Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life | Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying | EP 216

To recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have, and that is we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us and making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human.

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Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to have some friends of mine on, Heather Heing and Brett Weinstein. They're evolutionary biologists who've been invited to address the U.S. Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education. They've spoken to audiences across the globe.

They both earned PhDs in biology from the University of Michigan, where their research on evolution and adaptation earned awards for its quality and innovation. They have been visiting fellows at Princeton University and before that were professors at the Evergreen State College for 15 years. They resigned from Evergreen in the wake of the 2017 campus riots that focused in part on their opposition to a day of racial segregation and another college equity proposal.

They co-host weekly live streams of the Dark Horse podcast and are both quite well known to many people in my audience. It's a pleasure to have you guys here today. I just read your new book; I'm very much looking forward to talking about it.

I... you have a copy? Maybe we could see it.

It is a pleasure to be with you, Jordan. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Great to see you again, Jordan, and great to be back on your podcast. Thanks.

Ah, "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century." So let's talk about that. I've got some questions.

Well, first of all, maybe we should ask why. Why did you write it? What was your purpose?

Well, in the many years that we were teaching at Evergreen, we were deploying what we called the evolutionary toolkit, which was a set of concepts that allowed people to understand the nature of biological creatures and the nature of they themselves. Many of our students asked us if there was not some way, some form in which we could provide them the toolkit so that they could hand it off to people who weren't in our classes. Events have conspired so as to allow us to write that book, and we've now done it. We're very excited to finally have the toolkit in the world.

So there was a broad question that was popping around in my mind while I was reading this. I mean, you do state in the book that it's very difficult to derive "shoulds" or pathways for behavior from scientific facts and scientific data, but in some sense, the book is an attempt to... what would you say extract out from biological knowledge certain guidelines for behavior, guidelines for thinking?

And so it looks like it's in part an attempt to bridge the "is-ought" gap, to speak philosophically. Did you think about that explicitly when you were writing the book?

Well, it is. You know, we point out that the naturalistic fallacy is something to be avoided, exactly as you just alluded to. You know, what we know to be true does not necessarily mean that that's what ought to be true or what we ought to aspire to. But I think what we do consistently in the book and in our teaching and in our lives is try to understand what we've been, who we are, and not just, you know, what we are evolutionarily from an anatomical and physiological perspective, but from a behavioral perspective and a cultural perspective, and thus make the most meaning that we can from what we've been to what we can be.

Yeah, well, you talk about human universals, for example, and you speak about them biologically—sets of emotions, we have language, the use of shelter, the fact that we all live in groups, that we imitate, that status is part of our, what would you say, psychological concern, existential concern, the division of labor, artistic production, and so on.

You know, you could think in some sense that if that's what human beings have always done, that there's some—and that's what we are in some sense—that there's some utility in having some respect for that. And that seems to be at least a tentative bridge between the "is-ought" chasm.

For what it's worth, I don't think there's really any conflict between what we've tried to do here and the obvious difficulty of extracting an "ought." For many reasons, the fact is we have values. Ultimately, they may not be defensible from a scientific perspective; in fact, if you take it to an extreme, it's difficult to establish a reason that existing is better than not existing. In some sense, that's a subjective preference and it's one that it's not surprising we all share because we are the descendants of many creatures who have preferred it. But in an absolute sense, it may not be defensible.

So what we do in the book is we inform the question of what ought to be with a scientific understanding. We believe that any credible ought needs to be informed in this way, at least in modern times. Where we arrive is at the conclusion that we cannot in fact go back; there is no place for us to return to that would be sensible from the point of view of modern people, and we cannot go forward in a chaotic way.

We have to recognize that there are many things about what we were that need to be preserved and updated. There are other things that need to be jettisoned, and that is that renegotiation of our relationship with each other and with the planet—that is the focus of where we must go.

You talk at the beginning about the new landscape that sits in front of us, and you also discuss that in relationship to the human niche. So one of the issues you confront very early in the book is this notion of hyper novelty.

