 We don't need to rely on historical and cultural forces to live a good life. More ancient, more powerful, deeper forces are at work that have been shaping us for goodness for a much longer time. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. Super excited to be talking about our blueprint for goodness. We have Dr. Nicholas Kristakis joining us on the show. Hello. Thanks for having me Alan. Thank you so much for coming on. That's nice. It's really nice. So, so honored that you decided to join us on the show. This has been such a good synthesis, your latest book blueprint, the evolutionary origins of a good society, and just recently released and we'll be talking about that a lot on the show. For those that don't know, Nicholas's background. He's a sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socio-economic, bio-social and evolutionary determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. He is a Sterling professor of social and natural science at Yale University where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He's also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science and you can find all of the links in the bio to his profile there at Yale as well as the Human Nature Lab as well as his Twitter profile and the link to his recent book. All right Nicholas, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions to ask our guests. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? Well, I mean that's like over home plate. I mean that's what the book is about. I know that's not a hard question. I think for far too long in my view, scientists and the person on the street have been far too obsessed with the dark part of our nature, our propensity to violence and selfishness and mendacity and tribalism. But I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves because equally we are prone to be good. We are prone to have these wonderful capacities for love and friendship and cooperation and teaching. And I would argue these qualities are more prominent, more powerful, more forceful in us than the dark side. And the reason is that if whenever I came near you, you were mean to me or killed me or mistreated me in some way, I would have been better off as an animal being apart from you. We would have evolved to be solitary animals. So the very fact that we live socially in the way that we do suggests that the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. And so the argument, my argument would be that over the long sweep of our evolutionary history, over 300,000 years, we have been shaped by natural selection to be endowed with these wonderful qualities, that these qualities are extremely powerful, that they are more powerful than the evil qualities. And furthermore that because we've been endowed with those qualities by natural selection, they are universal. They are seen in every human being and in every society around the world. And furthermore, in contrast, for example, to Stephen Pinker's arguments about the progress that human beings have made over the last 200 years because of the philosophical movements and technological advances of the Enlightenment, beginning since the Enlightenment, which no doubt have redirected human trajectory and the trajectory of our world to be better. We're safer, we live longer, we are healthier, we have more technology, we have more democracy, more peace. There's no doubt right about all of that. But those forces are acting over historical time frames. And what I'm arguing is that we don't just, we don't need to rely on historical and cultural forces to live a good life. More ancient, more powerful, deeper forces are at work that have been shaping us for goodness for a much longer time. So that's my answer to your question, which I'm glad to see you're asking. There is something that's so deep in our human nature, this desire to collaborate, this desire for friendship, this desire to co-create a positive, beautiful future together, to ensure peace between each other. All of these are so deeply rooted in us and sense the dawn of time. And I like how you take us back. Well, dawn of time goes quite a far way back. Yeah, I would say dawn of our species. Yes, dawn of time is another whole order of attitude. And it could potentially even go to the dawn of time with the way of all the other evolution of the species, that they also have this, this deep essence of collaboration. No, because other species, no other species don't live socially. I mean, I think that we are different than the transmission of knowledge, things like that, that we can do. Yes, but other species live solitary lives. We are different than many insects. We are different than octopuses. We're different than reptiles and fish. So, you know, we live socially in a very particular way. And one of the things that I show in the book and that I argue in that is sort of paradoxical is that if you, the more we study certain other social mammals, the deeper understanding we have about ourselves. And here's why as an example, if you go and you map the social networks of elephants, like the mathematical structure of elephant networks, well, actually, let me back up just from that for a moment. So, it's very common. Many species reproduce sexually. Many species have sex with each other. But we do something else. We form long-term, non-reproductive unions to other members of our species, namely, we have friends. And this is very rare in the animal kingdom. We do it. Certain other primates do it. Elephants, both Asian and African elephants, do it. And certain cetaceans do it, certain whale species. So, this is an unusual feature that we evolved to have. But couldn't you say that a school of fish or a pack of... They're not friends with each other. They're from long-term, non-reproductive unions to unrelated individuals. So, those fish might be related to each other. They might be a transient interaction like a herd of buffalo moving on a plane. It's not like I'm next to you as a buffalo and we're always together, you and I. That's a different kind of sociality, a different kind of social process. So, I'm specifically talking about friendship. So, we do it. And so do elephants. And what's really interesting is that elephants... And then as a result of these friendship connections, we form social networks with very particular mathematical properties. So, if you map these networks and look at mathematical structures of these networks, they're very specific. And in fact, in some work we've done in my lab, we've sent people around the world. We have mapped networks in Tanzania, and Uganda, and the Sudan, and India, and Honduras, and in places around the United States. And again and again, the structure of the networks is the same. It's sort of universal, which is part of the point I'm making. Which is that you have a certain amount of close friends and these third degree connections where you can spread your needs. That's another whole topic. But for now, it's just that the structure of the network, the dots and the lines that connect them, you can summarize that in various mathematical ways, is very similar around the world. Anyway, if you go and you map networks in elephants, you find that the elephants have friends and their networks look like our networks. Which is astonishing because the last common ancestor we had with elephants was 85 million years ago. That animal did not live socially. And so the elephants, by independent convergent evolution, have fixated on the same type of social process that we have. They have friendships. They didn't need to have friendships. They make networks that look like our networks that need them in the case. But here's the punch line. The deep irony here is that by looking at the similarity between us and elephants, we can come to make the following argument. If we can share the capacity for friendship with elephants, we can share it with each other. The universality of this quality in us is proven in a way by its coexistence in this animal