Evolving Toward a Better Future with David Sloan Wilson

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. I’m honored today to be joined by David Sloan Wilson. With a doctorate from Michigan State University, David has had an incredible career at a variety of prestigious institutions, including—among others—Harvard University, University of Washington, Michigan State, and the State University of New York Binghamton, where he was a professor, now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of biological sciences and anthropology, and where he began their evolutionary studies program.

1:04 David is the founder of the Evolution Institute, and co-founder of the nonprofit ProSocial World, which includes the New Paradigm Coalition Initiative. David is an award-winning prolific author, and today we’re going to touch upon topics in several of his books, including This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way we Think About Our Lives, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve my City, One Block at a Time, and his novel, Atlas Hugged. David, welcome to AMSEcast. Thank you so much, Alan. Pleasure to be here. And I know we talked before we started today, our mutual friend, Guru Madhavan, brought us together, and our thanks to him for doing that.

1:48 Yep, absolutely. In his new book, Wicked Problems, I’ll be bringing that in because we are—this is our age of wicked problems that we’re living in right now, isn’t it? We have a few of those, David. Yes, we do [laugh] . [laugh] . So, I think that you and Guru together can solve them. I have great faith. So, [laugh] he’s— With many others. Only with the help of many others. That is very true. Very true. So, I so enjoyed learning about your work, reading your work, and something very central to that is something called the evolution paradigm. Can you tell us this as just as we start, what is the evolution paradigm? Right. Well, I mean, a way to begin is to note that the word evolution has a very general meaning.

2:32 People use the word all the time for any kind of change or any kind of development. But Darwin had a very specific meaning of evolution as the engine of change in nature. And so, he was pointing out three vital ingredients: first, that organisms vary in just about anything that could be measured about them; two, that those differences make a difference; and three, that traits are heritable, basically passed on to their offspring. And so, you put those three ingredients together, and then you get populations changing over time and adapting to their environment. So, there’s Darwin’s theory of evolution in a nutshell.

3:13 There’s point one. And point two is, although Darwin knew nothing about genes, once genes were discovered and the science of genetics was born, then the study of evolution became constricted to the study of genetic evolution. So, around the world, when one person says the word ‘evolution,’ other people hear the word ‘genes.’ And that’s actually not as general as it needs to be because there’s other forms of evolution. There’s cultural evolution, there’s even our personal evolution. And so, what’s happened recently that’s new and worth talking about is this expansion of evolutionary thinking to explain all of the fast-paced changes taking place outside and within us.

3:59 The applicability of Darwin’s theory of evolution is what my career is about and what’s so exciting to report to others. I know you mentioned this—I’m forgetting now, David, forgive me, in which of the books—but you talk about the evolution of cultures and how what you’re not talking about, essentially, is the very discredited theory of Social Darwinism. So, can you tell us, in terms of cultures, how this paradigm is implemented or seen, and how that’s different from those old ideas of Social Darwinism? Yeah, so Social Darwinism is the moral justification of inequality, and the idea that basically, the fit—first of all, the successful people in the world are the most fit, and they deserve to replace the unfit.

4:48 One point to make historically, Alan, is that it’s not the case that Darwin’s theory led to Social Darwinism, and all these pernicious things. Darwin’s theory was interpreted in so many different ways from the beginning. I mean, many people interpreted Darwin’s theory as saying, “Oh, my heavens, this means that the existing social order is not fixed.” Societies were different in the past than in the present, and they can be different in the future. So, in other words, people with a socialistic bent embraced Darwin’s theory, and then others did embrace this idea that the successful deserves to replace the.

5:29 So, Social Darwinism is a thing for sure, but it wasn’t the only thing. And it’s not the case that Darwin’s theory is inherently prone to this kind of a policy. But in any case, what’s proven to be the case is almost the very opposite. Because what’s so distinctive about our species is how cooperative we are. Cooperation is the signature adaptation of our species, and cooperation is what’s needed, basically. And what Darwin’s theory tells us is that cooperation—and everything associated with it: love, altruism, sympathy, empathy, all of the positive emotions, everything that we regard as morally good, basically—can evolve by a Darwinian process, but only if special conditions are met.