I mean, I've been very ill for a long time, and so I've sort of woken back up. I have all this new electronic stuff around me that I don't know how to use. It can do so much, but it's very, very hard to figure out how to make it work.

I know perfectly well that that problem is not going away—it's going to be twice as bad in a year, and twice as bad again a year after that.

So, what's this idea of hyper novelty in more detail?

Well, at one level—and I'll let Brett finish continuing on after I answer—but at one level, the book is an invitation to consider trade-offs in all things. To recognize that so much of modernity has been amazing for humanity and has given us the level of comfort and productivity and connection that we have—that is, we do not forget that when we also point out that the amazing rate of change that we ourselves have created is itself deranging us, making it very difficult to understand how to be human and how to remember how to be human.

I would add that the fact of novel technology, of course, exists in obvious forms—in the types of devices that you're referring to—but it also fits well with many other things: novel molecules that we encounter, novel ways of socially interacting. The problem is that although we are the most flexible creature that selection has ever produced, our level of flexibility is not up to a rate of change where we literally do not mature into the same world in which we were born. By the time we become adults, we live in a completely different context.

What this means, at an intuitive level, is that we do not know what to do. Our intuitions are badly tuned for the kinds of things that we encounter. This is made particularly bad in the context of markets, where our intuitions can be hijacked to get us to engage in behavior that benefits the people producing the content but at some cost to us.

So we have to become aware of this hazard, and we have to learn to apply the brakes to it. It's not that progress is bad; progress is often tremendous, but it almost always comes with important unintended consequences. Being aware of them is an important feature.

Right, right. So that's a permanent part, in some sense, of the proper political debate, right? And so you think we face a horizon of genuinely and truly unpredictable change. No one knows what's going to happen in the next 10 years at all, and so the liberal types who think more, would you say, loosely and with more associations, more creatively, they're going to produce solutions hypothetically to those unpredictable problems.

But the conservative types are always saying, "Yeah, but be careful, guys, because your damn solutions might be worse than the problem." And you can never say that one side of that argument has the floor properly; you never know because it really is unpredictable.

And so if that debate between the liberals and the conservatives isn't allowed to exist in an untrammeled manner, we actually interfere with our fundamental problem-solving... what would you say, problem-solving ability, both individually and collectively.

And when you talked about our niche being niche switching, you know, that we—and that's, I mean, part of the reason that I thought that the hero's story, in some sense, is at the top of the value hierarchy is because the hero's story is about niche switching. It's about the transformation of viewpoints.

So, well, what should all viewpoints be subject to? The transformation of viewpoints when necessary? It's something like that, and I thought that dovetailed with this idea of niche switching being one of human beings' prime... so maybe you could explain that niche switching idea and the niche idea too because lots of people don't know what that is.

Yeah, well, so in ecology, the idea of a niche is that part of the environment to which an organism is best adapted. Most organisms have a relatively narrow set of environmental conditions, which includes both the plants around them, the soil, the, you know, the climate and the weather, all of these things, the geology, to which they are best able to exist.

As they extend towards the borders of that niche, they do less and less well, and there's some area outside of it that they don't do well. Humans, of course, as is widely understood, have managed to excel on every continent of the planet that has plants, right? You know, we have explored everything successfully.

And so we argue in the book that while it is well understood in ecology and evolution that every organism has a niche, the human niche is in fact niche switching. That is what we do. We are able to move from, you know, hunting marine mammals on the coast inland to hunting salmon inland, further to hunting large terrestrial mammals. And that's just an example from a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural moment.

We can imagine any number of transformations that humans have been involved with, and this implies that we have a mechanism for swapping out our programming, which we clearly do. If you think about what happens as a population moves through time and changes what it does for a living, there's a mechanism for getting there. It's not a haphazard process.