species. And furthermore, if you do anthropological investigations and you go around the world and you look for societies and you try to quantify is there a society without friendship, the answer is no. So this is a deep and universal property within human beings. And we must have friends and we must have them in order to be able to live socially. It's a part of our nature. Yes. And even the nature of other species that they can look at and study. Will you show us on a network graph, show us what it would look like if you were the center node and then you had these similarities across species that we as a center node have connections, these spokes to other nodes that are then our, let's say, friends. And then they have their friends and so on. And they have their friends and so on. In the book there are pictures of elephant networks and if you look at the pictures of elephant networks and you look at the picture of human networks or you look at the picture of whale networks side by side, they're very, they're indistinguishable. You know, you could see a picture of a human network. They're these dots and the lines. Every dot is a person and every line between them represents a relationship between two people whose friend or who's sibling or who's mate, for example. And these dots and lines will form an intricate pattern that has a center and a periphery and they'll be the social periphery, people who have relatively fewer friends and whose friends have fewer friends and a social center, people who have relatively more friends and whose friends tend to have more friends. And so you can map this graph and in your mind's eye you can also invoke a kind of metaphor of, which is not exactly right, but at least you get a sense of it, like a tangle of Christmas tree lights where every bulb is a person and then the wires represent the connections and you can imagine this dense gamish of Christmas tree lights when you take them out after a year in a box and you try to loosen them up by pulling out the tendrils of the Christmas tree lights and then they kind of spread out in front of you. And then you can look at, you can do a similar process where you map networks of other species as like elephants and whales and they will look similar. Another way to cultivate- Specific nodes have lots of connections, other nodes may not have a lot of connections. Yes, but it's not just that, it's that the whole structure. It's like saying, you know, I could take a group of building materials and I can build a house and the house is basically the same house. You could take the same materials and build houses that look different, but the house that we built is very similar to the, with the same materials as the house that an elephant will build. Or another way to cultivate an intuition about networks is to imagine you have a hundred buttons like from a shirt and they have, let's say four holes, which is a simplification. But let's say each button has four holes and you screw the buttons on the floor and I give you 500 pieces of string and I say you're going to pick two buttons at random and connect them. Yeah, that's okay. And then you're going to use the next piece of string and the next piece of string. One button's going to have a more of the, and there's going to be a power lot. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so by chance you should have the intuition that some buttons might not have been picked at all. They'll have no friends, they'll have no connections, and other buttons might have been picked a lot of times. And so that's the first realization that there'll be this jumble of strings and connections and buttons. People are the buttons, the strings are the relationships. And you should have the recognition that if you look at, you could look at them down now on the floor and take a photograph of that mess. And then you could lean over and pick up one of the buttons and pull it up into the air. And if you did that, you should have the intuition that all the other buttons that were connected to that would come up. But would all the buttons come off the floor? Only like 30 or so would come up out of a hundred. Yeah, it's pretty good, your guess, actually. Probably more like 60, but not all of them. It's very good, your guess. That's a pretty 60 out of the 100? By chance will have been picked. Yes. Wow. Well, because they only need to have at least one thread. Oh yeah, sure, sure. So some of them, so these buttons will come up, and then the other ones that were never picked, they'll be disconnected. They'll have their other sort of networks over there. And then you can take this little thing and you should have a sense that there'll be this person here, and then one string removed from him will be all the people that are one degree of separation, and then another layer of buttons, two strings removed, all the people that are two degrees of separation from them and so forth. And then you should have the intuition that if you take this jumble and drop it over there and photograph it again, the two photographs of the two jumbles will look different. And yet you should have the intuition that even though the photographs look different, there's something deep and fundamental which hasn't changed at all. That's the particular arrangement of the buttons with respect to each other. That's known as the topology of a network, the structure of a network, the architecture of a network. Anyway, that type of structure, there are certain mathematical ways of describing it, are seen around the world in all societies and also in elephants and whales and certain other primates. So that means there's something very deep and fundamental about that particular kind of structure to us. And it's inescapable, it's innate, it's natural and good, I would argue. Wow. So there are mathematical properties about the way that our species organizes are seeing it as a topology. I like that. It's the topology, the topological representation of how our networks. So the idea is then that other species have different topologies that they organize. No, other species have the same ones as us. Well, whales and elephants, you said, but then other species... And primates. Well, no. But you also gave us indications that octopi or all these other... Yeah, they're different. They don't have friendships. See, that's what's interesting is that certain... You can have other ways of living socially. Yeah, yeah. Like use social insects, so termites and wasps and so forth. But in ants, but the thing about those insects is that they're clones. They're genetically identical. They don't actually need friendship in order to be social. They just are nice to... It's like being nice to yourself if you're an ant. All they answer, they're genetically identical. All an ants in a colony. You think that's what it's like? Yes, yes, I do. Wow. So is that really... What? It would just be a bunch of clones? They aren't clones. We're talking like millions of clones. It's like just... They're like identical twins. Yeah, like an identical... Nicholas is building the ant structure. Yes, yes, that's right. And so then why would you need to interact with the same... Yeah, why would you need to be... Why would you need to single, I'll be nice to you and not him? You're all the same. We're all siblings. We're all identical siblings. So the ants have a different set of problems, and they're very instructive in understanding the origins of sociality, but they're different than us. The ants are different than us, and they're also different than animals that, for example, that the packs of wolves, which often are very closely genetically related. They'll be the offspring of one sort of, let's say, depends on the species, one particular male or female going back one or two generations. So they're like cousins or siblings to each other. Those are all interesting, and there's also... We talked about schools of fish and herds of cattle, and they have all kinds of other social properties