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

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. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/26/342-rachell-powell-on-evolutionary-convergence-morality-and-mind/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. 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. Boston University web page https://www.bu.edu/philo/profile/rachell-powell/ PhilPapers publications https://philpeople.org/profiles/rachell-powell

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:55Sean 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.

• 1:37Sean Carroll?

  You cannot even possibly imagine searching through all of 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...

• 2:10Sean Carroll?

  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's nevertheless sometimes convergence onto the best way to achieve some purpose

• 2:54Sean Carroll?

  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 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?

• 3:39Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 4:24Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 5:00Sean Carroll?

  Rachell Powell, welcome to Mindscape Podcast.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.

• 5:05Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Or necessity.

• 5:18Sean Carroll?

  Necessity, yeah. Inevitability.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 5:22Sean Carroll?

  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.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  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 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 crosstalk between

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Physicists in general, I mean, like astronomers and SETI researchers and evolutionary biologists. And that's what I kind of want. And when I say cross talk, I mean, sometimes there was non-communication.

• 6:36Sean Carroll?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  And so this is something that I think it's a helpful way of thinking about, you know, how to think about contingency in 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 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 phenomenon.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  So maybe that's a place I can start.

• 7:22Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 7:58Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  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, and I'm always asking people, you know, at conferences everywhere, "Please, someone, you know, give me something that's on the level of these kinds of insights that science has given, coming from other disciplines." And it just doesn't happen. And- As I see it, and this is why this is going to become relevant. So I see the kinds of insights, 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

• 8:39Speaker 03

  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 biases in science, but really the deep, 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

• 9:24Speaker 03

  the world. And the second kind of arc that these insights have taken, in my view, is sort of this de-centering 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 de-centering 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

• 10:04Speaker 03

  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 give rise to all sorts of principles that are, you know, 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, you know, the point is, we should expect our situation

• 10:43Speaker 03

  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

• 11:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  For a bunch of reasons. And contingency is going to be one of the big ones. But I think what's happened, you know, especially in the 20th century, where, you know, evolutionary biologists were largely Not part of, I don't know if I can say historically excluded, but they weren't sort of active participants in discussions about about SETI and, you know, an 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.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  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, Dub Jansky, Gigi Simpson, they were all very negative about the SETI project.

• 13:14Sean Carroll?

  Interesting.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  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

• 13:59Speaker 03

  to the world, a Copernican-like orientation. And, but of course, the, the evolutionists like the, the Gigi Simpsons and the Ernest Meyers 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 planetary science on your side. Why?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  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 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

• 15:20Speaker 03

  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, it'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.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  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 choleoid 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, you know, and cuttlefish and so forth show surprisingly sophisticated cognitive abilities. So maybe they could have been the intelligent species on Earth. So 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

• 16:49Speaker 03

  of a better word for it. But we tend to, we treat evolution as these like bundles of traits. Yeah. In physics, when you get these bundles, they look, you know, they might look like natural kinds or something like this. In biology, it's this hodgepodge of highly contingent, non-replicable traits mixed with perhaps some law-like stuff weaved into it. The problem is people tend to just project the whole bundle.

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• 18:12Sean Carroll?

  So basically, you're saying people are able to imagine primates or cephalopods?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, or whatever the going kind of animal is, right? You know, and so there's this idea that 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 gonna, you know, you're gonna 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.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And so, basically, I mean, 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 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 gonna even be sitting around talking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we obviously came from a planet in which extraterrestrial, uh, sorry, with terrestrial intelligence evolved, so we know it's consistent with the laws of physics, but that doesn't

• 19:45Speaker 03

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

• 20:19Speaker 03

  That's about the closest thing to a law that we get in biology.

• 20:23Sean Carroll?