6:17 And when those conditions are not met, then we get dysfunction, selfishness, and conflict, and lack of coordination, and disruption in all of their forms. And in both nature and in human life, what we find is both. I mean, you don’t need to be a scientist to know that. We find spectacular examples of cooperation, and spectacular failures. And so, I think that what Darwin’s theory of evolution, properly understood, does is enables us to diagnose that, and then work, in the future, towards more cooperative arrangements. I want to dig into some more of these specifics, but you mentioned those special conditions.

7:00 So, what are some of those special conditions that need to be in place for that to be effective? They’re embodied in a meme that I’ve coined with the other Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson. And the meme is, selfishness beats altruism within groups; altruistic groups beat selfish groups; everything else is commentary. So, to unpack that meme, what we need to know—and I think what’s often overlooked because we’re always encouraging people to be good in one way or another—and what that fails to appreciate is the vulnerability of goodness. When we act on behalf of others or on behalf of our groups as a whole, we are inherently exposing ourselves to exploitation and free-riding by others who are not producing social benefits, and are accepting them without producing them.

7:53 And so, the vulnerability, everything we call prosocial is something that you have to know. There is an inherent disadvantage, and that disadvantage needs to be countered by the advantage of when cooperators work together. Then, as a group, they function better than other groups where cooperation is not taking place. And so cooperation, those special conditions require a process of selection among groups to offset their process of selection within groups. So, what we’re talking about as evolution as a multi-layered thing, that is what’s important, and the need for higher levels of selection in order to evolve cooperation.

8:38 Very, very interesting. Let’s dig into some of the specifics that you mentioned in your writings. Decision-making and the creation of public policy. At one point in my life, I was very fortunate to be head of the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee—now the Howard Baker School, I’m glad to say—so I thought a lot about these topics. How should decision-making and the creation of public policy, how should or could they be informed by evolution? Well, one point to make is that the world is so complex for the decisions we need to make—back to Guru Madhavan with our wicked problems—that there is no group of experts that can make wise decisions. The world is too complex for that.

9:20 Therefore, you have to experiment. And so, decision-making fundamentally has to be a form of experimentation. And by the way, experimentation is nothing more than a very conscious process of cultural evolution. When we make a decision, we have some goal—there’s our target of selection—we orient variation around the goal, we’ve heard what might work what might not work, and then we try it out and we identify what works best among those alternatives, then we replicate it, and then we repeat that process again, and again, and again. So, a decision-making process is an evolutionary, a Darwinian process. So, what we can is that experimentation is required. And the second thing we can say is that that needs to include all the stakeholders because you don’t have a special class of people who do the experimentation, so the decision-making process should be inclusive, it should include everyone that’s involved.

10:16 First of all, everyone that might contribute to the solution—in other words, who knows about it—and anyone who might be influenced by the decision. So decision-making, we can say, must be experimental and inclusive. And let me give an example, Alan, from industry. One point to make is that sometimes cultural evolution works well, kind of, all by itself, without us explicitly thinking of it as an evolutionary process. And Toyota, the Toyota manufacturing method is famous, at least in the business world, but what it is an implementation of exactly what I described. So, you have this big assembly plant which has a very, very, very complex system, and if anything goes wrong on the assembly plant, then the worker there who notices it, signals it.

11:07 It used to be that there was ropes hanging from the ceiling, that you’d actually pull the rope. And then there’s a swarm of activity, just around the solution to that problem. And the group that forms around it includes the workers that are there, plus the management whose offices are not on the top floor, but on the shop floor. So, the managers are working directly with the workers. And when they come up with a candidate solution, they don’t implement it. They try it out experimentally, and then they look at all the indirect effects that might take place, or that percolates through the whole system, and only then do they implement it. So, that’s a process of continuous improvement, and it’s why the Toyota method works so well.

11:48 It certainly does. I guess the question, then, in terms of decision-making, in the world we live in today, we see so many conflicting opinions. How does that cooperation work to get to that initial decision that we’re going to make this as our first experimental approach to this problem? How do you bring those parties together to get to that if they are so—if they’re on opposite sides of the argument? Yeah, well, that’s a great point, of course, and what is needed actually is a common goal. A lot of this work traces to somebody, Elinor Ostrom, who should be familiar to everyone. If you’re not already familiar with Elinor Ostrom, then please do [laugh] . Yeah, right [laugh] . And she outlined eight core design principles for groups to function well, and my work is very much based on her work.