And we argue that this process will have unfolded very frequently around campfires. As individuals come to consciousness of a collective kind, what they do is they pool their cognitive resources. They do a kind of parallel processing, asymmetric parallel processing, where they share ideas, and individuals with very different strengths and blind spots engage the same question.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That process allows human beings to literally bootstrap a new software program for their population, and that is the key to human success.

Okay, so when I was reading Jung's thoughts, so his conception of the self was an underlying mechanism that allowed ego frames to be transformed. Imagine at any point, it's like this niche idea: at any point, you're identified with your adaptation to a certain niche.

But now and then, the niche transforms, and so you have to transform or die. But you're identified as you with that adaptation, and so that's experienced in some sense as an ego death. And then the question is, well, when that ego death occurs, what does it collapse into?

Jung's idea was there's an underlying structure that he called the self that is there stably across transformations of proximate identity. He also associated that, at least in part, with the voice of conscience, which was a voice that was telling you that your current adaptation, despite your identification with it, wasn't optimized.

I suppose that's the right way of thinking about it.

So, yeah, many moderns, especially those of us who are spending so much of our time on screens and in social media now, too often conflate those two things. Right? Conflate the ego identity with the self, if I'm remembering your use of Jung's terms correctly.

And, you know, this is exactly the problem. And that is exactly the problem. Right? That's really interesting. You wrote an essay called "Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," which is one of the most brilliant things he ever wrote.

That is exactly discussing that problem, and it's catastrophic danger. It's brilliant, but it's very hard to figure out what it's about if you don't have this initial conception.

Yeah, and so not only is it exactly the problem for individuals and also for one individual assessing another. And so, you know, the way that we used to frame it in our classrooms, without the Jungian framing, was we're not going to conflate a person's idea that you may find objectionable with a dislike of the person themselves.

The person's idea is skating on top of what their actual self is, but it's very easy to fall prey to that conflation.

So, the parallel you point out is actually reflective of an overarching similarity, an analogy between developmental progress and evolutionary process. What Jung is focused on there is a developmental analog of what we talk about with respect to lineages transforming what they do.

An individual coming to do something different than they did before is involved in a process that looks very much like that and will have many of the same features as they...

Well, okay. So while you could think about that too, is, you know, the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex. And so what that means is the prefrontal cortex has basically evolved to abstract out patterns of action in abstraction so that they can be assessed and killed, dispensed with before being instantiated in behavior.

And so that is, in fact, a replication of the evolutionary process in abstraction so that we can have our ideas die instead of us. And we do that in the political landscape if we're smart, right? Because part of the debate is, well, here's a bunch of good ideas; we should act them out.

It's like, wait a minute, some of those might kill you. And you do a lot of that kind of warning in this book, right? Because you talk about the necessity of creative adaptation, but the book is full of cautions about unintended consequences.

And so, for example, you talk about—and I hate this—all these gadgets we have around us. Engineers! Hey! They're all autistic and obsessed with blinking lights, so every damn thing you have has to have a light on it.

And I finally bought a router where you could shut off the lights—it's like more power to them, but it's not trivial. You point out, for example, that we're not well adapted to sleep if there's any blue light around, and so we have these gadgets— we’re very sensitive to even dim light.

And so we have these gadgets around that are polluting the darkness. And well, that's not nothing. And that's a really good example of an unintended consequence.

Yeah, it's really... it's not nothing at all. I think, you know, we see—we have been lucky enough to live in a space for many decades now where we could make a totally dark and mostly silent nightscape for ourselves.

But whenever we travel, the presence of at least one blue LED blinking somewhere in the room in which you're supposed to sleep is almost ubiquitous in pretty much every other room that we have been exposed to.

And that suggests that right there, we have a likely explanation for at least part of the derangement of moderns right there—sleep disruption. We know we need sleep.

You know, we argue in the book, we're aliens to land here with the technology to have gotten here; they would not be confused by the fact that we spend a third of our lives in apparent dormancy because they too would sleep.

Sleep is necessary. Now, one of the first things you do as a clinician to treat people with depression is to try to regulate their sleeping because it's such a basic biorhythm that if it's fouled up, then your entire emotional regulation deteriorates tremendously.