  That's pretty basic, yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  It's very basic. You can, 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, you know, if A is better adapted than B in environment E, then A will out-reproduce B. The problem with all of this, right? And this is why there are these, there have been decades of debates in philosophy of biology about what kind of laws these are, whether they're laws. They're very different than laws of physics that have specific contents, because like,

• 21:10Speaker 03

  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, to try to say, oh, this is actually empirical. 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? And so, so yeah, so I mean, so that's, so the problem is that when you couch natural

• 21:55Speaker 03

  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 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

• 22:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Although, the convergence people are gonna come and say, well, maybe there is, maybe there is some evidence. So let me just, 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, you know, more freely. But, so, you know, Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionist, you know, he came along in the, in the late eighties, early nineties and he, he was for 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

• 24:05Speaker 03

  people have, you know, tended to imbue to the evolutionary process. Progressivist, I mean, in, 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, 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.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  And by the way, the assumptions of progress in 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.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  So, but anyhow, like, so this is what Gould said, and it's really, 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, um, let's do a thought experiment. So in physics, right? Thought experiments have played interesting roles. Uh, in biology, no, not that I know of, right? Which is interesting in itself. Why is that, right? But Gould's thought experiments were profoundly important, um, in the field, and in thinking about contingency, uh, and

• 25:40Speaker 03

  law-like necessity in the history of life, um, and hence, you know, in life elsewhere. And so, um, 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, uh, from different initial conditions with small changes occurring, and then how would that affect the outcome, right? Um, and Gould basically said, and there were a couple of Gould's thought experiments, these kinds of evolutionary

• 26:23Speaker 03

  counterfactual thought experiments that were really important. One was rewinding the tape of life to the origins of the, of the first, uh, bilateralian animals, okay? Like, the vast majority of all modern animal phyla arose with, you know, geological rapidity around 550 or 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, in, uh, the Canadian Rockies, but it's also since been, become, uh, confirmed as a global fauna in China

• 27:01Speaker 03

  and elsewhere, um, where there was this whole sort of coming out of these fossils in, uh, in the Burgess Shale, was this sort of chronicle of this parade of science fiction-y 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 around 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, you know, at the time Gould had said, well, like, I don't think there's anyone would

• 27:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  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, 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, you know, differentiating into all of these systems and subsystems. At the beginning, those early nodes, they're going to be highly determinative of what happens subsequently.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And that was the, 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, you know, if things had gone just a little bit different 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 arachnids, that that shape of life would be sort of confined or relegated to, you know, science fiction possibility.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  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, and so there's like yet another focal point of contingency in, you know, in, in the history of life, and that's one that's particularly relevant to our own origins, right? The problem is, of course, and this gets into the methodological, I mean, these are

• 31:06Speaker 03

  just thought experiments, right? This is, how do we know? How are we gonna, 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. 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 phenomenon of convergent evolution,

• 31:49Speaker 03

  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, mutter around with the environment and the genetics and everything, and then see what happens.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  But we can, you know, but thankfully, nature has done that for us. By running these tapes over and over again at smaller scales, and we see repetition. And that is indicative of a law-like necessity that is inconsistent with the contingency thesis, and kind of gives us a data set that we can work with in the absence of extraterrestrial information. And the problem with this, though, is that, you know, this is a, the way that it had been, convergence had been sort of looked at is it as a, like a monolithic homogeneous phenomenon. There's repetitions, therefore Gould is wrong.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  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, you know, I think we need to really be careful in parsing that data set before we can make any conclusions about, you know, any grander conclusions about a cosmic biology and that sort of thing.

• 33:45Speaker 01

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• 34:13Speaker 05

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• 34:41Sean Carroll?

  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/tipicality 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.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 35:03Sean Carroll?

  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 not fair.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  But actually, like, I think that looking at the nature of life or the living universe through a convergenceist 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.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  You know, so I mean, in a way, you're right, the Copernican principles and so forth. It's all sort of indexed to us.

• 36:02Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  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, 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, you know, the

• 36:47Speaker 03

  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 arthropod, 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 necessities, can also speak against anthropocentricism. So it's, it's, it is a weird balance how these things are playing out. I agree.

• 37:20Sean Carroll?