12:39 And the first core design principle, it’s a strong sense of identity and purpose. In other words, we must see ourselves as the members of a group with a common purpose, what we’re about. And if we’re not, well, that’s just, like… a recipe for conflict. So, that means that we need to find a common goal. At a small-scale, that happens all the time. You know, it might be our business or a neighborhood or something. So, I think that there’s many, many cases in which groups do have a strong sense of purpose, and then there’s more roles that are required, but at least they have that. And ultimately, there’s a lot to convey here, Alan, in a short space, so I hope that I’m not, you know, seeming like a firehose, here.

13:20 But I think what that ultimately means, what we need to work towards is a global identity, and that, the first and foremost, I’m a human being and citizen of the planet. And then I have many other identities. And those identities are important—my nationality, my religion, my town, up and down, different identities—but those identities will always exist, in some form, but they need to be coordinated with the planetary good in mind, I think. And so, that’s very important to work towards. And I don’t think it’s too idealistic to say that that’s possible. It’s already a reality for many people, and I think needs to become a reality for everyone.

14:00 Also, I know we’re spending a lot of time on this question, but I think it’s so fascinating. One more question for you, in terms of those groups coming together. How is failure handled? So, you see, in many worlds, if you think, well, this is an innovative solution to this problem and it fails, that experiment—the first one—doesn’t work, then often you’ll pay a price for that, right, you know, your job or a demotion or something. How can that be handled better within this cooperation we’re talking about? Yeah, from an evolutionary perspective, failure is the leading edge of adaptation, and so it really does require an attitude towards failure of a constructive attitude towards failure is where we, you know, we have a goal, there’s alternatives, we’re going to try something out, and then we see how it works, and if it fails, we’ve learned something from it, for heaven’s sakes.

14:53 We’ve learned something. And then we embrace the alternative, and then we repeat again, and again, and again. So, I think that’s really a wonderful attitude to have towards failure, a positive attitude to have. And just to, like, you know, you know, let’s fail again, and again, and again. But safely, of course. You can’t fail in a catastrophic way. Just like the Toyota assembly plant, when we try something out, we need to do it on a pilot basis and then expand. And we need to look at natural variation. I think that’s one reason that America—or any Federalist Society—works well: there’s so many different experiments, there’s 50 states, there’s hundreds of cities, there’s—and look around, and you’ll find stuff that works.

15:44 And then, of course, there’s what theory might tell us to do. So, the variation comes in a number of forms. One is natural variation, the other is the variation when we think about things carefully with our theories, and do very carefully controlled experiments, and they all feed into this process. Another topic we think a lot about it at the AMSE Foundation is education, and you certainly talk about education in your writings. How can this approach be applied to how we educate our children? That’s a great topic. And let’s just take note that we could ask that question, let’s say—and I hope we will—for economics, and the fact that we can do that, that we have a framework that’s equally relevant to any subject.

16:30 We might talk about religion, I’m not sure, but whatever we talk about, will be covered by this. And the economics education comparison, they share something in common, which is the current paradigm, placing such an emphasis on individual-level competition, the competition, it gets us a little bit back to Social Darwinism, and the idea that competition is always good, and that if we want progress, then we just pit individuals against each other. And that’s as much true in school as it is in many business corporations, where as a student, you work as an individual. I know you work in teams, but you get an individual grade, and whether you get into college depends on what their grade might be, and so on, and so forth.

17:16 So, it’s an individual level competition treadmill in business and in school, and it turns out that it’s toxic because it’s basically lower level of competition when in fact what we want our various forms of well-managed competition at the group level: people succeeding as teams and so on. So, there’s one. That’s just one. But another one is, naively we think that we want our children to develop as fast as possible, and so we push formal education on them sooner than then we should. And it turns out that just growing up, you might say, in the absence of education, such things as play—our parents, and maybe as children, we were lucky enough where your mom would say, “Go out and play and don’t come back until dinner.” [laugh] . Yes.

18:03 And you go out, and what do you do? You meet up with your friends, those friends are mixed age groups. Playing is so interesting. It’s much more sophisticated than we think. And so, when we push our young children into academic education too early, there’s a lot of research on this—we are stunting them, my friends, and we’re stunting them socially, and intellectually. What these studies find is that these academic programs for young children, they have very short-term benefits, small and short term benefits that wash out almost immediately. And then later on, we have deficits, sometimes extreme deficits.