And so these small, hypothetically small changes—and of course, light at night is not a small change—night is dark, and we didn't have light except fire. And you point out in the book that, you know, and this is Rangham's work, a lot of it which you cite, you know, that we've probably been messing about with fire for something approximating two million years.

And so nighttime fire, that's a whole different thing—that's the right kind of light—but, and well, you know, one of the things that's interesting about your book and the way you think is that you're using biology in some sense also to point out what we should be wary of because it's going to disrupt our biological function in ways that might not be so good for us.

And so it's health advice in some sense, even though a lot of it seems to be behavioral.

So, well, it's health advice in the sense that we are unhealthy because of all of this hyper novelty at virtually every scale.

And so when you say that light in the middle of the night is not a small matter, we point to the possibility in the book that, in some sense, wavelengths of light that tend toward day, that include a lot of blue, misinform us about when we are active.

And for many of us, we may be able to tolerate that if we can get past the simple sleep disruption, but for some of us, it may be activating the dream state while awake.

The degree to which simply activating the dream state while awake would mirror the kinds of symptoms that come along with schizophrenia is conspicuously significant.

Right, right, and activating the dream state, simply activating the dream state—we have this, there's a question about, given that we have these cycles of sleep and that we wake very differently under natural circumstances than we do under modern circumstances, it is an open question as to how much cost there is to awaking arbitrarily as a result of your alarm, suddenly triggering your ability to interrupt these cycles immediately if there's an emergency, right?

That can't possibly be good for you, and we are built not to do it. And so, the idea that, oh, I'll just put an alarm clock by my bed and I'll get up at 6:30—at what cost? And I think we simply don't know.

No, that's so interesting that so many of those technological innovations... well, this is the conservative speaking again—it's like you think you know what that thing is, but don't be thinking you do. That existentialists called that alienation, taking a page to some degree from the Marxists.

But in a much broader conception, which was, well, you're alienated from your creation, in some sense, because it has a life of its own because it contains way more possibility than you thought you packed into it.

And that damn possibility is going to unfold across time in ways that you can't possibly predict. And so that's wonderful because everything is so deep and mysterious because of that, but it's also, it's like, that's a genie and you can't put the genie back in the bottle, and you don't even know where the damn things are.

It's amazing we've actually managed to survive all this technological revolution, you know? And it's really something that we've been able to adapt to it so far.

God only knows what Twitter is doing to us, for example. You know, it points to the hubris that we have, right? The arrogance of all of us, not just creating, but accepting all of the hyper novelty into our world as if we already have a complete understanding of what humans are and what we need.

And, you know, we point, as you know, in the book to many passing examples that now look laughable, you know, to doctors at—in the early 1900s deciding that not only was the appendix unnecessary, but so was the large intestine. Let's just cut those out of people, right? This is going to be a lot more space in there—a lot of space.

Yeah, we probably need more space.

That's right, what could it possibly be doing? So this is easy, right? It's easy with hindsight of a hundred years, but we have to ask, are we so certain that we've attained godlike knowledge now that we're not making any of these mistakes?

Well, it's also godlike ethics. And you know, the fact that we're so damn powerful means we better be better because the lookout, you know, and this—we just have no idea what's coming.

I was talking to a good friend of mine who’s a brilliant computer engineer, and he's working on this damn thing that he thinks is more revolutionary than the internet. And he isn't someone who just says that. And he's already done this like five times.

It's like, and I thought, oh my god, do we really need something more revolutionary? And then I thought, he is a wise person and he's careful, thank god.

And you know, don’t doubt there are ten things coming that are more revolutionary than the internet. You know, I heard about like three of them this week and it's really something, and I hope we're bloody well up to it.

And you know, one of the things I hate to like ramble on about Jung, but one of the things he did say back in the 1950s, which really, this was in relationship to thermonuclear weapons, he said the most serious crisis facing us in the future will be mass psychosis, essentially mass delusions.

