Nicholas Christakis || The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

today we have Nicholas Christachus on the podcast. Christoccus is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science in the departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering.

He's also the co director of the u L Institute for Network Science, the co author of the book Connected, and most recently author of the book Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, which on its first week became a New York Times bestseller. Nicholas, so great to chat with you today. Thank you so much for having me Scott boy, you are involved in lots of departments that yeah, which department are you not part of? Is it? Like?

What are you not part of? Over there? Well? I have you know, I H. I think one of the benefits of an academic life is the ability to explore lots of ideas and fields. You know. I think depth is important, but so is breadth. Typically people begin with depth, right they start their career, and they're very focused. They learn something in detail, they really try to master or

discover new knowledge about something. But then I think ideally you put your head up and you start looking around and explore other fields, initially perhaps be adjacent to your own, and then further and further afield. And so in my own case, you know, as my career has an folded, I mean I always was interested in a variety of topics, but I have been progressively able to read more broadly

and become interested more broadly. And because of the academic life allows us this, I've been able to pursue a number of fields. I think chemistry is probably next up on Oh that's interesting. Yeah, there's so many different levels of analysis to address the issue. Well, I think I can say, the good society. But yeah, what would you say is like the issue though for you, I don't want to put words in your mouth. Is that what's

the common theme? Yeah? Well I think that. I mean, since you frame the opening question that way, I mean I I'll answer it in two ways. First of all, I will say that for too long, in my view, scientists have been overly interested in the dark side of human nature, you know, in our capacity for tribalism and selfishness and hatred and violence. But equally we are capable of love and friendship and cooperation and teaching and learning.

And so I think one of the kind of bigger frames with respect to the intellectual scope of the book, as you asked, has to do with this desire to push back using a number of fields evolutionary biology and the social sciences, genetics and network science, to push back at this conception of human beings as being inveterately bad, because in fact, the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs, or we wouldn't be living socially.

If if I always came near you and you know you killed me, or were mendacious to me or brutal to me, I wouldn't approach you, and nobody would approach anyone. We'd live solitary lives. And the second big way, like the knowledge from all of these diverse fields, is relevant to the problem before us, which is, you know, how and why do we live socially? Is the following you know. I think there's been a lot of interest lately, especially because of Stephen Pinker's work on the social effects of

the Enlightenment. So there's no doubt that in the last two hundred years, given the developments, the philosophical ors and scientific discoveries associated with the Enlightenment, that human beings are living vastly better lives. That we are safer, we're less murderous, we live longer, we have better health, have better wealth in every possible regard. But I don't think we need to look solely at historical forces to understand the origins

of a good life. I think actually, deeper, more powerful, more ancient forces are at work as well, evolutionary forces that have shaped shaped our evolution shaped us as an animal, shaped our capacity for living socially, and in fact equipped us with all of these qualities to be good to make good society societies that are on balance further our interests. So this breadth of fields I think is required if one is to understand a problem of this kind, ranging,

as I just said, from history to evolutionary biology. And so that's why I think the way in which this diversity of the fields, perspectives and interests can be useful, and in fact, I hope is captured by the book Wonderful.

What broad were the goals you have there set out for yourself, But you also have a sort of I see this ravenous curiosity aspect of use not just the caring about making a side a better place, but it seems like you really want to triangulate as much sources of information to try to get the truth as possible. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean I think that is fair. I think the truth is difficult to see. I mean, I think the one thing we should stipulate from being

I think the truth is knowable. I think it's out there. I think there's an objective reality. I recognize that science is imperfect human activity, you know, prone to failures, but I think it's a falsehood. It's a nonsense to believe that there is no out there out there. But it's hard to see. And I think what you see depends

on where you stand. Well, I mean, I think the more places you stand, the more perspectives you have on what it is that you're trying to see, the more likely you are to see it, the more likely already see it correctly. I think it's quite dangerous to stand in one perspective. You may not appreciate what's going on.

In fact, if we even use a metaphor from physics of inertial frames, you know, you if you're standing in a train and you juggling balls, your whole world is this train and moving train, and the whole world is these balls that are juggling, and you just think they're moving at a certain velocity through space, But actually an observer outside the train, in a different inertial frame, sees that the balls actually have a completely different kind of motion than you think. So you know, what you see,

of course depends on where you stand. But I think additional perspectives, as we said, you know, shed more light on the truth. Yeah, for sure. So your book is simultaneously wlantly realistic about human nature while optimistic about human nature. So I like that, by the way, I like that, And then that you don't always you always kind of maybe see one or the other. So I'm going to

like combine two statements from your book. So the very interesting question you pose, which I tweet it out because I thought it was such an interesting question, can you love your own group without hating everyone else? And then here's another question you asked you posed in your book how can crowds be a force for good? And I was wondering if you could just kind of riff on the integration of those two questions. Well, I think that we evolved this capacity for tribalism or in group bias

or hamathhai. These are slightly different concepts, but they're all similar. They're the idea that you know, we prefer the company of people we resemble, or we think more highly of the company of people we resemble. Resemble defined in whatever way it needn't be you know, superficial characteristics. It could be your religion or your language, or where you're from, or what kind of food you like, or all kinds