18:45 And so, the whole concept of education really needs to be reformulated with human development, what we know about human development. And it’s huge. It’s huge, and it’s tragic. When we talk about the anxiety epidemic in children, we blame it too much on social media. I mean, social media, of course, is a big factor, but there’s other factors involved, and seeing it from a evolutionary perspective leads to a much, much more humane form of education. We’re starting at the earliest age. I must say, as a student, pre-social media student, I had my fair share of anxiety, so I did not depend upon social media for that.

19:29 I will say, I hope you can visit us in Oak Ridge. When you look at our high school here, for example, I think they’re leading the way in that team approach, really, truly phenomenal teachers and students over there, looking at kind of a new way of doing things. Have you seen other best practices elsewhere that we should be looking at for our education system? Well, I’ll mention two: one is called the Good Behavior Game. And what that involves—this is played at a very young age, like, kindergarten and first grade—you get the class together, you ask them to nominate what counts as good behavior. And even though—even kids that are, you know, Johnny the Badass knows what it means to be good. And so, what they come up with is very, very similar to what the teacher would have said, but the fact that they came up with it is very, very important.

20:16 And so, this gets listed and is put everywhere on the wall and stuff like that. And then the class gets broken into small groups who compete to be good while they’re doing their schoolwork. So, they’re doing the same schoolwork anyone else might do, but they’re doing it in groups. And if they can manage to do it without too many misbehaviors, then they get a small prize. And so, now you’re basically, the kids are competing to be good, and if anyone within one of these little groups acts up, then the other kids are saying, “No, no, don’t do that.” [laugh] . Right. And just it turns within-group competition into cooperation. Now, this has been played—very good longitudinal studies have been done on this, and when this is played for a single year—that’s it, a year—in either the first or second grade, and then these kids had been followed through adulthood—the study is still in progress—their following the results of this one-year intervention, and is just so many benefits.

21:19 It’s like money in the bag, and so—in terms of earning compound—there’s, like, 70-to-1 ratio in terms of the social benefits compared to the cost of the program. And the program is spreading. Dennis Embry is the person who’s known for this. And then the other example is a study, one of the first studies I did in Binghamton, where I had an opportunity to help design a school for at-risk students, and to make a long story short, these students had flunked three or more of their courses the previous years, so they were on their way to being dropouts, for sure. And what we were able to do in the class was to build in these core design principles that I’m talking about. We didn’t teach them; we built an end to the social environment.

22:01 That’s an important point. And so, much depends on psychological safety and other protections, basically. So again, to make a long story short, without many resources at our disposal, we created what we thought was the ideal, or the best social environment we could, based on these evolutionary principles. And not only did these students perform better than a comparison group in a randomized control trial, but they did as well as the average student in the system. And then not only that, the main benefit was achieved during the first quarter of the year. And you got to ask the question, isn’t this too good to be true? And the answer is, I mean, the way to make sense of it is, is that all of us are like any sensible turtle or snail; we know how to pull into our shells when we’re dangerous and insecure environment.

22:53 And we also know how to come out of our shell when we’re in a safe and secure environment. We’d like to be prosocial, we’d like to be cooperative, as long as you don’t get hammered for it. And so, the students, despite very hard lives—which we couldn’t change outside of school—in school, by providing this environment, they looked around, and within the first quarter, they came out of their shells. That’s what happened. And they were very resilient. You said in terms of post-school, going into adulthood, these programs still continue to show benefits, even when they go out into a world that often is uncooperative?

23:34 In many cases, yes. Yes. I mean, there’s a lot to say about that. In one sense, you think I mean, it does seem contradictory. Let me note the apparent contradiction. In one sense, we’re saying that there were—we’re like turtles, we pull in and out of our shells. As soon as you leave that social environment, back into our shells, we go. But in another sense, you can do an intervention and it can have permanent effects. Both of those things are true. I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to unpack it. In fact, there’s extraordinary studies—this is very science documented—there’s numerous studies that show, do a comparison pre, post, and follow up. So, pre and post, you hope for an improvement because that’s what the experiment was about.

