Well, you mentioned a couple times the word normativity. And I mean, you are a philosopher after all, so you 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. 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?
1:14:02.0 RP: So yeah, no, that's a great and a very important question, which sort of, it does touch upon 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 then again, like what are we going to learn from aggressive colonialists? I mean it's not that different. But it's a really important question. And I have a book that I co-wrote with the political philosopher Alan Buchanan from 2018 called The Evolution of Moral Progress. And basically that book is essentially an argument that it sort of poses this sort of question. Given, 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 not sustainable because of the highly kind of parochial tribalistic moralities that we are the legacy of.
1:15:26.3 RP: 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 that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other groups. So you have essentially what amounts to like in-group favoritism and out-group antagonism, which is extremely universal in humans. And so that's the evolutionary picture. But then you say, look at especially post-enlightenment, look at like these tremendous examples of progress that we would normally identify as progress, like the [1:16:10.2] ____ Like, look, right now everything's up for grabs.
1:16:19.0 SC: Yeah. Progress comes and goes.
1:16:20.0 RP: I mean, Yeah, the things that we wouldn't have even thought about as in question, like the rule of law, human rights, et cetera. But the things that we normally take to be progress, like the increasing inclusion of women and minorities and people with disabilities and LGBTQ and the ethical treatment of animals and going back before that, the rule of law, 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 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 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 under certain kinds of circumstances, humans are able to step back, critique the kind of norms that they're following and make consistency judgments and other things that allow them to interrogate and improve our moral systems. And so I think there is a legitimate... I mean, I'm trying to avoid very thorny territory in the sort of the Humean-Kantian debates about the nature of morality and so forth.
1:18:14.6 SC: We're all Humeans here at the Mindscape Podcast, just so you know.
1:18:17.4 RP: Yeah, no. Yeah, I would figure. I would figure. But actually to that point, it was really interesting because when I teach moral philosophy, when you get to Kant, it's bizarre. It does... The grounding is weird. None of it makes a lot of sense. Whereas Hume is just like very... I mean, for us science-y people, it's really on point. Whereas Kant is bizarre. But then you sort of get to the bottom of Kant where, sort of at the basics where he's saying like, you know what, there are certain things that are right and wrong irrespective of what our desires or preferences are. Hume ultimately rejects that, but kind of, in a more philosophical way. I mean, what Kant to me is saying is just so important is that there are rights and wrongs that transcend our own self-interest, and that it's just not sufficient to say I don't desire that, so it doesn't have any grip on me. Once you're in the realm of reason-giving, you're within the realm of morality and you could be swayed. And so, 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 kinds of cues and triggers in the early ancestral environment that we respond to with out-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 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... People can use that polemically to make people believe that and bam, trigger these highly exclusivist, highly sort of out-group xenophobic attitudes.
1:20:43.1 SC: So you're saying there's sort of a vulnerability in our moral structures that when everything is going well, we can be good people, but there's a set of situations that we're not really equipped to keep it up?
1:20:59.1 RP: 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. Even if we sort of knew what that big picture story looked like, or at least the key aspects of it, we might still be feckless to do anything about it because of just the way these emergent patterns... So 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 scary thing. 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, the light of reason and et cetera, et cetera. And 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 to say, I think that these gains are fragile because we're susceptible to the... And that's what... I mean 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 maybe we'll get to a point in human history where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with. But right now, it is quite precarious. We honestly don't... I would not have said this like 15 years ago, but I really don't know where we're going to be 30 years from now. I really don't.
1:23:10.1 SC: Well, that's too bad, because that was the last question I was going to ask.
[laughter]
1:23:15.8 SC: I mean, you've been wonderful at saying, look, we might not last. We might not be the 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 determinate. But also one gets some feeling, 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? 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?
1:23:58.6 RP: Well, okay, so there's short-term and very long-term.
1:24:03.7 SC: Yeah.
1:24:05.6 RP: And this is where you get into like sort of debates about long-termism as an ethic. I mean anyone who's... 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, learning about the solar system and star life cycles. And I started to get real worried about the sun bloating. And whether it's going to swallow the Earth or what in the red giant phase. And like, that's all freaking me out. And so people... Anyone worrying about what are humans going to be at that time? 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... On the other hand, I think that there is... There are some interesting things to think about even in shorter-term questions about human survival. And then I'll say something about the ethical side too, because I think that ultimately, what's driving this question, what makes it so poignant or compelling is that it means something to us. And then trying to figure out what it means and why extinction would be bad or good for some people, I guess, is another matter.