of traits that people. You know, there are these famous experiments that but it done with toddlers that I discussed in the book. You randomly assign toddlers t shirts of a different color, and all of a sudden, the blue T shirt wearing kids think the red T shirt wearing kids are less deserving of toys and are you know, morally deficient just from this minimal group manipulation of the

trivial assignment of different T shirt colors. So it's very easy to elicit this us versus them inclination and human beings, and it is, as I discuss, this, in group bias is a part of our human nature. It's unavoidable. There are arguments that I discussed in the book, and I don't think the science has settled on the evolutionary function of this predilection. So some people think that, and I think it's probably true that the evolution of cooperation required

the evolution of in group bias. And so in order to have kindliness within you need to have you needed to have war likeliness without. That is to say, in order for me to be able to selectively cooperate with individuals and get the benefits of cooperation, I need it to be able to define my group. And therefore, in my group we cooperate with each other, whereas between groups we have animosity or we don't call great with each other.

First point. The second point, however, is that the you know, sort of indifference to other groups is distinct from hatred of other groups. So it's still unclear. You know, you could have a preference for your own group and neutral feelings to other groups. So the origins of this sort of animosity. You know, there's a big difference between thinking ill of other groups and sending them to gas chambers.

And you know, so we still don't idea, I think, have a full accounting of the origins of that kind of hatred, although we can know it's historical impact. We know that malicious leaders can whip groups into a frenzy. They can, as I talk about in the book, they can exploit this innate tendency in people and manipulate it so that they actually develop hatred of other people. So the first I think my answer to you is that in group tribalism and in group bias are an inherent

part of our human nature. But I don't see a necessary reason for us to hate other people. And furthermore, natural selection has equipped us with two other abilities to efface the impact of tribalism, and so one of the challenges in living socially is the ability to get along with other people and to derive benefits from being near other people. And so we shouldn't be surprised to find that we have several tools that make it easier for us.

For example, one of the arguments I make in the book is that the capacity for friendship to have a special attachment to particular individuals is also connected with the evolution of cooperation. So rather than cooperating blithely with every other human, the population has what is known as structure. So we're not all jostling around like in a herd of cattle, each of us cooperating with everyone else. No,

each of us has our own unique friends. Everyone has some friends, and each of us is cooperating with those friends, and it kind of congeals the whole population into this cooperative matrix because we've added this structure. And there's a lot of experimental and mathematical evidence that the addition of network structure to a population facilitates the emergence of cooperation. So it's not just that the definition of us versus

them facilitates cooperation. Network structure can do it too. Furthermore, and now I'll get to the answer. If you think about populations as having like some large population composed of individuals. So at the top you have this like large population at the bottomy of the individuals, and in between you have groups within the population. If you find the groupingess problematic, as I do, there are a couple of other tools that evolution has equipped us with to cope with this.

So one solution is to go up a level to the level of the large group. Because we can define the boundaries ourselves. They're not God given, they're not innate. We can expand those boundaries and come to think about being members of the entire group. And if you think about our history in the United States, you know, there was a kind of idea about the America and project that anybody could be an American. And you know, to talk Phil talks about us being a nation of Joiners.

You can self define as an American. We all have, you know, this kind of eplur of us. You know, we're all united, and so you can exploit this tendency for us to be affiliated with groups and define the group up so that you, let's say you're defined on the level of nationality rather than the level of constituent group or and or you could go down a level

to the level of individuals. Because one of the other things that's really unusual about oursist a species, is that we have this capacity to express and recognize individual identity. In fact, one of the paradoxes of social life is that we have to be able to express individuality in order to live socially. So we do that with our faces. Each of our faces is unique. It's actually evolutionarily costly. It's a luxury that we all have unique faces. It

needn't have been that way. We all could have had the same face. Why do we not all have the same face? We all have different look in faces. And you can recognize your friends from the appearance of their faces, but you cannot recognize your friends from the appearance of their hands. And in fact, hands look more similar to each other pars. You know, each person's hands are more

similar to each other than each person's faces. Speak for yourself, yeah, yeah, So the capacity to express and recognize individual identity is evolutionarily costly. There's a lot of brain power that's going into that, and this is not a coincidence, and it is related to the essential the necessity of cooperation and living socially, you need to be able to distinguish one person another, who is my offspring and who's not my offspring, Who is nice to me, who is not nice to me,

Who is my friend, who is my enemy? And so the argument here is that we can go down a level from tribalism and start seeing people as individuals, and evolution has equipped us with this capacity to recognize that we're all individuals. Go down a level. And this is in essence Martin lue King's argument that everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color

of their skin. So even in the American tradition we see we have both of these traditions, these still philosophical political traditions in our society, I would argue, which are built on these ancient, primitive evolutionary foundations, and which give us tools to combat to tribalism, which you know, I see as a depressing feature, undue tribalism, which I see

as a tribalism that involves hatred of other groups. I'm not so worried about tribalism that, you know, say, I like my group, but I'm neutral to other groups anyway. So that's my answer to that question. I don't know if it's a good answer, but it's where I'm thinking right now. Thank you. It's a very thought provoking answer, for sure, and you know it's got me thinking about

lots of different things. So one of the fields I work with in this positive psychology, and like the positi psychologists in me like almost wants to reframe your question to like, because like the whole point of positology is like negative five to zero is not the same as zero to twenty, like flourishing. So can you love your own group and well other groups? Like that's my question too, It's like not just going to neutral. Do you think