too, but all of those are incredibly interesting, and we can learn a lot from them, but they are different than our problem, which is how do we organize our relationships with people who are unrelated to us? How do we avoid killing each other when there's no genetic reason to avoid killing each other? And so we have evolved a set of capacities to do that. And so then the idea would be that if we were to run another simulation of the evolution of planet Earth, that we would see a very similar mathematical topology of how we organize. Yes, and that's what I'm saying with the elephants. So the elephants ran that experiment for us, and they have all of these qualities, like they have friendship, they have cooperation, they have in-group bias, they have mild hierarchy, they have identity. Now, this is a very interesting idea. So you take it for granted that you have a unique identity as a person and that everyone does, and that you can look out at a sea of people and every one of them has a unique face, and that's how we signal our identity in our species. We use our faces, but why? I mean, it's an evolutionary luxury that we are able to have variable faces. Why don't we all have the same face, like penguins? The answer is a little bit complicated there, but yes, we're like penguins or cows or something. We look at each other, and so it turns out the regions of our genome that are responsible for making our faces are very variable and deliberately so, so that we each have a different face that we can use to signal, this is me, not someone else. And the reason we do that is so that our many reasons, so that our parents feed us and not strange kids. They can say, oh, that's my kid. Interesting. We also want you to say, oh, that's my friend, not my enemy. I need to be able to tell apart my friends' heart. Yes. So furthermore, not only do we have this evolutionary luxury of signaling our identity, using our faces, but we also have this evolutionary luxury of being able to detect the difference. Like a big part of your brain is devoted to being able to tell the difference in other people's faces. So all of this is very expensive. Why do we do that? Well, we do that in order to be able to live socially, to be able to remember who's a cooperator and who's not, who's our friend and who's not, who's our partner and who's not. If you didn't care about who you had sex with, you would need to be able to tell the difference, but you do care about who you have sex with, so you need to be able to tell one person from another, for instance. And amazingly, elephants do this and whales do this. By independent evolution, elephants have evolved the capacity to signal who they are and to recognize each other as individuals. So these qualities of identity, friendship, cooperation and so forth, teaching, which we may come to later, all of these qualities are very wonderful, special qualities that we have that natural selection has equipped us with and that are crucial to us being able to live together and make a good life. Whoa, Nicholas, it's so interesting learning from you about the variability in our genome for the way that our unique identifier of the space evolves so that we can more easily then help for the mother to be like, oh, this is my child to feed or to know friend to friend, lover, identifying that. So for example, there's even differences between, in this regard, between rats and sheep. So for example, rats can't tell their pups apart. So you could take the rat pups from a mother's little group of rat pups, swap out someone else's rat pups and she'll feed them. She can't tell the difference. The reason is that rats have evolved the capacity to detect places rather than individuals. So they feed the rat pups in this area. Why? Because when their pups are born, they're immobile. So there's no need to know one pup. This is this is this pup and this is this pup and they're mine and that's that pup and that's not mine. No, the rat pups can't move. So the rat mothers just learn, this is where my pups are in this location. I'll feed the pups here. So sneaky scientists can swap them around. But sheep, as soon as a sheep is born, it has to be able to move. Otherwise it would be prey, the ancestral sheep would have been eaten, the immobile ancestral sheep. So sheep from the moment they're born, they can move. So in a big herd, how do mothers tell their offspring so that they feed their offspring if not someone else's offspring? They have evolved, they use scent. So they can signal scent. Wow. By scent. Biology is so cool. Evolutionary dynamics are so cool. Yes. Yeah. There's so much cool stuff like that when you spend decades studying it and finding these unique insights and sharing them with people so that we gain a better understanding of not only our own true, these deep laws of our own human nature, but also how other species have evolved and all these different mechanisms like scent and when I was describing. Nicholas, explain to us what we should do about the power law dynamic that's evolved within our network topology. Because if this button string has 60 buttons on it, and all of these poor buttons over here have only by themselves are a couple. Well, they're typically will be a second cluster. So they'll be like a third string of 30. Yeah. Yeah. Second string of like 20 and then the remaining 10 or whatever will be on their own or couplets or something. I don't know the precise distribution, but that's approximately right. It's a little bit more complicated because in my example, every button had four holes, not a variable number of holes. Anyway, the parallel thing is what you're alluding to is that people vary in how many friends they have and learn how much wealth they have accumulated. That's another power law. So now what do we do about these unequal distributions of friends? I think, well, so friends, the distribution is not as unequal as you would think. We've looked at this. So on average, people have about 4.5 individuals with whom they're socially intimate. You can ask questions like who do you discuss important matters or personal matters with or and you might say your spouse and your sibling and your best friend and another best friend or who do you spend your free time with? We might ask you or we might say, I'm going to give you, we've done this. I'm going to give you something of value that you have to give to someone else you can't keep. Who would you give it to? So I could use that heuristic to question. Yeah. Yeah. So I could use that heuristic to see who would you be anonymously generous to? Right. So we've done that. For instance, we've used amongst the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, they love honey and in order to get honey, they have to do these risky things where they climb up trees. They don't have any protective equipment. Actually, they have a honey, I forgot what it's called. It's like a honey finder bird. It's one of the rare examples of a human animal pairing in nature, a symbiosis with our species where these honey birds will identify where the beehives are and then the Hadza will climb up and not the beehive down, getting stung. They'll take most of the honey, but they'll leave behind some of the, what is it called? The honeycomb. The honeycomb and the birds eat that after they got the humans to knock it down. Anyway, the Hadza love honey, but it's a real pain for them to get it. We just went to Costco and bought honey sticks. So we took these honey sticks to Hadza land in Tanzania and we gave the Hadza respondents the honey sticks and we said, you can't keep them. Who would you give them to? And we mapped the networks of the Hadza that way. Anyway, you can map these networks using different sorts of techniques and when you do that around the world, you find that about two to five percent of people have no one. When you ask them, who do you spend free time with? Can you just discuss important matters? Two to five percent say no one. In our society, too, you have those