  And this leads me exactly where I wanted to go next. What do we know about convergence vis-à-vis questions of intelligence and minds? You know, we, from our perspective as human beings, it can be easy to say, we're what is being converged to, we're better than anyone else 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.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  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, 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, it is quick

• 38:28Speaker 03

  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 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? 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

• 39:13Speaker 03

  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 I, so I, 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, you know, you know, take a question like, you know, questions about like burying the dead, right? You say, okay, like Neanderthals were burying the dead, that's, that's interesting. So why were they doing that? What's the implication?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Oh, they have supernatural beliefs, and that suggests stuff about symbolism or intelligence, right? And that's all plausible, right? I mean,

• 40:05Speaker 03

  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 don't have rituals around it. They're not, you know, they don't have representations of the supernatural, presumably, right?

• 40:22Sean Carroll?

  I don't think so.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  So what's the common between them? Well, epidemiology, et cetera, 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 gotta 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.

• 41:08Speaker 03

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

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Well, but you know, I mean, this is, this is the problem with humanities, though. The humanities wants to keep humans at the center. And there's times when you sort of need to do that, but there's times where that really holds back knowledge and understanding. And, um, and I think that this is one of those times. Now, if you go back to the mind question you asked.

• 42:14Sean Carroll?

  Just to sort of be on your side a little bit.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 42:17Sean Carroll?

  Uh, as you, as you indicated, there's multiple levels of perfectly legitimate causal explanation going on here, right? Like, maybe we do it for epidemiological reasons, but also for symbolic sacred reasons.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  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? Yeah. 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,

• 43:12Speaker 03

  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 were talking about earlier? Exactly what I was gonna ask, yes. Yeah, I mean, so I think, like, and, 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

• 43:56Speaker 03

  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. Okay. And...

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, that triggered all sorts of arms races and then you got several other, a couple of other lineages that also developed what we would talk about as brains. I mean, brains are like, you know, on a continuum of neural complexity, right? Um, so you have like ganglia, nerve nets and so forth in your brains. Like, when does ganglia become a, 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, uh, too, you know, bogged down in, in artificial distinctions.

• 45:03Sean Carroll?

  We did have Peter Godfrey Smith on the podcast, just so you know, so.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you do get the repeated evolution of brains in, uh, encephalopod mollusks, in, in vertebrates and arthropods in reverse order. And I think that there's, you know, this is where you get into some of the, uh, the ongoing work in comparative cognition. And this is, by the way, why the convergentist approaches are so important. I mean, historically, there was this like focus in comparative cognition, a very heavy focus on homology. So it's like, well, where's consciousness in humans? It's in this part of the brain. No, of course it's not the, the pineal gland, right? That, that they carved out.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  But, um, you know, here's a portion of the brain that, that, 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 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 presumably it would have been with their, their ancestors, uh, in the dinosaurs, theropod dinosaurs, if we were able to, to reconstruct their cognitive world and, and, you know, um, and, uh, and so I think that comparative

• 46:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  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 in X number of trials, you know, the bee people will say, oh, like, our bees 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.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  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 other pods 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

• 48:16Speaker 03

  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 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? You know, predators prey, objects to avoid, things to eat, you know, so forth.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  That has evolved multiple times independently in the history of life. And that, 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

• 49:47Speaker 03

  looking at a more law-like type of phenomenon. Then the big problem comes when you get to human cultural capacities.

• 50:01Sean Carroll?

  Good.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  And that's gonna be, that takes you into a whole different realm. So, so far, we've been like, well, you know, there's all this historical contingency embedded 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 could, 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

• 50:45Speaker 03

  there being no contentful laws. 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.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  From getting a species with cumulative culture.

• 51:18Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:42Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  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 culture 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.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  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. It's obviously not going to be a spacefaring, you know, detectable extraterrestrial type of species. And, and, and humans were that kind of species for 99% of their time. And so I.

• 53:09Sean Carroll?