24:19 The post follow up is really interesting because nothing took place during that period. The experiment was over. And a lot of these studies, they showed not only an improvement between pre and post, but a further improvement between post and follow up. And what that means is, is that you did something [laugh] that was permanent. They’re different now. They’re thinking in a way that’s different, and that’s causing them to act in a way—and then they’re further improving upon it all by themselves. So, that’s the best possible outcome, and often that’s the outcome you get. You make a note that scientists, your fellow scientists across the spectrum of disciplines should, and really must, embrace the concept of evolution in the work.

25:01 Why do you say that? Well, the first point to make there is that if you were to say that to a biologist, they’d just look at you and say, “Well, of course.” Of course. Right? Right [laugh] . “Stupid.” “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” That… mantra, that statement was spoken in the 1970s by a geneticist named Theodosius. In the 1970s, you could say, “There’s something about this theory that just covers everything,” and so that’s commonplace in biology. The only thing that’s new is to extend that to all things human. So, nothing about religion, nothing about economics, nothing about education, and so on. And that takes us back to this constriction that I talked about, that evolution was confined to genetic evolution all the way up to the ’70s, so when Dobzhansky made that statement, he was only referring to genetic evolution.

25:52 And now the prospect is—which is the topic of my book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution—is that way of thinking middle, they can be expanded to everything that matters to us, the entire human realm. And that’s very new, only within the last 50 years at most. One of those, for example, being human is the importance of faith and religion. So, how do you see that applying to that part of human life? I think that once we see that cooperation is the signature adaptation of our species, that we do so well to live in cooperative groups, those groups, by definition, are larger than ourselves.

26:35 And so, the idea that we are part of something larger than ourselves, which is the heart of the religious and spiritual sentiment, all of the keywords associated with religion—worship, sacred, and the commandments—all of these can be seen as adaptations for highly cooperative groups. And so—and that’s not new. Émile Durkheim said that. It’s fascinating that there’s two major definitions of religion: one is centered on supernatural agents—you know, religion is a belief in gods, and that we call supernatural, they intervene in the natural order, so that’s one definition—the other definition of religion is a set of beliefs centered around the sacred that unite into one moral community called a church all who adhere to them.

27:25 That’s close to Durkheim’s definition of religion. It focuses on moral communities, the concept of sacredness, and doesn’t say a thing about supernatural agency. And so, when you look at religions, what you find is—and I think that this is a wonderful thing to say about religions—they’re amazing at forming community. Yes. They’re amazing. And wouldn’t we want that to be the case? But then they’re also, from a scientific standpoint, a human construction. A human construction. And so, to think that all of the beliefs, that basically this great bushy tree of religion, and the great bushy tree of culture in general, can be studied in the same way as the great bushy Tree of Life, of biological life, and that the most successful religions are the ones that, in the first place, endow individuals with a very strong sense of purpose.

28:21 So, you get up in the morning brimming with purpose, and the religion moves you to do the right things, to basically to exist in community. And historically, of course, those religious communities were often—not always—pitted against other communities. And so, the dark side of religion—and religion does have a dark side; do I need to tell anyone that?—can be explained along with the bright side of religion. And it also points the way to the future, that just as the scale of human society, including the religions, the great religions, has been increasing. So, if you look, for example, at the Axial Age, what we call the Axial Age Religions, the major religions today, they bind together, they form a social glue for tens and hundreds of millions of people.

29:12 That only happened over the course of human history. And what we need to do is to extend that further so that religion expands to, “Our common home,” as Pope Francis put it, “Beyond religion,” as His Holiness the Dalai Lama put it. And his message is that there’s 8 billion people in this world, and they will never belong to a single religion. Never ever. And so therefore, we need some way of thinking that can be applied on a worldwide basis. That’s why he could be such good friends with Desmond Tutu, a Buddhist and a Christian. And David Bohm, a particle physicist. So, science and more than one variety of religion can somehow merge to the worldwide scale, and that’s back to the need to be, first and foremost, a human being and citizen of the earth.

30:06 Everything that’s trending in that direction, and any religion that resists that, that says it’s only—you know, we’re the only way to go to heaven, well, you know that’s out of step. You know that is, and should be, antiquated. I mean, do you think that also? I mean, I do [laugh] . I know there are so many—they always say, don’t discuss politics and religion, the bar, but, I mean, there are so many good things over history that have come from religion. I was brought up in the Disciples of Christ Christian church, in Millersburg, Kentucky, thank you very much. But they are also, obviously, as you said, those dark moments looking through time. And I think it really goes back to, as you say, our common humanity, how we treat one another.