approximately that number. They might be isolated widows or they might be people who never made friends or had other problems, for example. And at the upper end of the distribution, you might have two to five percent or so, I don't remember the precise numbers, who have eight people or more. But the great majority of people have in that range and the average is about four and a half people. So it's pretty tight. But there are, when it comes to actual friendships, real relationships, when you look at other sorts of things like phone calls or Facebook friendships or Twitter followers, then you get a more power law distribution where some people, like the Kardashians or something, might have millions of followers and the rest of us just have 10,000 or 10 followers or something. And then what do you think we can do about the inequality in power law distributions for wealth or for... This is a tough one. Well, that's a different topic. I think that some inequality is a state of nature. People are born with different talents. It's called the natural lottery. Some people are born very tall and others very short. Some people very fast and others very slow. And some people are born very smart and others not so smart. And this is just a play of chance. Some of that is sometimes due to the environment. If your mother was starving when you were in utero, this will hamper your own life prospects. I should stress by that example, I should stress that by born, I don't just mean endowed genetically. You can be born to a poor parent, for example, or your birth order or your mother could have had an infection while she was pregnant with you. So there are other kind of phenomena in the environment that can affect your life chances at birth. So when I say the natural lottery, that's what I mean. I mean, things you didn't do, things that just you were gifted at birth. This was your life. Or whether you're born in Greece or in South Dakota, for example, that's what happens. That's just your lot. That's the natural. So some of that inequality that we see in our species is also seen in other species, other primate species, and is irreducible. And there may even be reasons for it. But that's different than the social lottery. The social lottery is then what the society do to you after you're born. And are you in a society which, for example, exacerbates the natural inequality or compensates for it? So here's an example. Let's say some people are born blind and some are not blind. That's a working of the natural lottery. But then what does the social lottery do? Does it build a society in which we have brailed books and auditory, audible stoplights and elevators? And do we compensate for the natural lottery in a beneficial way, reducing the inequality? Or we build the neural prosthetics? Yes, or do other technologies. Or do we invest money in restoring sites to people who are born blind, if that's possible in the distant future? Or do we build a society that exacerbates it? It's sort of every man for himself kind of society, which then all of a sudden then widens the gap between the sighted and the unsighted. So the social lottery is different than the natural lottery. So in a way we could think about it like when we see the power law of wealth that inequality that's occurring, are we seeing the people that are find themselves at this very end of having so much of a surplus of wealth? Do we see them building things incrementally that help themselves become more wealthy? Or do we see them building the things that compensate for the wealth and equality to where people at the lower end of the distribution have more degrees of freedom and more opportunities for them to pursue their own North Star and creative endeavoring, these types of things? Yes, yes, that's right. That's a cool way to view it. Yes, and it's not just the people at the top, but it could also be the state, state actors. I mean, are you in a state that attempts to, for example, redistribute wealth or not, and or grow wealth in certain ways that are beneficial to the bottom or grow wealth in certain ways that are not beneficial to the bottom, etc. Now some, we have done some experiments looking, there's something called the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of inequality. It goes from zero to one. Zero is perfect equality, everyone has the same. One is perfect inequality, one person has all the wealth and everyone else has nothing. And typically the Gini's range from, let's say, zero to about 0.4 would be American or Moroccan level of inequality and 0.2 would be sort of Scandinavian level of inequality. When people have gone to hunter-gatherer societies that live as we did in the ancestral way, forager societies, and those people tend to have very few possessions, often because they have the very mobile, so there's not a lot of stuff they can take with them, and they also don't have farm or cattle, you know, they don't have domesticated animals. So they have very few markers of wealth at all, but even in them there is some inequality in terms of their assets. So that is studying the burial grounds and things like that. Or the good, someone has a big bow and arrow and someone doesn't, someone has 10 arrows, someone has 8, etc. So they're inequality, their Gini's about 0.12, for instance. But even in those societies, you know, if you interview them and you say, well, who's a good hunter, they'll say he's a good hunter and he's not. Natural lottery or social lottery. Your father taught you to be a good hunter, his father did not teach him to be a good hunter. So there's always some variation, and in fact, in Blueprint I talk a little bit about how mild hierarchy or moderate egalitarianism is also a necessary part of a well-functioning society. Societies that are absolutely equal tend not to function well, they're very chaotic. Someone's good at one skill and they are great to then go and teach other people that skill, and then I pick up a different skill and I help them with that skill that I know, and they help me with the skill that they know, and we form into the hierarchies of competence that then help us do specific attributes that make the entirety of the civilization function well with all its unique components, because we're all uniquely equipped in those competence hierarchies. Right, so you're exactly right. There could be that type of complementarity, and there have been some arguments about how variation in human beings, like, you know, you're strong and I'm smart, or you can see and I can, you know, row, right? So on the, you know, on the Argonauts, you know, Jason famously had one guy who could see very far. He had fantastic vision. You don't need all 10 of the sailors to see far. Just one is enough to see where the shore is. The rest have to be able to row, and you need one guy who can navigate by the stars, right, and so forth. So you can form groups, or for example, ancestrally, you could have some people who are very good at locating prey, and other people who are very good at like spearing the prey, let's say. So you're talking about complementarity, but it doesn't just need to be that way, because sometimes an exceptional individual can generate benefits for the people around them, even without any complementarity. So for example, a simple example of this might be someone who can, who knows how to make a fire. So we're all 10 of us in a group, we're cold. One guy makes a fire for himself, even selfishly, but then we all benefit from the fire, right? We can all warm ourselves by the same fire. So we don't even need to give him anything. He's happy to do that. He makes a fire just for himself, but he creates what's called an externality now that the rest of us can benefit from. So anyway, there are many advantages living socially. Okay, okay, I like that one. All right, I want to, so much of Blueprint and so much of what now the study of Indigenous culture is more deeply around the planet is showing to us, which is that we come from this