love or positive regard as zero sum? You think we're limited in our capacity to think highly of other people? That move? Absolutely not. So what I'm making a distinction here is something that I'm starting to distinguish in my work between the need for belonging and connection and the need for universal love. And you know, we can have like universal love without even like liking people, you know, Yes, So such a distinction. Well, thank you, I'm so glad

you think. So it's possible they're different feelings. I think it's possible. I love you feel we use the same word love, but perhaps we shouldn't. So I think that you're kind of love for one's love for humanity, for which I think there's a word. It's escaping me right now. The Greeks, you know, philanthropy, let's say that might be a good word to use. So philanthropy in the strict Greek meaning of the word. You know, love of human beings might be rather different than love of an individual.

So even if it's the same word love, they might two different feelings or experiences or phenomena there that you're distinguishing. That's right. And how can we, you know, have great admiration and pride for our in group while truly respecting that other people are equally admire their own in group as well, Like you know, have the society where like we kind of treat groups as sacred and recognize that our group is not necessarily the most sacred group. But

you know, like we can still have that advertise. That's very combustible, of course, right, you know, every one of the things I find solf interesting about you know, the work of the anthropologists in the twentieth century is that they spanned out around the world, as you know, of course, as part of the colonial project, and they encountered, you know, peoples all over the world and traditional you know, forager populations for example, or agropastoralists, and in most of those cases,

the people's word for their own people was the people. In other words, you know, in this language, what do you call your own group? Oh, we're the people? So everyone, you know, every group thinks are the right. So so I don't know if you're right that that philosophical stance would be entirely benign. You know, I worry that that would in fact lead rather quickly to well, wait a minute, we can't both be you know, the people. One of us has to be on top. It might perhaps too optimistic,

because I share your optimism. I'm just saying I'm not sure that's the way to achieve it. You're saying, you're saying, why don't we just try to frame the problem as one of our group is sacred, but we recognize that other groups can be sacred. That's an extra step, that's I think that's an extra demand compared to the idea we were discussing earlier, which is why can't we just have people say my group is terrific and I have

neutral feelings of quality. Yeah, because you're asking that. Not only you don't just want me to think my group is terrific. You want me to think my group is sacred. Furthermore, you want me to grant that other groups also think there's sick. I mean, maybe they can do that. I'm just I'm a little nervous about your proposal is a fair enough? You know, sometimes I can think very utopia you know about things well, you know, you know, with

hindred spirit, are utopianism as a kindred? Oh? Yes, And we're going to discuss our white triad scores later, which are some similar levels. I've been really interested in narcissism, but you know, I started off really interested in individual narcisism, but now I'm really interested in collective group narcissism. And yeah, and I think it might be relevant to this discussion. So the same principles that operate by like individual ar like.

The distinction between having a secure self esteem versus a narcissistic self esteem is the difference between just merely feeling like you're worthy, like self worth versus I am better than others. Like you can have a great, stable sense of self worth without feeling like you're better than others. But recently research psychologists had created this construct called collective narcissism, where you elevate your group as superior to other groups.

And I've just been trying to think, like, well, applying the same principles, like isn't like stable secure self esteem groups possible, Like it doesn't have to be like collective narcissism doesn't have to exist. There are people with stable self esteem who report much greater levels of happiness in

life and life satisfaction and meaning and purpose. It seems to me like there's a healthier way forward with groups where you maybe it's exactly what you're saying, like we have this you know, great pride in our group, which is great, but we don't need to rely on others for validation of that greatness, Like we don't have to constantly be telling others that were great, Like we can actually have this stable sense of pride within. So I

just wanted to just riff on this a little bit. Well, I it's a new idea to me, it doesn't or new framing of this idea to me, it doesn't striken it's crazy. I think I think that there are many emotions which we customarily or temperaments which we customarily think of as being individually based. That's white, could have collective analogs. So for example, we're accustomed to thinking about this in the terms of happiness for instance, or you know, so you can have a group can be happy and not

just an individual, or or fear. You know, a group a individual can be afraid, or a group can be panicking or rioting for example, with anger or whatever. So I think a quality like narcissism, I absolutely do think you could have a kind of collective narcissism that you're discussing now. Whether that well, I was going to say, whether that gives us additional purchase on the topic before us, I don't know, but I actually would My bias would be yes, let's approach it from that point of view

and give it and give it some thought. Thank you for entertaining it at least. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, what what can we learn about this kind of collective you know, the secure kind of sense of confidence versus the kind of deficient kind of narcissistic sense. What can we use from our understanding of these principles as has been developed in the case of individuals to understand the functioning of groups. I think that's an interesting idea. Well,

thank you. Should I summarize your argument correctly? Oh yeah, absolutely so, thank you. So many interesting intersections between psychology and the work you're doing, you know, like all the stuff psychologist do. You may a chance intersected with Molly Crockett over there at you Yeah, I know Molly. I think very highly of her. I've only met her a few times. Her lab is across the street from mine. Of course, Dan Gilbert is a very close personal friend.