  So we, so we had the biology, we didn't have the culture yet.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  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, 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. Um, and you had all that, but you, you didn't, you know, it becomes like a parlor game of possibilities to try to explain why did, you know, what they call behavioral modernity or the upper Paleolithic revolution.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Uh, and then subsequently, right with, um, about 10,000 years ago with agriculture. That's when you get the real explosion, uh, of technologies. And all of these things were like the, the most recent eye blink of human history. For 99% of our existence as ourselves, as I'm sure full persons, you know, uh, in all respects, for 99% of that history, we were, we essentially had the ecological footprint of like other social carnivores. I mean, there was nothing, our, our numbers were tiny. Like, you know, I mean, we were scrappy, we made it. But like, you wouldn't be betting on us.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Like, you know, the Toba super eruption, whatever, 75, 70,000 years ago, you, you have an effective human population down to, what, 2,000? And then like you have a human population hovering at 20,000 global for like tens of thousands of years afterwards. I mean, that is not an inevitability waiting to just explode, right? I mean, they 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.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  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, it's a parlor game. We can list like, we could probably come up with like thirty or forty orthogonal adaptation, major adaptations. That are all relevant to creating cumulative culture, you know? I mean, you can even go back and say you need some pre-existing anatomy, like you need fine motor manipulation. 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.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  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, right? And so I think, you know, 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.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  A fair me paradox resolution on genuinely biological grounds.

• 57:11Speaker 04

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• 57:41Speaker 05

  ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.

• 58:08Sean Carroll?

  So in other words, there was this transition. I mean, you know, 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, you always correct me if I'm wrong, it wasn't like a thing, a genetic mutation that allowed us to do that. It's accumulation of all sorts of different things that were kind of individually unpredictable and just came together in the right way.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  That is the signature of contingency in macroevolution. And you see that 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

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Sort of like, 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, you know, all of these things clearly 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

• 59:48Speaker 03

  teaching too with, you know, using very different methods. But, um, but yeah, so like, you know, so I think that that, you know, that's the kind of thing that really bespeaks a kind of, a kind of contingency.

• 1:00:02Sean Carroll?

  And when I asked the question originally about, you know, minds and intellect and the extent to which one does converge towards those biologically or through evolution, I think people get that question, you know, they understand what is going on. Is there, is there as much effort put into sort of the social version of that question? You know, is there a natural convergence to different kinds of social, cultural organization?

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  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, you know, convergence in anatomy and morphology. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, like, you know, the, the sort of fish-like shape of, you know, sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins, which is remarkable.

• 1:00:58Sean Carroll?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  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, right? You have to think about it in behavioral terms.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  But as an example of convergence, behavioral traits are a little harder 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 like, I, for example, think and have argued

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, punishment of norm violations is critical to stabilizing cooperation in human groups, for example.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Now, when people ask like, "Well, 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. Right? And so, it's kind of like, 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, that 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

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  that are multiply cognitively realizable, meaning many different cognitive forms could give rise to the same functional structure.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  And, and that's what I think happens when you, you know, think about these functional structures as being multiply relizable. 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 arthropods, vertebrates, and cephalopods all have, you know, visual ecologies connected

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  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 a 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 to finding human traits and, and specify them in a way that makes them essentially non-replicable.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  And so like I think, for example, like going back to the the the issue of like social norms. So I think of social norms essentially as, you know, rules of conduct that regulate behavior in social groups in order to stabilize ultra cooperation. And I think that that can you can get that through many different cognitive avenues. And one of them, I mean, the humans are the obvious example, but the best case, I think, for social norms outside of human beings is actually not in the animals you might expect. Like, it's not, it's not, I mean, in my view, it's not in, you know, cetaceans like dolphins

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  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 know, you can get turnover of dominant individuals through alliance making and so on. But you don't get rule of all by all. And I think in social

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  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, 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?

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Like, you know, foraging and food sharing and warfare and collective defense and pedagogy and industry and all of those things. And so, you know, I think that when you start to think about traits in a deeply biological way, where you don't tie them to, you know, very specific, uniquely human, very anthropocentric, you know, 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,

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:09:15Sean Carroll?

  So in some sense, ants have in common with humans, but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement?