It'll be psychological instability because we can't afford that and be this powerful.

So you were talking about your friend and his idea and you said something akin to, I hope he's up to it—he’s at least, you know, capable of seeing the hazards. But the problem is there’s no level of wise that covers this.

None.

No, for— you know, you mentioned Twitter. It's early with Twitter; we don't really know its full effects, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not making us nicer or better informed, even if that seemed like it might be a consequence.

But if you imagine—I mean, I remember, you know, it wasn't so long ago that Twitter was a novel idea. Can you imagine saying, well, what will be the effect if suddenly everybody can say 140 characters at a time anything they want at everybody?

The idea is, well, what's the harm in that?

Yeah, right. Well, so we could talk about that a bit. I mean, because we don't know much about our linguistic function. We have no idea what the combination of 140 character limit, no censorship or social scrutiny at the moment does to the emotions we're likely to manifest when we communicate in that manner.

We have zero idea, and by the time we figure it out, Twitter will be something else, so it won't matter.

Right, and add to that the fact that we're not engaging with whole human beings, right? That it's entirely behind a facade. Some of those facades are real people. You know, I know when I see a tweet from you that it's actually you who is behind that.

There are other people who might know entirely online, and I think they are who they say they are. There are other accounts that are actually anonymous, and they're consistent, and I think they're going to be consistent, but who really knows? And of course, there are far more that may not be people at all.

Right, right. I mean, that will be a bigger and bigger problem, right? We either be hired and are actually real people or they're just not even people.

So yeah, I think 60 percent of the internet traffic is bot, something like that.

Yeah, so yeah, so pretty much it's going to be just... yeah, we're learning to conflate real people with fake people.

Yeah, well you have no way to tell the difference.

Think about this too. You know, so you’re driving around in your car, and it's a shell; it sort of looks like a beetle because the engineers hide the complexity from you because that's what you want.

And then you see these other people in their shell beetle shells, and you curse and swear at them like you never would if they were right in front of you. And that means that just putting that facade on them dehumanizes them to the point where you're much more aggressive than you would otherwise be.

And so we have no idea how that works out in the social sphere. Even conversing like this, which seems like the real thing, you know, and maybe is close enough that we don't know what that does to the likely emotional tone of our interactions.

No, that's right. It's arbitrary is the answer, and I agree with you exactly. Your example of cars is a great one.

But one thing that we can be pretty sure is that if people treated each other in person the way they treat each other on Twitter, they would get beaten up with some regularity, which would stop them from doing it.

Right, and so the net effect might be that we would be nicer, right?

And so the suspension of the actual violence may cause us to become much more dangerous as we're trying to problem-solve and navigate.

Well, yeah, and then we could talk about that for a minute too because you might think, well, violence is no solution. It's like, no, but one of the things that you do see in interactions between men is that there is an underlying threat of physical violence that's always there.

And you think, well, that's a terrible thing—those demonic males, that's Rangham's book, right? But by the same token, you can signal a tiny increase in the potential for that violence in a variety of ways—by frowning, by changing your voice tone.

So you just have to hint at it if it’s a civilized discussion, and it keeps it within bounds. And that's one of the things that I don't see so characteristic of linguistic interactions between women, for example.

Yeah, so it's not—and I would just add, to pick up on a point that you made earlier, you know, you said the prefrontal cortex inspiring from the motor cortex. Well, it's also specifically in mammals, the cerebral cortex is borrowing from what used to do our smell processing.

And you know, as primates, we're much more visual than the rest of mammals, which are much more focused on smell. With this increase in the size of the telencephalon, what all are we missing when we're doing something that feels very much in person like what you and we are doing right now, but we're not smelling each other?

And, you know, that's your sexual interactions. That's got to be crucial, man, right? And it's mostly not conscious.

Like, humans, yeah, we supposedly don't have pheromones.

Well, let's see.

Yeah, right, right.