30:48 And you have to judge I think any religion of how you treat your fellow man and woman. That’s the bottom line. That’s the bottom line. I’m going to—you’ve mentioned the term prosocial a few times. And easy for me to say today, David. What is the ProSocial World Initiative and the New Paradigm Coalition? I know when Guru first introduced this, he talked about this New Paradigm Coalition. Can you tell us in general what those are? Well, prosocial is a word which I think it speaks for itself, just the way antisocial does. Yeah, yeah. But it’s not a commonly used word until recently. It’s now becoming more commonly used. You know, there’s Google Ngram, where you can look at the frequency of words from Google’s vast trove of text.

31:30 And if you look at Google Ngram for the two words ‘antisocial’ and ‘prosocial,’ there is a period of decades in which prosocial was a word that was almost never used. Of course, antisocial has always been a common word. Now, prosocial is catching up, I’m glad to say. And— [laugh] . Yeah, how about that? Right. So, what it means is basically anything oriented towards the welfare of others or society as a whole is prosocial. It’s a more general word than altruism. Altruism is like that. Altruism means other, but altruism for many people has the connotation of self-sacrifice, that in order to benefit others requires self-sacrifice. And prosocial is more agnostic about that.

32:13 Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes there’s win-win situations: we all can benefit from things. In fact, that would be better, wouldn’t it? And so prosocial, I think, is a lovely term for its generality. And ProSocial World, my nonprofit organization, is basically dedicated to that, and our mission is to consciously evolve a world that works for all. What really differentiates us is this modern evolutionary perspective. We might be the only organization that’s really just at the forefront of Darwinian, generalized Darwinism. Who’s heard the term generalized Darwinism? Nobody. [laugh] . So, I’m sure that all your listeners—if there’s a listener out there that’s heard that term, write to me.

33:01 That’s how new it is. And the New Paradigm Coalition applies all of this to economics. And when we do that—economics and business—and when we do that, we confront an elephant in the room. The elephant is neoclassical economics, the dominant tradition in economics is called neoclassical economics, and it goes all the way back to Newton and Newtonian physics. And back in the 19th century, of course economists, that was the new topic. It used to be called natural and moral philosophy. But people studying economics, they wanted to be scientific, and back then that meant emulating Newton and his planetary laws of motion.

33:41 And so, they would say, “Oh, yeah, we want a physics of social behavior. That’s where we want.” And that’s whatthey set about. It was very mathematical. It had to treat individuals as this kind of atom, and it went on from there. The New Paradigm Coalition, so on the one hand, we have this evolution paradigm. We haven’t said much about complexity yet, Alan, and I’m not sure that we will, purely for lack of time, but of course, your museum is all about—and you know, science—is all about complexity. So yeah, just to mark it. Two bodies of knowledge new within the last 50 years. One thing I like to say is that the last 50 years is more than just 10% of the scientific revolution.

34:23 Two bodies of knowledge that are foundational and new. One is complex systems science, and it’s new because it required the advent of widespread computing. So, before—the Santa Fe Institute, for example, was founded in 1984—so before that, you could talk about complexity, but you couldn’t model it because it was too complex for math, analytical math. You had to have computers, and they weren’t available until the ’70s or the ’80s. So, everything we associate with complex systems science, new. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing to me. A real revolution. Yeah. And then everything about evolution beyond genetic evolution, as we have said, new [laugh] since the 1970s, and ’80s.

35:07 And so now, this combination, this complexity of evolution paradigm is what provides an alternative to neoclassical economics. And so, the New Paradigm Coalition is all about evolution complexity, but applies it specifically to economics, business, and public policy. And the difference is as profound as what we talked about with education. I mean, in some ways, just night and day. And let me give you one example. It’s a common practice in businesses called force distribution ranking—otherwise known as rank and yank—where a company evaluates all of its staff members on their performance, rewards the best, fires the worst, maybe does something with the middle.