I've known him for a very long time. Steve Pinker and you know, and a whole bunch of as Paul Bloom, I mean, I hang out with a psychologists. Well maybe you'll add Scott Berry Kaufman to the list today, Yes, incited to do that. Yeah. Actually, Molly Crockett's psychology podcast episode is dropping today, Yeah, and yours will drop next week. So I thought that'd be a nicely pair parent. Yes.

So you're talking in your book about the social Suite of Features of Humanity, and I was wondering if you could mention some of the members of the social suite and why you think that it's important to think this way, well, I think, I mean, the part of human nature that interests me is that part that we express inter individually. So there are of course many parts of human nature. This includes, for instance, your propensity to fear or wander lust.

Your intelligence is a part of human nature curiosity. I mean, there are lots of qualities which are instinctive or natural, which are instantiated within individuals. But the part that I'm interested in is the part that we express between ourselves inter individually, and that are relevant to our ability to live together. So which qualities, what qualities has natural selection equipped us with to be able to live socially in

the way that we do. Incidentally, these same qualities I argue in the book are found in other animals, such as elephants and whales and certain other primates, which have by convergent evolution and independently also evolved similar qualities, for example, capacity for friendship or pair bonding or cooperation and so forth,

which we'll get to in a moment. So this convergent evolution of these qualities in other animal species, other social mammals, further vindicates my confidence that these qualities are crucial parts of living socially. And so the list of these qualities includes the capacity for individual identity, which we talked a little bit about already. That paradoxically, in order to live socially,

we have to have individuality. Love. When you think of the human virtues, when you think of our virtues, they are social virtues. We don't care whether you love yourself or are kind to yourself, or are just to yourself. We care whether you love others or are kind to others, are just to others. And so our virtues are social virtues primarily. So love is the second part of the social suite. You know, the fact that we love our mates is unusual in the animal kingdom, and it's something

that's expressed into individually. Then I discussed friendship. I include friendship in this. Our capacity for friendship, again unusual in the animal kingdom. We form long term, non repri productive unions to conspecifics. Why do we do that? Other animals don't do that? We do. Elephants do it, certain whale species, certain primate species. That it's rare that we do this.

So individual identity, love, friendship, social networks. Because of our capacity to form friendships, we form ourselves into networks, something I've been thinking about it for a very long time, obviously, and these networks have very particular mathematical properties which actually confer advantages on groups in ways we can discuss if you're interested. And then continuing the list, we have what I would call a sort of a cooperation I don't

call everyone calls cooperation. Cooperation our tendency to cooperate with each other. And this creates multiplicative benefits for the individuals participating in cooperative exchanges and is the clinic core of how groups are together in group bias. This thing we've already discussed a little, This tendency to prefer and think more highly of your own group what I call mild hierarchy. So our groups are structured I think innately to manifest

mild hierarchy. And here I rely on work by many primatologists, and including some of fascinating experimental work by Jessica Flack and her colleagues manipulating primate hierarchy and exploring what happens when you eliminate hierarchy in these groups. And then I have a whole argument in the book relying on natural experiments with shipwrecks and so forth that looks at the role of hierarchy, and finally, our capacity for social learning

and teaching. We don't just learn. I mean many organisms learn, you know, worms can learn. A little fish in the ocean can learn that if it swims towards the light, it finds food. We learn socially, which is extremely efficient. So you can learn by putting your hand in the fire and pulling it out that the fire burns you. Or I can watch you put your hand in the fire and I learn almost as much but pay none of the cost. That's very efficient. But we don't just

learn socially. We actually affirmatively teach each other, and that also is very rare in the animal kingdom, animals that affirmatively set out to teach each other stuff. That capacity, of course, lies at the root of our capacity for culture. That's the foundation for our ability to be a cultural animal and therefore to express, in fact, to have a

manifested a kind of social conquest of the earth. I think, other than ants or something, we are the species with the widest ecological range, and we do this not because of changes in our body, but because of our capacity for culture. You know, we can make parkas and live in the Arctic and make canoes and live in the equator.

And so this capacity we have to transmit knowledge across space and time, you know, to learn over generations and preserve that knowledge is the last part of the social suite, this teaching function. So those are the eight elements of the social suite, and that I think are essential for essential parts of our nature that have shape by natural selection and that make it possible for us to live

socially the way we do. Cool. Thank you. I liked how you put that all together into like one cohesive list. That was helpful for me, So thank you. Well, so you talk about intentional versus intentional communities, can you please distinguish between those and maybe give an example of each. Well, I mean that part of the book begins with a sequence of explorations of what's been called the forbidden experiment.