1:25:30.5 RP: But here's one 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 zeitgeists because I... But maybe we have no choice and that's what happens. So now I'm going to talk about AI because 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'll be laughing about talking about it maybe, I don't know. But I guess one thing that I want to... I do take the robots seriously. And I don't think most biologists would. They'll think, oh, robots are clunky. They're brittle. They're not flexible. 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. And I'm worried... And so I guess like an interesting question to me is... To think about is, and this might be something that we can learn from looking at other animals. So I had mentioned that social insects, one of the things 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, besides humans. 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 coevolution. That's going to be a whole interesting argument in itself, right?
1:27:31.2 SC: Yeah.
1:27:31.8 RP: 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 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 kind of the macroevolutionist in me. One of the reasons I love macroevolution and got into it as someone like, 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, 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 I think there's something wonderful about that. And I think from a macroevolutionary perspective, if there's any inference you're going to make from induction, it's that all of every species' time is limited.
1:28:56.2 RP: 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 so, 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'm okay with disappearing. And I think, there's... 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 the sheer pain, suffering, destruction, but 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 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 smart and social and like all of this. And if you saw that asteroid coming, you'd say this is the apocalypse. But then of course, like, well, what came out of that? Is it something better than what was before? Is it better simply because maybe there's a highly self-conscious species? Is that alone going to give us a greater value of the entire biosphere? I mean, all of this is going to rest on these insanely controversial questions. 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... Is it... And there is no agreement on this. Once you get to aggregates and ethics, no one knows what they're no one knows what to do.
1:31:17.6 RP: So human extinction might overall for sentient life be a huge boon. But maybe not. The reality is, and this is something people don't realize, and this is what I 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 it's just 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 a natural, beautiful, harmonious state. But of course, that wasn't true in colonialism. I mean, colonialism was a problem for other moral reasons. But point being, there wasn't some kind of harmony that was being disrupted. And is of course the same thing in the natural living world. It is a horrific, horrific place.
1:32:17.7 SC: Red in tooth and claw.
1:32:19.8 RP: Yeah. I mean, just doing little things can give you insights into this. I've always been into aquariums and when I finally moved out of my parents' house, I could have all the animals I want. So now we have a bazillion aquariums and I've been breeding all sorts of fish like many, many generations, years and years. And all I could tell you is, it's like, okay, you're going to have fish that breed. Oh my God, 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. And you immediately realize all these horror shows unfold. What happens to these little creatures is horrific. And even you do everything in your power to try to... As many can survive and you can't. So this reminds me of Groundhog Day. You remember that movie?
1:33:20.3 SC: Of course.
1:33:20.7 RP: 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... 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 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. 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 going to... He knows everything that's going to happen, so he's going to manipulate the world to his end. So he tries to sleep with the girl, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't work out well for him anyway in all of those cases. And he keeps getting reborn, recycled. It starts again. He at some point moves from this kind of egoist mentality to what essentially is a utilitarian mentality, like maximize utility, meaning maximize pleasure over pain, which is a deeply selfless thing, but it's also futile.
1:34:42.1 RP: And so, he's running around trying to save the kid from... He knows where the kid's going to fall out of the tree. He knows like... He's like, he never thank me. And then like but then he's still... There's still people that die he can't save. 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 self... 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 ethics-y, even though I hate to say it.
1:36:03.3 SC: I think I'm extremely sympathetic to this. My thing about virtue ethics is maybe it's right, but maybe it's not ethics. It's not quite comparable to...
1:36:13.3 RP: It's like aesthetics.
1:36:14.5 SC: Yeah.
1:36:15.4 RP: More like aesthetics.
1:36:15.9 SC: It's an approach to life, right?
1:36:19.1 RP: That's right.
1:36:19.7 SC: Something like that. I don't know.
1:36:21.3 RP: I think that's right. I think that's right.
1:36:23.1 SC: Rachell, 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.