36:03 And so, when you think of this, what does that assume? That assumes that a performance of the individual is based purely on the properties of that individual. It accords nothing to social interactions at all, doesn’t it? It that some people are gold nuggets, other people are gravel, and all you have to do is sift them, you get the gold nuggets and then your organization works. Well, it accords nothing to social interactions. And what it causes is a complete shutdown of cooperation because in that system, if that’s the system that you’re locked into, and if you want to get ahead in that system, you never do anything to make anyone else look good. You’ve turned it into a hunger game. And that’s the way some corporations are run, and that’s the way some of our schools are run.

36:45 And so, just to make the most elementary points, is that for any group to work well, including the business group, it has to foster cooperation, friends. And in order to do that—and then it just goes on from there. So, it’s watershed. I mean, it’s truly watershed. And that’s what the New Paradigm Coalition is intended to catalyze. So, on a broader scale, let’s say on a governmental scale, the New Paradigm Coalition, it’s certainly not founded on laissez-faire principles, but also you don’t call for a centralized or command structure in our economy. So, how does that cooperative approach work on a governmental level at that point, in terms of the economic future of a nation?

37:30 Well, we already covered, I think earlier in this conversation, the impossibility of centralized planning. And so, no group of experts is capable. So basically, we’ve already covered the necessity of experimentation. To broaden that, we can say two things don’t work. Only one thing can work. One thing, centralized planning, we’ve covered that. The second is laissez-faire because it’s just not true that the lower level pursuit of self-interest is led by an invisible hand. No. No, forget about that. That’s the foundational message of multi-level evolution. Therefore, the only thing that works is experimentation.

38:11 I think, in some ways, we have covered that. And that goes for a government agency or governmental process no less than any other kind of process. I actually have a series of interviews on all different topics: government, business, entrepreneurship, development, innovation, and in all cases, we can show that the only thing that works is experimentation. And people are pushed into that pragmatic zone. We have our theories, but when people are actually on the ground, just trying to make things work, they just get pushed into that pragmatic zone. They don’t have a theory for it, but it’s what they do. And I think providing a theory for it is—you can ask the question, it’s a kind of a humble question.

38:52 “Well, if it’s what you’re already doing, then what good is the theory?” I mean, the theory is kind of a late arrival, isn’t it? And the answer to that is no, no, the theory is pretty important. To be able to understand this on the benefits of first principles is very important. Even if you’re a good practitioner, [man] , you want to know about the theory. Let’s talk, as we draw to a close here, the role in your system of cooperation. We have the state, you have the group… groups working within that state, and you have individuals. So, we put, I think, for good reason, a lot of focus on individual rights in the United States, in the western world in particular, but elsewhere, obviously.

39:36 What’s the role and the status of the individual in a world that’s then built around these groups cooperating? If I’m an individual and I disagree with the group’s end result, how do I express myself? How am I heard? That’s a great question, Alan. I’m really happy that you focused on that. And I want to answer it first in the context of a smaller group because I think it makes so much sense in a smaller group, but then we can expand it. And one of the amazing virtues of these ideas is that they are scale independent. So, whatever we might say about individuals in a village, you might say, it also goes for nations in the global village, or global corporations in the global village.

40:17 But let’s begin with a smaller group and Dr. Ostrom. What’s needed is, first of all, the group is the focus. We’re trying—the group—to function as a cooperative unit. But the members of the group have a tremendous amount of agency, and they must. And we’ve talked about this: decision-making must include the whole group. We can’t have freeloaders. The benefits that you get from the group must be proportional to the cost. We have to monitor what we do. If we’re not doing what we should, we need—so with all of this stuff about what we need to do to govern our group, and it’s the individuals who are doing that. I mean, so much so that actually, the concept of leadership is something which needs to be questioned because so often we think of groups as having leaders, and those leaders having a lot of power, but what this is telling us is that power needs to be distributed.

41:09 And if you’re going to—and decision-making needs to be decision. Yes, you do need leaders, actually, but they have to be servant-leaders. And the concept of a servant-leader is one of the religious concepts, I think, that’s worth identifying. When I’m leading, I’m not a boss. I’m helping to orchestrate all of us. And upon not doing a good job, and somebody else should be the leader. And so, there you have the ca—first of all, the group is the focus, but the individuals are the agents. And so, everything that we associate in democratic terms with individual rights and so on is found there. It’s equitable, it’s participatory, it’s just beautiful, basically, around the standpoint of those values.