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  Yes, and I mean, it is absolutely, they do have police forces. And they, you know, they do have what I would call an institutionalized form of norm enforcement. Whereas 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.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

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

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  It's not despite that, but it's actually because of that, that we can start to glean really big lessons about the, you know, about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture.

• 1:11:07Sean Carroll?

  Like, maybe I'm running the danger of being anthropocentric myself here, but I guess, I think what, what many people would say in response to this is, sure, social insects and human beings have high degrees of cooperation and social organization. But isn't it different because aren't the ants kind of just hardwired with instincts and aren't we like agents making choices? Isn't that different somehow?

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  No, you're right. I mean, like, the objection is something like, um, you know, look, if you're gonna, uh, I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the, the contemporary FSB version in, uh, in Ukraine, but I'm thinking of like the NKVD barrier troops, right? You know, forcing Soviet, uh, infantry to sort of keep moving forward and they'll shoot them if they try to turn, right? Um, like, you know, social insects don't need an insect equivalent of the NKVD for the most part because, right, they can just be, you know, in defense of, of the motherland, right? You know, they

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  can, uh, evolve these relatively stable mutations that then generate certain kinds of behavior. But the reality is that, and first of all, I want to say that I don't really care how in, how these functions emerge in development. Genetics and environment and culture are just all resources that then shape bias, certain outcomes in ontogeny.

• 1:12:42Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

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

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  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 produced. Yeah. And ultimately, like I said, yeah, humans might have more flexibility, but I can I would bet everything that the the social insects, which are probably, I mean, they're sort of equivalent in even just the ants are probably equivalent to humans in their in the fraction of energy that they common share in the biosphere today, right? And, you know, or biomass and everything. And that includes their their domesticates, by the way. I mean, we have a lot of domesticates, but so today. And, you know, both fungi and

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  animals. And so I I really don't have much doubt, for good or for worse, just as a statement of of 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, you know, I'm not saying that that makes them better in any way. In fact, there's nothing like morally, robustly morally normative in any of this. Like, it's not like people sometimes ask me like, oh, well, if if these are normative societies, what can we learn from them about how we ought to structure our society? I say, nothing, nothing. I mean, well, you know what? We could have learned faster how to inoculate, because they do that. Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  You know, things like that quarantine, you know, they had they had a functional germ theory of disease before we before we did. I know it's funny, but it's actually kind of true. And so like, you know, and 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?

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Why did they invent agriculture? Why, you know, all these things? When you eventually

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  And you ask that, when you ask that question, compared to chimps, then you're gonna get a particular answer, right? And that's gonna involve lots of human-specific adaptations that played a role. But that's what you, that's what I would call like a divergentist explanation. Like, why did humans diverge from these other close cases? Here's an answer, and it is powerful. But it's, it's, it's an explanatory powerful answer, but it's very narrow in scope. Because it only applies to that one, 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?

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:16:33Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Endpoints? Now, you know, you might come up with some underlying common causes that look like they have a more sort of deeper, 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. Um, but if you wanna think about more broadly about evolutionary patterns and process, as opposed to like human-specific quirky evolution, then it is important to go broader.

• 1:17:05Sean Carroll?

  Well, you mentioned a couple of times the word normativity. And I mean, you are a philosopher after all, so we, we gotta go there and, and dig in a little bit. I mean, I'm presuming, I, I always get in trouble when I'm making presumptions, but you're not making some ought-from-is kind of statement. But you're trying to, uh, by the way, normativity is a word philosophers use for when we talk about what you're supposed to do or should do, not just what things do do, right? So morality comes under that. But obviously, our morality evolves. Um, and, and one can then ask, like, is the morality that evolution has left us with what it should be? And then what does even that mean?

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  So I, yeah, though, that's, that's a great and a very important question, which sort of, it, it does. It does touch upon that, what I just said a second ago, which is that like when people ask, well, what do we learn from social insects about how morality ought to be? It's like, nothing.

• 1:17:59Sean Carroll?