1:36:29.5 RP: 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.
1:36:37.9 SC: They don't know.
1:36:39.2 RP: But it's true. Wink, wink, self-deprecating. Okay.
1:36:41.0 SC: Very self-deprecating. That's the evidence they have. They have no choice but to go with it.
1:36:48.3 RP: All right. Thank you, Sean. This was great.
1:36:50.2 SC: Thank you very much.
1:36:50.9 RP: All right. Bye-bye.
[music]
Sean, you have hosted some very, very interesting podcasts. But the interview with Rachell Powell tops my list — totally fascinating on a long list of subjects. And you get high marks for allowing her to just sail along. Lots of interviewers would have insisted on inserting themselves into the discussion more often, but she was rolling, and you just let it happen. Many thanks, it was brilliant. (And one more note — In your post-interview reflections, you make a comment about the difference between reading and talking. You may be familiar with Plato’s remarks on exactly this point, but if not, you might enjoy reading the relevant portion of the Phaedrus dialogue (see in particular 274c et seq).)
Thanks again
Your guest has a phenomenally singular mind, and the things she said sent my mind into all sorts of directions that I already don’t remember. But early in the interview when she was talking about SETI, I thought of Frans de Waal’s book “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” Perhaps the SETI people are listening for the wrong signals that might suggest other life in the universe. It might take more imagination to figure out what to listen for.
There’s so much more that this podcast suggested to me. Very interesting guest.
There have been some great exchanges on your podcast. This one must be amongst the top ten ever (though perhaps that’s a reflection of my particular interests). Rachell needed no guiding – she just laid it all out, in cogent and compelling terms. A magisterial take on the life and times, stretching over both the receding and looming horizons. And your (mild and appropriate) interventions supported the flow.
Thanks.
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The interview with Rachell Powell brings up an intriguing question: Were the laws of the universe fine-tuned in a way that makes life possible, or is life a rare accident in an indifferent cosmos? Most likely, we’ll never know for certain the answer to that question. But humans are meaning-making creatures. We’re wired to look for patterns, stories, and significance. In that sense, the question is as much about us as it is about the cosmos.
Ref: Microsoft Copilot
Incredible episode. Kudos and many deep thanks as always Sean. I have for many years shared the idea that cumulative culture is the only thing that makes humans seem so unique, but for some reason I’ve never done any reading into that argument (also never had any doubt people have written about it). It’s the first time I’ve heard it though, and Rachell so eloquently stated the idea within an evolutionary context / geological timeline. So cool. Rachell if you see this I think your voice is wonderful, thank you!
Just on the comments about bees being instinct driven (eusocial, I’ve probably spelt that wrong) verses humanity that’s culture driven in terms of the two ‘societies’ co-operation. The recent research shows that there are lazy bees (for example on https://royalsocietypublishing.org), they hang about largely doing nothing. In fact throughout social insects there are members that just ‘parasite’ off the commune, so it may not be so cut and dry about instinct driving everything in the eusocial insects, or perhaps culture driving us. (I haven’t been through university, so could well be wrong)
This was fantastic. I’ve just decided to try listening to a few podcasts, after years of largely avoiding them, and this was a wonderful entry point! Thanks to both you and Rachel!
In a recent podcast, I think with Rachel Powell, ants were said to be of a higher intelligence with respect to social organizing abilities than chimpanzees and you asked a critical question – Isn’t it that the ants operate on instinct and the chimpanzees might have to consider options before choosing their path – sth like that as I paraphrase. And humans, they can, and fairly frequently do, think about what they are doing and come up with a wide variety of answers leading to a herky-jerky social fabric.
I would love to hear how the issue might be presented from a Jaynesian point of view. I imagine that there is not debate among the ants on which road to travel as they are not conscious of being separate entities, organisms, and do not have the type of consciousness that Jaynes defines. Whereas the human, so desperately aware of being an individual with opportunities to debate itself, “decides” alternative paths requiring enforcers, cultural, religious or political, to bring about social cooperation.
Perhaps you have addressed Jaynesian thinking elsewhere and I could go to that podcast but if not, please consider it as an option for a future podcast.
Love the talking. Mystery and surprise. Keeps you going.
Crup
Top tier episode ⭐️