41:52 And just a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of doing my own podcast with Robert Putnam of Social Capital fame. He’s the author of Bowling Alone, and is the best-known figure for—he coined the term ‘social capital.’ He’s written an essay which pointed out that in 1831, there were two voyages of discovery. One was Charles Darwin sailing around the world on the Beagle, and the other was Alexei de Tocqueville, coming to the United States within a few months of each other. And Bob Putnam does a great job of weaving Tocqueville and Darwin together and focusing on the phrase of Tocqueville’s, “Self-interest rightly understood.” And Tocqueville’s theory of democracy, it made a distinction between individualism—which would be, like, just pure greed; I’m out for myself—and self-interest rightly understood, which is, well, I’m out for myself, but I’m doing it in the context of cooperating with others, ultimately, in the creation of a great nation.

42:57 And so, Bob and I updated the concept of self-interest rightly understood. He channeled Tocqueville and I channeled Darwin. [laugh] . But I think that that, to say that what’s new about all of this can actually be traced back and can be true to something like Tocqueville and the ideals of democracy, which currently are in such tatters. I mean, if you read some of the work on this, and you realize how much America is a plutocracy run for the benefit of the elites, it’s sad and shocking, and ultimately self-destructive. There’s so much that needs to be done.

43:39 What I hope for in our civics world is that we do a better job of teaching our young people about how they can be engaged in the political system. And that’s something, when I was director at the Howard Baker Center, we did a lot. They’re doing that now at the Baker School. But yeah, I share your concerns about democracy in the world writ large today, for sure. And David, before we run out of time today, I want to make sure I at least mentioned your novel, Atlas Hugged. I mean, you’re in the world of fiction now, too. Can you tell us just a bit about Atlas Hugged? Well, first, my dad was a famous novelist in the 1950s. He got the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place, so the idea of writing a novel was not new to me.

44:21 But it was in the early days of economics when I was beginning to read about economics. And then somebody said in a workshop, “You know, Ayn Rand did so much with her book Atlas Shrugged to popularize the neoclassical paradigm. Shouldn’t we be doing the same?” In an instant, the title Atlas Hugged floated into my mind, and the beginning of a plot line. And so, over seven years, as I was actually thinking about economics as a scientist, I was writing my novel on the side. And then ultimately it got published, and it has made a pretty good name for itself. So, if you want to learn about these ideas through a story—and stories are so much more captivating than—even the best-reading nonfiction book is no match for a story, in my opinion.

45:05 So, check out Atlas Hugged [laugh] . Definitely. I read both of yours, and enjoyed the both fiction and nonfiction very much [laugh] . Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And in Atlas Hugged, a worldwide transformation takes place in a hundred days. So, beyond those things, what’s—not that you haven’t done [laugh] a lot already, David, but what are you working on right now? What’s next for you? I think I’d like to end on the concept of catalysis. In chemistry—you know what catalysis means in chemistry—basically, it’s a molecule that you can sprinkle into a chemical broth, and it increases the rate of reaction by orders of magnitude—incredible—without being used up in the process. And so, the idea of cultural catalysis, the idea that there’s something we can do culturally, to make things go faster and better in years, not decades or not at all, can this really take place in months and years?

45:58 Can it? And if we take the concept of catalysis seriously for culture, then the answer would be yes, we could. And then of course, then if that gets planted as a genuine possibility, well, it highly motivates you to do it if you possibly can. And so, this was what causes me to be very highly motivated and to work through my organization and with other organizations, and to make this kind of positive catalysis happen as soon as it possibly can. And so, that provides plenty to do. I’m sure. Where can people go to learn more about your organizations? Well, they can go to prosocial.world is the website, and they can email hello@prosocial.world in order to get in touch with us, and then we’re very happy to work with you.

46:45 We work on multiple fronts: education, economics, religion, spirituality. “Nothing about humanity makes sense except in the light of evolution.” And so, whatever your interest might be, we hope to provide engagement. And whatever your current level of knowledge might be, where you are on your learning curve, it doesn’t matter whether you’re highly educated or not, it doesn’t matter. Just check out hello@prosocial.world, and we’ll see if we could engage you in this new paradigm. Well, what a thought-provoking conversation, David. Really enjoyed having you on AMSEcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks. Thanks very much to you, and all that you’re doing.

47:26 Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org. Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

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