same origin. We come from the same source. I'm curious what your thoughts are on us all coming from a same source or a same origin and what that can do to unite our species? Because you look back, you're like, who is your parents, their parents, their parents, my parents, my parents, my parents, and you just keep going back and back and back to the evolution of life in the first place. Well, there's a lot of discoveries right now in physical anthropology. The origin of our species keeps getting pushed back. So even 30 years ago, it was thought that Homo sapiens sapiens, our particular species, was 50,000 years old. But now people believe that anatomically modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years. And a lot of the new genetics that is being done on discovered bone fragments shows that we still spread out of Africa, but there were probably multiple migrations. And more importantly, we interbred with Neanderthals and Homo florensis and other other hominids that had preceded us or succeeded us out of Africa. So the story is changing even as we speak. And so some of the variation across humans may relate to interbreeding with some of these other hominid species. But in general, the way you told it is correct that if you go back far enough, we all of us are descendant from the same ancestral group of hominids. And that's just sort of pleasing in a way. Even the seed of life. And even the seed of life. Yeah, well, if you go all the way back. Yes. Well, yeah. So we can speculate about where life came from. And Nicholas, then the question would then become is, and this is what so many of the indigenous cultures are pointing out, is that is our species disconnection from the origin and how we all come from that same source? Is that the reason why we have so many of the issues in our civilization today? No, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, first of all, even among other some of the other animals we discussed earlier, you know, so one pod of killer whales who have identity and cooperation and friendship and all these qualities can be rather mean to other pods of killer whales. And, you know, they're not humans. Same with chimpanzees, chimpanzees, groups of chimpanzees have this just like we do have this sort of tribalism, this sort of in group bias, you know, us versus them, and they'll patrol the perimeter of their turf and they will kill and eat other chimps that they that they murder. So, but it is our highest potential pinnacle state of being to embody that deepest sense of empathy for the other that is with their unique expression, artistic expression of existence on this Well, I would agree with that spiritual claim, but I would dispute, I mean, there's a kind of you're sort of sneaking in a kind of teleology there where you're imagining that, you know, that that is the only or right way. My claim at the beginning was not that natural selection wanted to make a good to endow us with these qualities. My claim is only that these good qualities counter man the bad ones, which also exist. And And the claim of the indigenous would then be something along the lines of that because the species has deviated away from this natural spirit or source of our origins is so much of the reason why we have many of the issues that we have in our world. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's a possible explanation. I think that that I think that there are ways in which the worlds we make for ourselves now because of our capacity for culture, which we innately have the ability to be a cultural animal is itself a product of natural selection. So we can each fashion these cultures, we can make these enormous technological civilizations. And I do think that those civilizations, there are aspects of them that can alienate us from our roots and certainly feel alienating. So for example, imagine for hundreds of thousands of years we evolved to live in groups where to encounter strangers might have been dangerous. And to be with people we know well, we were evolution shaped us to value that and feel good about that. So to be with friends gives us this warm feeling. And so we want to be with our friends. And so the argument would be that friendship is enhances our survival. Being with a group of friends is good. You can hunt prey, you can defend yourself against others. So we come to feel, hey, it's good to be with friends because those people who felt it was good to be with friends and hang out with friends were more likely to survive compared to those people who are indifferent to their presence of their friends. Okay, so you can construct that whole argument about how we have these these warm feelings. So now you take a creature like that and you put that creature in a modern world in which we interact with each other, not authentically and face to face as human beings, but in roles like bureaucracies, you go to meet someone at the DMV. And that person doesn't know you and treats you imperiously. Or you move among strangers on a street, for example, or you go to a workplace and you have superficial inauthentic interactions with other people, all of which are products of modernity. And those make a creature like us sense danger. We find that alienating. We find that inconsistent with our nature. We find that discombobulating. We sense that that is potentially a dangerous and unwholesome set of social interactions. And so we crave a kind of authenticity and real face to face interactions. So in that regard, I would I would agree with your point. Yeah. And similarly with the amount of light pollution that's in the metropolis is the children are born without ever seeing the cosmos. The children walking into a grocery store exchange a sheet of paper for the goods instead of knowing how to grow them from the soil. These are very raw disconnections from source and from the breaths of air that sustain us. The gulps of water that do is I think such a pertinent point from the indigenous culture. Now, okay, here's a really good one that I want to talk about. So at least a little bit we need to talk about this. The meme gene interplay. So meaning that the way that we have now told the stories the way that we have now built tools that have shaped us we've built cities that have shaped us. This is actually directly from these artificial cities what we were just talking about how that's shaped us. So in the memetic evolution, cultural evolution is just moving way faster the devices that are everywhere now that are shaping us and the way that we socially interact way faster than the slower genetic pace of evolution. How do you see that interplay between memetics and genetics and even people that are choosing to just be like like in Silicon Valley and so many other places they're like I need to climb up the competence hierarchy. I'm not having children for a long time maybe even not ever I just have to keep climbing this competence hierarchy. I have to spread these memes these ideas all eight billion people are my children my brothers and sisters I will spread ideas to them rather than having one child and spreading ideas to them. What are your thoughts on things like that? Okay, well I can go in two directions with that. First of all this whole notion of memes has gotten far from its original sort of more narrow meaning which I think Dawkins was trying to argue for which is a sort of self replicating idea just like a gene is a replicator right it's in a host and it replicates itself. So I think one of the most famous examples of this was the meme that kill the infidel so kill individuals who don't share your religion. That's a very powerful idea because if people don't share your religion you kill them and there are fewer of them so therefore people with your religion that have the belief kill those that don't have your religion become more numerous. But memes has now come to me just sort of ideas that spread you know from my brain to your brain for example and there's a sense in which that's