  Nothing.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  I mean, do you see how they treat each other? You know, then again, like, what are we gonna learn from, you know, aggressive colonialists? I mean, you know, it's not that different. But, um, 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

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  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, uh, uh, 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 a group, sort of a group level selection process that selects for groups that are moral, but the only reason that they're, that they're, uh, that that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other groups.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  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 of law. Look, right now, everything's up for grabs, right? Yeah. I mean, Progress comes and goes. 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

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

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

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  bigger arc and the bigger trajectory. I think it's a little too fine-grained to make that conclusion. But I think like the, the sort of upshot is that humans have a capacity for normativity, this is going back to your question about normativity, for understanding, for thinking about what's right and what ought to be. 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

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  I'm trying to avoid very thorny territory in the sort of the Humian Kantian debates about the nature of morality and so forth.

• 1:21:56Sean Carroll?

  We're all, we're all Humians here at the Mindscape Podcast, just so you know.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, yeah, I would figure, I would figure, but, um, but you know, but, but you know, actually to that point, it was really interesting because I, you know, when I teach a moral philosophy, like when you get to Kant, it's bizarre, it does like, the grounding is weird, none of it like makes a lot of sense, whereas Hume is just like very, I mean, for us science-y 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, at the basics, where he's saying like, you know what, you know, there are certain things that are right and wrong irrespective of what our desires or preferences are. Hume ultimately rejects

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  that, but in a more, kind of in a more philosophical way. I mean, what Kant to me is saying is just so important is that like there, there are rights and wrongs that transcend our own self-interest and that it's just not sufficient to say that, you know, I don't desire that, so it doesn't have any grip on me. Once you're in the realm of reason giving, 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

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  of social conditions that don't replicate the, um, the, the kinds of cues and triggers in the early ancestral environment that are, that we respond to without group antagonism.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  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, 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 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.

• 1:24:25Sean Carroll?

  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, a set of situations that we're not really equipped to keep it up.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  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 the, just the way emerge, these emergent pattern, you know, like, so

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  we, we might know the playbook of a demagogue, but that doesn't mean we're going to be able to successfully battle it. And that's the, that's the scary thing, right? And I mean, now of course, you're dealing with social media problems and other things which create new problems. So it's kind of an arms race between parasitic demagoguery.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  That could stand to benefit in some narrow way from moral regression. And I hate to say something tropey, but it's like, you know,

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  the light of reason and et cetera, et cetera. 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

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  to this. And that's what I mean, you know, that is what we're seeing. We're, we're looking right now down the barrel of the fragility of our institutions. Yeah, big time. And it is easy to take them for granted. And, you know, maybe we'll get to a point in human history where they're, where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with. But right now it is quite precarious. Like, we honestly don't, I would not have said this like 15 years ago, but like, you know, I really don't know where we're going to be 30 years from now. I really don't.

• 1:26:52Sean Carroll?

  Well, that's too bad because that was the last question I was going to ask.

• 1:26:57Sean Carroll?

  I mean, you've been wonderful at saying, uh, 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, 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?

• 1:27:30Sean Carroll?

  You know, be, give us your honest take here. What, what do you think should be the kind of prospects that we should keep in mind for the future of humanity?

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so there's like short term and very long term.

• 1:27:45Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  And this is where you get into like sort of debates about long termism as an ethic. Right?

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  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, uh, learning about the, the solar system and star life cycles. And I started to get real worried about the, the sun bloating, right? And whether it's going to swallow the earth or, you know, or what?

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  You know, in the, uh, in a red giant phase and like, that's all freaking me out. And so people, you know, anyone worrying about like, what are humans going to be at that time? Will they have made it into space and call it? I mean, this is just, the scales that we're talking about are so vast that from a macro revolutionary 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 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

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  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, is another matter, but like, here's one thing.

• 1:29:17Speaker 03

  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'll be laughing about talking about it, maybe, I don't know. But like, You know, I guess like one thing that I wanna, I do take the robots seriously. And I don't think most biologists would. They'll, they'll think, oh, you know, robots are clunky, you know, they're brittle, they're not flexible.