But we know that we're in person with one another; there's little things about body language, about movements, about little gestures and facial movements that don’t convey even over screens and certainly don't convey otherwise.

When I was in college, I lived with like six narrative wells and a couple of pretty decent women. One of the women had this—she had her moods, you know, and I swore that I could tell if she was in a frozen mood when I walked into the house.

I thought, I know something's up here, and that happened like six or seven times. Maybe it's, you know, superstition or whatever, but I really think it had something to do with smell.

And I also had this very strange experience when there was someone in my house that was pretty much homicidal and ready to go off that night in a very not good way—a very person who was very disturbed, a good friend of mine who eventually committed suicide.

And I woke up at like three in the morning, and I thought, no, something's seriously wrong. And I went into his room, and he was sitting there, up on his bed, and I knew what he was thinking.

And I swear, and my brother was sleeping—he was visiting me from western Canada—a couple thousand miles away. He was in the other room, a completely different room.

He told me the next day, independent of this interaction I had with my friend who was staying with us, that he said, "What the hell was going on last night? I couldn't sleep at all."

And I really think it was smell associated. Who knows? It could be. But it also... you know, one of the things about human beings is that we have really no idea what most of our minds are up to, and so you don't know what you're tracking.

You could be tracking that when somebody is in a mood, that they walk across the floor in a particular way, where that board doesn't squeak or it does squeak or something about their pattern of behavior has just been recorded as a precursor to something bad, and so it might as well be smell or that might be a metaphor—I can just smell something's coming.

Well, just think about dogs. Try taking your dog to the vet without him knowing. It's like, what the hell is that dog figuring out? It's non-verbal, clearly.

It's like, you think your dog can't understand language? They get some of it, but man, dogs—they know, and that's probably because your non-verbal behavior isn't exactly the same as it usually is.

And they're extremely attuned to that, partly because they're not actually blinded by their linguistic ability, right?

Because our linguistic ability actually inhibits some of that non-verbal decoding, at least our conscious awareness of it.

Yeah, we make the mistake of thinking if we're using language, we're being purely analytical, and we forget all of the things that underlie the analytical—like all the musical tone.

Yeah, in fact, this is my hypothesis for why we have these greetings that carry zero content in them is that it's very hard to hide from somebody who knows you that, you know, there's something on your mind if you say, "I'm fine!"

Right? But you just don't get the tone color exactly right—you're fine.

Exactly.

Right? But there's an awful lot that's communicated. And well, you see that with small talk too, you know?

And I've talked to a lot of hyper-intellectual people, and I was kind of like this at one time. It's like, small talk, you know? Who's got time for that? It's like, no, you probably don't want to be around anyone who doesn't have time for small talk.

And because small talk is, well, first of all, it isn't energy-requiring, and that's really actually really quite nice, and it's also an indication that the person has some social skills.

You know, they know how to just have an introductory conversation and not jump right into what's dead serious. And all those things we do to smooth the waters, that well, that a technology like Twitter just eliminates.

And we also don't know how Twitter samples people.

Like, Twitter may only allow people who are irritated about something to talk.

That's right, that's right.

And to your point about small talk, I too have dismissed small talk in the past as not worth my time.

And I think I've come around, as you have, it sounds like, to the idea that—it’s actually much like, you maybe could smell or you heard the floorboards or something with your friend who was in an apparently homicidal mood that night—small talk allows you to take the temperature metaphorically, literally maybe, of the mood of the interaction and get a sense for, okay, how am I, as we go deeper, how should I play this?

Like, you know, do I go in guns blazing? Do I take a little easy? What kinds of things is the person that I'm interacting with likely to be able and willing to engage right now?

Well, it's probably a form of play. So, when kids get together, say, two kids of roughly the same age get together on the playground and decide if they're going to play, they start with little play that's below their developmental level, and then they both ratchet it up to their own developmental level.

And if they're dealing with someone who is developmentally much delayed in comparison to them, they'll tend to find another play partner, and of course, we do that as adults.