the case but I'd like to then broaden that and address more directly your question which is this notion of gene culture co-evolution for which there's a ton of work being done in labs around the country. Joe Henrich is and and and LaLonde in Scotland there's some and and Boyd and Richardson and there are a lot of people that are thinking deeply about about gene culture co-evolution. So the idea here is is that that human beings have been endowed with the the capacity for culture. We we've also been endowed with the capacity to accumulate culture so we don't just distribute information and ideas laterally across space. We also distribute information across time which means that we accumulate all of the knowledge from the past so when you are born today you are born into a world in which calculus has been invented already and animals have been domesticated and someone built roads. A hundred billion humans built the civilization with forests. Not a hundred billion but that's about what the anthropologists are citing the numbers. A hundred billion people. Yeah a hundred billion people before us. No no that number can't be right. You were just giving the numbers of five plus million years of what is a per what are we definitely. Yeah yeah I don't think I think that I don't know the precise numbers but I would be stunned if there had ever been a hundred billion people had ever been lived. Well that could be right. That could be right. I don't know. It seems very high to me. Okay but anyway all those people worked so hard to produce yeah however many they were and there were a lot of them they worked very hard to produce all this stuff and we're just born and we inherited on the day we were born we get all of this stuff knowledge about the stars and about nano fabrication and about the tides and figuring out longitude and latitude and how to build roads and chisel stone and and milk cows and you know all of this stuff that other people had invented and given to us then we build on that foundation and create new stuff and transmit it and so forth. So so culture accumulates and evolves and and people experiment constantly so by chance occasionally we discover an innovation and in the book I talk about for instance cumulative culture with respect to aero poisons you know how did they how in the amazon do they make you know poison darts and the preparation of curare for example which is not easy to do you know over hundreds of years these people figured out how to prepare curare in very specific ways and very specific steps and it's this capacity for culture that actually makes us the ascendant species on the earth we have pathetic bodies our bodies would be unable to survive in all these environments and yet we can make parkas and kayaks and dig wells and we can live in deserts and the arctic and and we transmit that knowledge and it's that that capacity for culture that allows us to have a social conquest of the earth as yo wilson says anyway so all of that is happening that cultural evolution and in parallel to that we also continue to evolve as you said at a somewhat slower pace genetically but the amazing thing is in the last 30 or 40 years people have begun to understand how these two parallel systems interact and my favorite and simplest example of this is the example of the domestication of cows so so so humans have an enzyme in us called lactase that's able to digest lactose which is the principle sugar in milk and all of us have lactase as babies why because we're suckling at our mother's breast and we drink milk and we need to be able to digest the milk that our mothers feed us and after we're weaned we no longer have lactase why because there's no milk in our diet there's no reason for us to be able to digest milk in adulthood and yet billions of people today are able to do that why are they able to do that well it turns out that uh between three and nine thousand years ago human beings had a cultural innovation which is they domesticated cattle they figured out how to breed cattle and feed cattle and contain cattle and create an animal that was available to us to eat and to milk and drink the milk so those members of our ancestors who lived in a world in which they had domesticated cattle now suddenly had an those among them who could digest milk had a survival advantage they had another source of food and they had a source of clean hydration when the water was spoiled so those individuals who by chance had mutations that had sort of lactase persistence into adulthood outperformed outbred had a Darwinian fitness that was higher than those that do not and what's seen when you go and then this has been worked out by Tishkoff and other scientists when you go and you look in Africa at those populations uh in the last three to nine thousand years there's been a multiple domestications of cattle and multiple independent evolutions of the ability to digest lactose that occur in specific populations but not in nearby human populations that didn't domesticate the cattle so here we have an example of something human beings invent in historical time three to nine thousand years that changes the environment around them feeds back on then and acts as a selection pressure and and changes the trajectory of our genetic evolution now all these humans billions of them have lactase persistence and it's not just cattle there are many examples of this so it's quite possible that our invention of cities in a similar time frame is making us smarter those among us that can live in cities that have brains that allow us to live in cities may actually be getting smarter so different kinds of brains are required to live in cities let's say then to live in the country for example so here we've invented cities and again we're changing that or a simple example it might be you know medieval lens grinders invent this I would have died 10,000 years ago I would have been eaten by a lion but now I can live so I pass on my genes from myopia to my children myopia to my children and so the species is becoming more myopic because we invent glasses and indoor rooms it turns out and books and so forth so anyway gene culture co-evolution yeah well also that you gave this example you've given so many of these other examples in your writing as well where you have these little subculture pockets that develop unique skill sets based on their environments and what they need to do to survive in those environments and then that has that gene culture co-evolution that's occurring and can occur yeah that can occur and what about taking that all the way up to today with these claims about well I want to spread my memes out to all eight billion people I don't want to focus on genetics I want to focus on memes and now I have information technology so I can spread memes way faster yes so what do you what are thought well I think I mean if you're asking is the internet changing us I think we won't know the answer to that for a couple thousand years but I think yes if I had to guess could memetics be more important for climbing up competence hierarchies than genetics now yes yes I think the capacity to to manipulate information is hugely important and getting more so but a simpler example might be google glass so let's say google glass you know has facial recognition software and can call up the internet so I'm walking through down the street and the glass is detecting everyone I see and pulling up their biography and then using natural using artificial intelligence to label them friend or foe so I no longer something that was crucial for hundreds of thousands of years in our evolution which is to detect other people yeah remember we talked about that earlier detecting individual identity and knowing whether they mean you ill or well we can delegate to a technology yeah so I no longer need to be quite a social creature I can just rely on a technology to recognize other people and call up their data and tell me whether they are friendly or or mean me ill and