So if you know, in the mind of a deranged scientist such as you and me, you know, the actual experiment would be to you know, take take a group of babies and abandon them on an island, you know, a cultural babies and abandon them on island, and somehow they would grow up, you know, without parenting let's say then we would ask, well, what kind of society would they make for themselves? You know, just like you might ask, you know, what kind of body are you innately pre

wired to make? You know, you're born with certain genetic predispositions to diabetes, towards a certain height, towards whatever. Obviously, the environment is very important. You know, if I starve you and you're a child, you won't be as tall, and you'll have other risk for diabetes and so forth altered risk for diabetes. So the environment is crucial. But you know, there's some sense in which your body is programmed to be a certain kind of body based on

the genes that you were born with. Well, the same argument might be, I do make is with respect to societies. You know what kind of society is innately part of our human nature. So the experiment that I would love to do is to you know, love to do so to speak is to you know, take a group of people and abandon them on an Now, obviously you can't

do that. It's but a monarchs of the reality TV show. Yes, And in fact, I talk about some of those examples of you know, survivor type situations that and you know, this has been called the forbidden experiment because we're not the first people to think about it. Herodotus talks about an Egyptian pharaoh that was wondering what was the kind of language we were innately pre wired, you know, was

Egyptian the language we just had to speak? And so he contried the experiment of taking some babies and as signing them to the care of a mute shepherd up in the mountains, to just see what kind of language would these babies speak when they grew up. And you know, multiple monarchs have tried this, are said to have tried this over the centuries. But obviously it's a cruel and brutal and unethical experiment. It's the forbidden experiment. So the

experiment is forbidden to us. So what can we do instead? So well, what I did is I look systematic, systematically broadly, and then I chose selectively examples that are in the book of different kinds of circumstances in which we were trying to see if you throw a bunch of people together and they're left to their druthers, what kind of social order do they make. So the second chapter of

the book begins with shipwrecks. Unintentional communities groups of people who have been stranded on an island, are in a coast and are tasked with making some social order. And between fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred I was able to find twenty cases which at least nineteen people had been stranded for at least two months unintentionally. You know, they didn't set out to do this. They were thrown on

this island. And then I got all the records I could about them, and the archaeological excavations of the rec sites, and try to make some inferences about what kind of social order did they make? And then the next chapter considers intentional communities. You know, people who like set out deliberately, maybe like we were talking about earlier, you know, our utopian inklings. They set out, you know, to set up communes,

you know, utopian communes. And people have been doing this since at least Roman times, you know, have been saying this society is screwed up. You know, I'm going to go make my own society. And I look at those examples. I look at the Pitcairn mutiny on the Bounty and the Pitcairn pitcare and settlement. I look at colonies or groups of scientists who have self isolated on the South Pole. You know who, you know, they have to live together for ten months. You know, what kind of social order

do they make? What kind of networks do those scientists make? Some of those pictures are in the book. I look at Kubutz's I look at a variety of examples of that.

And then in the fourth chapter I talk about artificial societies, And here I use some of our own work, looking at online communities, for example virtual you know, like Second Life and World of Warcraft, stuff like that, but also some experiments we've been doing in my laboratory over the last ten years, in which we've written this software that allows us to create temporary artificial societies of real people.

Over twenty thousand research subjects have come through our lab, have been dropped into this little world and various worlds, and we've experimented with you know what happens when you put people in an unequal society versus an equal one. We give them real money, and some people are made rich and poor, and we vary the Gini coefficient and so forth. And after I'm looking at all of this, the argument that I make is that actually the variation

is extremely small. The kind of social order that we make occupy is a tiny fraction of the parameter space. You know, Like if you imagine parameterizing this space of all kinds of social order, you might get you think that actually people have many different ways of living, but they do not, in fact have many different ways of living socially. So the question is how and why did that come to pass? So culture is not infinitely valuable,

is that what you're saying? To one degree, some elements are, you know, for example adornment patterns of adornment, but some elements are not. So every culture we go to we find love and friendship, and I look at the cross cultural evidence for these things, and cooperation for instance, to differing degrees within a certain range, and so on. Every culture we go to we find teaching and learning. So these are why these items belong, I think in the

social street. When we go to every culture, we find the capacity for religion everywhere, But of course we don't find the same religion everywhere. So that's how I try to get at, you know, the underlying core features. Incidentally, this idea about you know, is there a universal human culture is another topic that anthropologists have been thinking about for at least a century, and I review some of

that in the book as well. And there is a kind of a sense in which if you could itemize, like we mentioned adornment, so you can talk about all the patterns of adornment and all the patterns of subsistence, and all the patterns of political organization, and all the patterns of you know, magical thinking. And you make a long list of religion, and you know, do you have many gods or a poltheistic or monotheistic? And you array all of these traits and you and look at all

the combinations of these traits. There are more combinations than there are stars in the universe, truly, and yet when you anthropologists fan out across the globe, they don't find every possible combination. You only find a small subset of the combinations. And once again, I think this is for

evolutionary reasons. That's fascinating. I was really happy that you brought into the artificial communities discussion a discussion of the time machine, because that was like my favorite book growing up as a kid, and I used to write different. I used to be in a cretive writing as a kid, and I used to write different alterations of that in different universes of that. So how like that social arrangement, Like, do you think that's like a fair representation of like

how human nature would react? Like is that actually like I know it's science fiction, but well, I mean I used I look at science fiction as well as a source of ideas for different types of social arrangements. And there's a sort of I actually had. I had written a whole chapter on that, and that got cut down to a few pages. The book was this book was like twice as long as it is now originally if you can believe it, I do believe it. Trusts me writing a book. Yeah, yeah, it's really hard to get

it shorter. And it's you know, it's it's one hundred and twenty or one hundred and twenty five thousand words and it was originally like two hundred thousand words and my editor just you know, had a conniption. God bless her, Tracy. I would have written, as my editor is, Tracy Bhard. But as Mark Twain said, right, I would have written shorter book, but I didn't have the time. I think he said I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time. But anyway, so it's hard