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  Like, you know, you could tell the whole story. At the end of the day, I don't know. I'm worried about functional convergence. You know what I mean? I'm worried about distributed intelligence. Yeah. And I'm, I'm worried. And so I guess like an interesting question to me is like, you know, to think about is,

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  and this might be something that we can learn from looking at other, other animals. So I had mentioned that social insects, one of the things that they were, you know, that they've done repeatedly many times is

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  And an interesting question is like, when does it look like? So there's a conceptual question is like, when can we say, which, can we make a principal distinction between a domesticator and a domesticate? It's a process of co-evolution. That's going to be a whole, a whole interesting argument in itself. Yeah. 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?

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  And I think that that's actually important. Because this might be something that we want for ethical reasons to battle.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  But I think at the end of the day, I personally, and this is like, this is like kind of the macroevolutionist in me. Like, one of the reasons I love macroevolution and got into it, as someone like, you know, I came from a background in law and 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. Yeah. 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.

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  And I think from a macroevolutionary perspective, you know, if there's any inference you're gonna make from induction, it's that we're, 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'm okay with disappearing.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  And you know, like, I think like,

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  And it's just so deeply sad, not just because of like the sheer pain, suffering, destruction, but like,

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  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, 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

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  what was before? Um, is it better simply because there's, maybe there's a highly self-conscious species? Is that alone gonna give us the, a, a greater value of the entire biosphere? I mean, all of this is gonna 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,

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  human extinction might overall for, for sentient life be a huge boon, but maybe not, you know? The, you know, the reality is, and this is something people don't realize, and this is like, you know, this is what I always like, always kind of made me a little bit reluctant to go sort of like vegan vegetarian in the sense that like, I mean, it's as if like, 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, um, like a natural, beautiful, harmonious state. And, um, but of course,

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  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 the same thing, um, in the natural living world. It is a horrific, horrific place.

• 1:35:59Sean Carroll?

  Red and cheese and claw.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  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, uh, my parents' house, I could have all the animals I want, right? So, like, you know, now, if we have, like, a bazillion aquariums, and I've been breeding all sorts of fish, 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 gonna get two living. Yeah. Right?

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  And so, and you immediately realize, all these horror shows unfold, right? Like, what happens to these little, little creatures is horrific. And even, you do everything in your power to try to, you know, as many can survive. And, and you can't, so, like, you know, this reminds me of Groundhog Day. You remember that movie? Of course. But here's, I'm gonna give you my take on Groundhog Day, that I 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, a senior enough state in my career, where I feel like I could just say things like this. Say it. I think virtue ethics, ethics is stupid, but I think it's right.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  And I guess the reason why is because, so, okay, let's go to Groundhog Day for a second. The, um, uh, the, uh, the Bill Murray movie, right? Where he just keeps reiterating that same day over and over again. I think this 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.

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  He, at some point, moves from this kind of egoist mentality to what essentially is a utilitarian mentality, like, maximize utili- maximize utility, meaning maximize pleasure over pain, which is a deeply selfless thing, but it's also futile.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  And so like, he's running around trying to save the kid from, you know, he knows where the kid's gonna 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 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.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  He doesn't care about self, 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 ethics-y, even though I hate to say it.

• 1:39:45Sean Carroll?

  I think I'm extremely sympathetic to this. I, my thing about virtue ethics is maybe it's right, but maybe it's not ethics. Like, it's not quite comparable to...

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  Ah, it's like aesthetics. It's more like aesthetics.

• 1:39:57Sean Carroll?

  It's a approach to life, right?

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:40:01Sean Carroll?

  Something like that. I don't know.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  I think that's right. I think that's right.

• 1:40:05Sean Carroll?

  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 Landscape Podcast.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:40:19Sean Carroll?

  They don't know.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  But it's true. Wink, wink, self-deprecating.

• 1:40:22Sean Carroll?

  Very self-deprecating. But, you know, that's the evidence they have. They have no choice but to go with it.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, Sean. This was great.

• 1:40:31Sean Carroll?

  Thanks very much.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  All right. Bye-bye.

• 1:40:58Speaker 04

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