you know feed into my ear say this person is your friend you know his name is Alan treat him well versus you know this person is a bad guy you know we find him in the criminal database you know walk away you know this kind of thing so um so that that kind of technology I think is going to reshape how we interact with each other but over very long time periods not over you know the the people you alluded to who are climbing this pyramid in their own lifetimes they're they're not going to change the species in 50 years it's a these are long horizon things but but still discernible over historical time it's it's interesting looking at what kids 50 years from now will be saying about what we used as these technological appendages and how they affected gene culture co-evolution yeah I'm sure I wouldn't say 50 years necessarily but there absolutely are things technologies that we're inventing now that are changing the fitness landscape for human beings that are enhancing the prospects of survival for some of us and not for others and faster than ever doing that process yes um but it's not just the speed it's like the impact of selection so for example elephants are evolving in real time right now to be that was a crazy example yes so right now in in the last 30 years because of human predation and elephants that don't have tusks survive elephants with tusks get killed so but that's a very powerful selection force that was hunters go out and kill these and not those there's nothing quite as powerful that's affecting us right there's not like half the population is being exterminated because they have this these set of features yes and that would rapidly weed out yeah um so some people speculate that we'll all be more religious in the future because one of the ascendant memes right now has to do with reproduction so educated people tend to have fewer and non-religious people tend to fewer children than religious people so so brains that are endowed with the capacity for religion tend to be more fecund so in this historical moment so um so you're going to get more of them and what are the future religions that don't necessarily yet exist that can potentially bring the entire species together again something like we all come from the same source we all come from the same i don't know i mean i like you know i like i like very partial to the star wars religion you know the jedi the you know these old you know the notion of a force but uh i find it very hard to imagine that human beings will converge on a single religion that doesn't seem likely to me is nicholas would you say that that this world that we live on and the entire process of going from source until here and all that is is this one big artistic expression i don't know the answer to that question what is it i mean my favorite my favorite my favorite answer to that question is in uh in uh steven hawking's a brief history of time he very nonchalantly says you know when they're working he's just trying to figure out when the big bang occurred and how and he's solving problems having to do with black holes and in that mechanical voice of his he i can't imitate and i wish i could he says while these discoveries do not shed light on whether there is or isn't a creator they do put a constraint on when he did his creating so you know i uh i don't think we can answer those types of questions with science i we're talking about this with franta i really hope that science can get to the point of being able to better poke and probe at that because then that will be a more beautiful melding between spirituality and science in the future um okay i we really need to talk about this subject um this is a lot of ways this is how i see the world our show is called simulation and uh in for a variety of reasons but one of the reasons why and we mentioned this earlier too is that it's really cool to think these thought experiments where you say well would this same topology of social networks with humans have evolved if we ran a simulation of the species again and so here's this question then to ask and and you know you kind of do this a little bit at the human nature lab you called this thing also you gave an example of what would be like a forbidden experiment so like what would it be like to evolve a simulation of a couple of humans on an island by themselves and where they didn't have any of the same endowments that we had like we have from these hundred billion or however many people that have made the world so what would how would they pick up a language how would they pick up tools how would they pick up all these things so speak to the importance of the work that that human nature lab and that that can reveal for us yeah so the the argument is that you know that if i take a human and or like a monkey and just feed it and give it water it'll be born a little thing it'll grow up and it'll have an adult type body that's innate that's like you know the the the the genes shape the structure and function of the body now you could starve the animal and get stunted growth but in a kind of wholesome environment this is the body you get because of the genes well genes don't just shape the structure and function of our minds i'm sorry of our bodies they also we're increasingly discovering shaping the structure and function of our behaviors and they don't just do that they also as i argue shape the structure and function of our societies there's a kind of innate kind of society that we're endowed to make just like there's an innate kind of body we're endowed to make and and so the question is you know how could we prove that so in a in a kind of mad scientist fantasy what we would do is is we would take a group of babies that had like no cultural learning and we would abandon them on an island and let them grow up you know plentiful food stuff and and see what kind of society they made now of course this is unethical and cruel and could not be done and it's been called the forbidden experiment you simulate it well and we do yeah we do but um and so um and but this forbidden experiment there have been times we are told that very powerful monarchs have done something similar to that for different reasons for example um Herodotus writes about a pharaoh samtik the first who wondered what kind of language was ancestral that is to say what kind of language was innate and so these monarchs would contrive to take a babies and give them to mute shepherds to raise up in the mountains and then see well what language did they speak when they grew up for example in order to understand like what what what language capacities innate within us so obviously we can't do those kind of experiments so i was trying to figure out like what would be reasonable proxies for this and one idea i had was to look at unintentional groups of people thrown together unintentionally for instance in shipwrecks and between 1500 and 1900 there were 9 000 approximately shipwrecks such a cool study during the european exploration of the world i found 20 shipwrecks that had 19 people that were isolated for at least two months and the question is when these people were thrown on this island and they had to make a society what kind of society did they make and what were the qualities of that society and what of those qualities was associated with success or failure you know did they survive or not so i found this corpus of 20 shipwrecks these examples i got all the original narratives of the survivors all the modern archaeological excavations of the shipwreck sites looking to see did they work together to build a well or a signal tower did they did they have hierarchy did they have one dwelling or several dwellings you know for the crew and the passengers for instance or the officers and the crew or whatever and to make a long story short many of these qualities that we were discussing earlier is innately fundamental in us are also seen in these examples but that wasn't the only type of thing i looked at i also looked at