to get things down. So anyway, I had a long, long section on science fiction, which I love science fiction, and usually usually the one of the very common tropes in science fiction is that, you know, when they're trying to make a creepy social arrangement, they have us live socially like insects, right, So that's considered to be really creepy and no mammal lives, you know, And part of the reason, of course, is all the use social Insects are clones, so we have a different challenge of living

socially because we're all genetically different, whereas you know, the termites and the wasps and the bees and the ants, they're clones, so that is different. Anyway, So I look at science fiction, I look at a time machine, which is, you know, extraordinary levels of hierarchy in that society, and yeah, too much, right that we have mild hierarchy we were talking about earlier. So anyhow, well, it'd be amazing to see if humans last that long, as I don't think

that's in our future. No, I think you want us to be cannibalizing each other. You want to no, no, know. What I was saying is like, you know, I forget the date that he went in the future, but humans still in years? Yeah, I'm saying, will Homo sapience still be there in a hundred That's all I'm saying. I think if we're not, if we don't nuke ourselves, or we don't we don't have a kind of machine intelligence,

it's possible. Of course, this is total speculation. It's possible that a million years from now the world will be populated by sentient machines and we will either be dead or enslaved, and and those machines will think about us the way we think about you know, single cell organisms, as being a kind of transitional phase in the distant past before we now have this sort of ascendant species

on the planet. And those machines will think of us as, you know, as sort of the necessary transitional step before we get to the higher are you know, more perfect

kind of arrangement. Well, I would hope that the machines would have, you know, teach in their history classes in high school the fact that we're the ones that, like, you know, we created them, yes we did, and but then but then you know, now they're there, and you know, like if chimpanzees could speak or think, good point, they might say, you know, our ancestors gave rise to these humans.

Isn't that terrific? It's such a good point. Do you think that the chimpanzees would that are in our cages or whose habitat we are destroying, would be so grateful for having, you know, given rise to us. No, so, now, of course there's more volition in them. I mean, these

are very speculative ideas. But if those don't happen, if we don't have nukes, we don't kill ourselves this way or some other way globally, and if we don't give rise to these machines, I think that our species will continue to evolve, but we will be about as different one hundred thousand years from now from us now as we are now from one hundred thousand years ago. Homo sapien sapiens. And that's the prediction I'm going to make. And anyone who proves me wrong can come back and

let me go. Well, you know, maybe in our lifetime zone will create a time machine. Who knows exactly doubt that it's unlikely. Thought of a good segue to what you were just talking about, because you do, you know, just to be a bit more hopeful about how we treat other primates. You do have a whole section your book on primate friendships I thought was very touching. I thought maybe you could talk about elephant friendships a little bit.

One of the I mean, the book looks at length at social order in other social mammals, and one of the sort of the meta arguments that I try to make in the book is that is that if we can share the capacity for friendship with elephants, we can share it with each other. In fact, the paradoxically, the more similar we are to these other animals, the greater and deeper our understanding of our own common humanity can be.

You know, we are all human beings, and we share these deep and fundamental qualities all of us with each other. And the proof of that is actually the fact that, you know, like I said, if we're similar to elephants,

we must be similar to each other. And these elephants, you know, which have been beautifully studied by Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole, two of the leading ethologists of elephants, whose work who I really admire also Sherman de Silva, who's a young ethologist, a young elephant expert who I hope to collaborate with, who's done some amazing work with the elephants in Sri Lanka. You know, these elephants. Sort of studying or looking at elephants can give us paradoxically

insights into ourselves. So the book has had a long exploration of elephant society, of chimpanzee society, of orca and dolphin society. I have a great admiration for the ethologists that study cetaceans. I mean, I think I have problems

with data collection. Imagine if your research has to take place, you know, if you're study of the social organization that has to take place, you know, like you would have to work, you know, in the cold and underwater to observe your subjects Now, ethologists who study Wales like Hal Whitehead or David Lusseau, whose work I also greatly admire, who mapped the networks of these animals and study their communication patterns and so forth. You know, do that anyway.

So the point though is is that it's fascinating to look at at these animals and how they interact with each other. But furthermore, it's also interesting that our relationships to social animals is rather different than our relationships to non social animals, and so there's a there's there's an interesting history of examples of human animal friendships, typically between humans and animals that themselves live socially or at least in groups. So a lot of the creatures that we befriend.

So you know, there's an Jane Goodall's relationship with David Graybeard, the first chimpanzee that befriended her, and she speaks of him as our friend, or our relationships with even with our pets, you know, dogs and horses for example, are herd animals now cats as usual as a special exception, you know. But anyway, I don't want to push it too far, but the point is that we we have a capacity for friendship that we even sometimes apply across species to our pets. Yeah, and it's a very it's

a very good point. And really it's nice to kind of like shift our perspective. Zoom out. You know, we can use you zoom in in your book, and you also zoom out is constant. I feel like you're constantly going back and forth. You know, it's really cool. So let's zoom. Let's loom out again to humans and our natural and social laws. You know, you make the argument, well a lot of people made this argument, but you emphasize that our evolution has shaped not just our bodies