intentional communities for instance communes in the 1960s or communitarian movements in the 19th century you know the shakers for example or the kibbutzes in israel i looked at scientific settlements so scientists that were stranded in Antarctica for to winter over groups of 30 scientists that lived in this community what kind of social order did they make for themselves pitcairn for instance or the shackleton expedition so many many examples and then finally in my lab we've developed speaking most closely to simulation we've developed a kind of software that's integrated with amazon mechanical turk so we can we in a godlike way can create temporary artificial societies of real people and tens of thousands of people we basically paid small amounts of money to from amazon mechanical turk but we've also done this with other sources of subjects and they can come to our laboratory and we can in a godlike way control like engineer the society they are in to have let's say this topology a very natural topology of social interactions or an unnatural topology and drop them in and say okay which does better are people when they're dropped into a natural topology better able to cooperate yes if they're dropped into an unnatural topology no they won't cooperate maybe even in even more communal topology it could cooperation be even better maybe and we are doing some new experiments to see if we can increase cooperation very good question so we're doing all of that work so we created artificial societies and across all those examples unintentional societies intentional societies artificial societies again and again we find that human beings innately are equipped with certain capacities to make particular kinds of social order and furthermore that the social order is very is good and universal and then what other ways would you manipulate the artificial environments that people are going into to see if we could you gave the example potentially increasing cooperation what other unique insights would you would you say you in the lab are most interested in exploring with tweaking those environments okay so one of things we're very excited about right now is our research on what we call hybrid systems of humans and machines so we're doing lots of experiments in which we we create systems of people into which we interspersed some bots let's say and so you then create a hybrid system of humans and machines that are interacting on a level playing field and what we're trying to do in my lab is develop forms of artificial intelligence particular forms so we're not interested in developing super smart ai to replace human cognition like alpha go for example that can play go or the poker playing ai which is unbelievable no we're not we're not inventing super smart ai to replace human cognition we're developing dumb ai to supplement human interaction so the question is can we develop machines that when we interspersed them into humans because the humans are smart the machines act like catalysts lowering the activation energy and facilitating the interactions or reactions between humans let me give you some examples so a very simple example might be alexa or other kinds of personal assistance people don't realize that those assistants are programmed to facilitate your interaction with that assistant and so that assistant for instance is programmed to be very obedient it doesn't require you to say please siri or thank you know that stuff so you then get and trained to behave very rudely and then you leave your assistant and you go into the real world and you interact with other humans and now maybe you're rude so this machine is changing your interactions not with it but with other humans so we need to think about how we program these machines to make you let's say more polite rather than less polite yes even more creative or whatever more deeply pursuing your own divine for instance all these things for instance exactly so we need to be mindful of the fact that as we introduce these social machines in our midst they are transforming how we interact not with them but with each other and this happens for example with autonomous vehicles so so right now the concern is how do how should the autonomous vehicles be programmed to maximize the safety of the people in the car but actually maybe what we should be concerned about is how should the autonomous vehicles be programmed to optimally modify the human driver's behavior on the road so can we program these cars in a way that changes your driving behavior to make you less likely to crash into him it's not about whether you're less likely to crash into this the driverless car it's about how the driverless car changes your your ability to crash into someone else so we are experimenting in my lab right now with these types of ideas hybrid systems of humans and machines or humans and bots online and we have a whole suite of ideas on ways to develop and test bots to reduce racism online reduce the problem of fake news online increase cooperation online increase sharing of information within firms and so forth and so on I love how you have that meta perspective on the way that we're developing the robots and a eyes and being very aware and vigilant of the way that we interact with them and how that's going to influence the way we interact with each other outside of that relationship and that's so evident already with our devices that we have and our level of aggression or less empathy when we're typing behind the keyboard versus looking at someone else in the eyes and yeah it's seeing that yeah yeah that's okay um okay and just a quick questions that we like asking on the way out of the show uh do you think we're in a simulation we could be but I don't think we are and why I just don't think the fabric of the physical world is consistent with an entity that could design the universe but it's unprovable so and then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world consciousness and why well because that's how we are endowed with the ability to see the world right and to think about it I mean absent consciousness I don't I don't think we would even be we wouldn't even be able to ask these questions so I think I mean there are there's a whole category of things which I'm sure you've thought about which arise because of what's known as the phenomenon of emergence right so holes have properties not present in the parts the hole is greater than some of its parts and so the fact that you can take a set of neurons and interact and connect them in a particular way and because of that pattern of connection you get consciousness is miraculous to me consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal tissue and then there's also the panpsychist ideas of consciousness is everything is all that is yes these are very interesting things I Nicholas this has been such a pleasure talking to you it's been an honor having you on our show thank you thank you so much for having so great that's great thank you for all of your incredible work in the space and also thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode let us know what you're thinking and also check out the links in the bio below check out the links to Nicholas's pages as well as his lab his twitter profile and his newest book blueprint the evolutionary origins of a good society please check that out and go and share more conversations with your family your friends your co-workers people online about the subjects that we discussed today about our blueprint for goodness go and share those everyone and also support the artist entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders the organizations around the world that you believe in support them and help them grow support simulation our links are below to our patreon our cryptocurrency link our paypal link you can design cool merch and get paid as well support us and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace that's a wrap thank you so much for having me that was great