and minds, but also our societies. And you know, I think about like how we've how we've designed our society, and how we justify various aspects of our manifestation. I should say, justify various manifestations of our human nature. You know, one question you ask the world is how is God to be justified in the face of all the evil in the world? World? You know, how do you answer that? How do you answer that question? Well, I'm not a theologian, but I refer I make use to some of these

struggles that the theologians have had. So that's what is known as the problem of theodicy. How has God to be vindicated or justified in the face of the manifest evil and suffering in the world. And I'm not a panegloss, right, I'm not a Pollyanna, you know, thinking this is the best of all possible worlds. And you know, because I'm

fully aware that every century is replete with horrors. You know, we've had the Inquisition, and we've had pagrums, and we've had the Holocaust, and we've had you know, horrible leaders, and we've had Paul Pott and you know, and and and the Rwanda genocide. And I mean, it's just awful. We are also awful, we humans. We're awful to each other. We are vile and full of hatred and propensity to violence and everything else. So I'm well aware of all of this. So in theology, this is seen as a

problem of theodicy. How can a beneficent god or omniscient or omnipotent god possibly permits such suffering or evil? And the theologians struggle with this. It's a kind of branch of theology. But I see Blueprint as a work of socioticy. It's a vindication of our way of being social despite all the failings of our living socially, How are we to come to understand the good in human society despite

the bad? And another analogy might be by reference to this Japanese philosophy and esthetic known as wabi sabi, which is to see this aesthetic. You know, in Western aesthetics, we might value symmetry and perfection. But there's a branch of Japanese aesthetics that sees imperfection is very beautiful. So that a pot that has a little crack in it, or a bent tree, for example, or especially natural phenomena, or you know, a cobblestone streak, that's beautiful because it's imperfect. Right,

there's a kind of beauty to a cobblestone street. So that's the argument I would make about society. I think I think society is beautiful and full of beautiful things like love and cooperation and friendship and teaching, despite its imperfections. In fact, in some ways maybe those things are even more beautiful or more perfect given are imperfections. So I see this as a work of sociotsy. It's a vindication of our confidence in the good of society despite its failings.

It's very hopeful. Yeah, you believe in humanity, and that's why you scored high on my late Triad scale, where one of the fastest is literally faith in humanity. You know, you know, my mother was a She was originally trained as a physical chemist. She died when I was twenty five and I was forty seven, And I tell some stories about her in the book here and there, and

she went back to school in the nineteen seventies. She got her was working on her PhD in physical chemistry at Yale in the sixties, and she went back to school to Howard University in Washington, d c. To get a PhD in clinical psychology in the seventies. So while she was training before she died, she would use us children as guinea pigs. So I took the Thematic apperception test, I took the MMBI, I took all the risk intelligence tests,

I the ror shark test. I had every damn test administered to me during my preteen years that you can imagine. And I acquired from that a kind of healthy respect and amusement for an amusement by these tests. So when you said would you like to take my test, I'm like, yes, I would love to take your test. And so I did. And you know, I don't know what it means exactly, but you know I was happy to do it. It It just confirms the sort of spirit that underlies your book. OK, yeah,

you know this not a hypocrit. No, you're not a hypocrite. I wanted to get your thoughts about something because I

wanted to circle back. I feel like I left something unsaid and I wanted to bring it up and get your thoughts, you know, because I can tend to be, you know, have this sort of very hopeful spirit, and then you know, I'll talk to someone who's like, you know, really really suffering right now, like maybe maybe they are part like a part of like an oppress group or like a group that like it might be rightly so to actually hate the app particular out group. Like, you know,

I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I don't believe in in collective justice. That's what the Nazis did. You know, one member of a Cretan village would kill, would kill, you know, a Nazi, and then the Nazis would come in and wipe out the village as kind of collective punishment. If you if you believe in collective justice, you are not doing justice, right. So I don't think that that you can blame one person for the sins of another. I mean, that's not justice. It's something else.

It might be public policy. You know, we might want to do that anyway, but I don't think that is a kind of justice. I mean, we think one of your children if another child, uh, you know, I don't think any children should be spank I'm using physiness hypothetical. You know, we customarily think of punishment redounding to the individuals who committed the delect. You know, we don't punish

one person for the actions of another. So I have like this viseral hatred for like Nazis for instance, you know, and so would you say a better would you make the case that I should get rid of that hate for that out that particular out group, or like you know, like white supremacists, like don't instill in me a great feeling of love? Are you saying I should have more like I should? What do you think I should do? Well?

So all, there's a distinction between words and deeds. Okay, So I'm not saying you need to like these people or respect them, even you can avoid them, ignore them, and so forth. I think that when you do something, you know, when you touch another person in some way, I mean, you know, hit them or kill them for example, we have well understood procedures that are philosophically grounded and

evolutionarily shaped for punishment. So I think you could hold people responsible for their beliefs you know, you can say you have a for example, think about the people who are posted to vaccination, think about the anti vaxxers. You know, we can say you have a set of beliefs which are dangerous to yourself and to others, and you know, let's try to talk to you to persuade you to change your mind about your beliefs. So I'm not saying

you're prohibited from having disliking people who or even hateful feelings. Yes, I think it's okay. I don't think it's healthy. I

don't think it's necessary to have those hateful feelings. I mean, you know, if you look at one of my favorite examples, there was the study by neuroscientists at MIT about ten years ago, I should look it up again, in which they did MRI scans of Buddhist monks and they showed that certain parts of the brain I can't remember which parts right now were hyper developed and there were certain

brain patterns. Maybe they did EG studies, I don't remember right now what they did exactly, But the just was that the brains of these monks were different than you and me. But that wasn't what was interesting to me. What was interesting to me is. They interviewed the monks. They interviewed the monks, and one of the monks told the following story, which I still remember now. I read this ten or twenty years ago, whenever it was, and I've been thinking about it ever since. So they talk

about how does this monk do this? And the monk said, well, you know, I'm constantly renarrating the world around me. And he said, for example, let's say you're driving in traffic

and a person cuts in front of you. Now, you and I might say that person's an asshole, right, But what the monk does is the monk says, you know, maybe that person his wife is in the car and she's delivering a baby, and he's racing to the hospital to get the baby to the hospital, and he said, it wonderful that the new life is about to be brought into the planet, and totally renarrates the whole thing. And he's not doing it for the sake of that person.

He's doing it for himself, for his own experience of the world. Now, I think it does also when you do that, it does create positive externalities. I think you're more likely to be able to reach a better world. And again, I'm not naive. I'm not saying we shouldn't crush the Nazis, right, I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, people who who wish to you know, who set out to kill us, we must defend ourselves. But I am saying that, you know, I think we need

to judge people. I don't think we do ourselves any favors by forming group level hatreds. You know, now there are I don't want to be. You know, if you want to form individual level dislikes, that's fine, and if you want to form group level dislikes, that's okay. It might not be great for you or our society. But if you want to form group level hatreds, I don't think that's good for you, and I don't think that's good for our society. So thanks for offering that perspective.

I'm really truly trying to wrap my head around all the implications of what you just said, and thank you for stimulating my brain. I just want to just think this through. So there's great power in the collective more so than just the individual. Like, let's say that there's like a real social inequality that a particular group like you know, is like we really want to address this because people who are like us, you know, like like

racism maybe one example. So couldn't one make the argument that, like there is power in the collective of people coming together to fight systemic racism, Like would that be an exact like what would you say to that? I'm just curious. I think that's great. I mean, I think and I talk about civil rights movement in the in the book, and I talk about how the in fact our capacity for collective action, which is ingrained in us, can be

harnessed as a force for both good and evil. Right, I mean, and create You can create witch hunts and you know, in mobs by groupiness, or you can create you know, a positive change in society. You know, groups are very powerful. And our capacity to form these groups and to suspend our individuality, which is also an interesting trait, you know, as you probably use you well, now, I'm sure we can deindividuate when we're in groups, right, we can lose ourselves in the group and surrender our own

agency to the will of the group. And that's how mobs form, and riots and panics and all kinds of other well understood a well known I won't say they're totally well understood phenomena. So absolutely groups can be a force for good. But you know, we can also get genocide from groups, right, we get the Hutus and the Tutsis manas occurring each other. So so the question is how to harness those powers effectively? And you know, I

think that, I think that, I don't. I mean, my book is not a work of politics, Like I don't go into specifically how that might be done, but I do certainly explore the undercurrents for how that might be now. And the question of racism in our society, I think racism has been present. It's again a manifestation of in group bias. It's been present in every single society and every single group since time immemorial. And it's really depressing. It sucks, it sucks, And we're not the only society.

In fact, if anything, we are one of the best societies in addressing issues of racism. We have a you know, we have our own distinctive history of course with slavery, and but you know there's been slavery again since time immemorial. Have enslaved other groups, you know, in every continent in every century. So and we slave other animals, other primates. Well, that's another question. I know I can stick with humans, you know, which is very important. But so I think

the challenges are real. I think we need to work together to address them. I think there we are equipped with equalities that we can use to make political changes in our society. And I would highlight our capacity for recognizing our common humanity. I think to the extent that we can see that we are all human beings, that we have this shared humanity, it provides us a very powerful lever for positive social change and for and actually for improvements in our society. I'm right there with you

on this idea of common humanity. I think that your book does lays out that case really persuasively, and it's an important message in this day and age. You know. I also am a big fan of loving kindness like Buddhist meditation, and I try to practice it even on

my enemies. So I think that's kind of one of the points you're trying to make there, of just recognizing the common humanity even if I want to, you know it, like I don't have to like accept bullying, you know, like I don't have to just you know, I can still loving kindness for the person and also try to make healthy changes so that I am not being hurt

and you can incarcrate them if they hurt you. Right, not they say mean things to you, but if they hurt you, yes, I think that's well understood kind of. I hope that we make that clear. Yes. So I want to end today on two quotes of yours from your book that I think kind of sum up a lot of what we talked about today. Quote, we are primed for conflict and hatred, but also for love, friendship, and cooperation. If anything, modern societies are just a patina

of civilization on top of this evolutionary bootprint. And then you say we should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts. Fortunately, we do not need to exercise any such authority in order to have a good life. The arc of our evolutionary history is alw but it bends towards goodness. So thank you for shining spotlight on the human potential for goodness. Thank you so much for having me. I had a really good time talking to you. Me too, Thanks for

listening to the Psychology podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the Mind, Brain, Behavior and Creativity ass