That's right, as we make our progress through the social interactions.

So, okay, so let's also talk about objections to evolutionary theory—biological essentialist types, you know? So how do you respond to those sorts?

And there is a danger, right? Look, there's a real danger that we should address here.

We here follow the science a lot, and we hear these unthinking claims that the science will just tell us what to do, without any intermediation of such pesky things as politics or— and so—and so when people are criticizing evolutionary theory as psychology, they are, to give the devil his due, they're also going after what might be a too-facile tendency to say, "Well, this is," and since it is, "I can make it should," and it's science—that's me allowing me to do that, and that's not good.

That's not good for science or everyone else.

So how do you handle that philosophical problem, let's say, when you're trying to write a book like this?

Two points, which are really probably facets of the same point. One, we are very early in the study of biology, unlike things like physics and chemistry, and we are also in a different kind of scientific realm. Complex fields function very differently than simple fields, and unfortunately, our model of how science works is built on the places where we succeeded early.

And we're going to have to revise the way we do science for biology and psychology and all of the related disciplines.

And I would say a couple things: one, I think there's a perception in certain camps—very frequently they are non-academic camps—in which there's a recognition that there's something missing from evolutionary theory.

And what I would say is we agree there's something missing from evolutionary theory. What we tend to disagree about is what is there. And from our perspective, there is a missing layer of Darwinism.

In other words, the Darwinian story we tell about how a creature like a human being arises through this process is an incomplete story, and many people detect that incompleteness.

The question, though, is, is that an indicator of some divine force, a force outside of physics, something like that, or is it an indicator that there is a Darwinian process that has yet to be described?

Okay, so I really want to ask you guys about your opinion about this because that's a real crucial issue as far as I'm concerned.

So as far as I know, Darwin outlined both natural selection and sexual selection, and he put a fair emphasis on sexual selection. But when biologists started to unpack Darwin's ideas for about seven decades, eight decades after he wrote his great books, most of the emphasis was on this like blind natural selection.

And the thing that's so interesting about sexual selection—and I think this is true as organisms become more complex—is that it implies in a very non-trivial manner that consciousness is directing selection through mate choice.

And so, you know, this idea that we have that spirit compels matter to emerge towards complexity has something going for it that seems to me to be deeply rooted in Darwinian theories of sexual selection.

It's like—and you see this emerging in very weird ways. So I'll give you one example that you may know of. I don't know if you've seen that YouTube video, I think it's from a BBC nature documentary, of that damn puffer fish making a mandala sculpture at the bottom of the ocean.

It's like, it's like 20 feet across this thing; it's about eight inches deep. This puffer fish is like this big. He spends four days making this incredible sculpture, and this is a bloody puffer fish.

And then the females come and take a look at his sculpture and think, you know, he's kind of a creative, artsy type of puffer fish, and he's pretty practical from an engineering perspective.

And so, you know, he might make a good mate. And that's a puffer fish, you know?

So well, and then in the bowerbirds, which are also extremely interesting examples of that, obviously they are being selected by the females in particular for high levels of creative intelligence and practical engineering skill. So there is a role of conscious choice.

So because you keep hearing about the blind forces of natural selection, it's, yeah, fair enough, but what about sexual selection, and then what does that say about what consciousness is doing?

And I don’t think I... because that's not mechanistic in some way.

Well, that's all I have to say about that.

I don't know where you think about all that.

You're exactly right. Your sacrilege is dead on. And you know, you can detect that this is the error with the following version of the same puzzle, right?

We swear that evolution does not look forward. On the other hand, we also swear that we are the products of evolution, and we certainly look forward, right? We can project forward in time.

So if it is true that selection can build a creature that can model the future, then is it true that evolution cannot model the future? That seems wrong, right?

So anyway, we could parse the details of that, but the basic idea is, look, we are not dealing with Darwinism 1.0. We're dealing with Darwinism 10.0 or something like that, where the original crude, haphazard process has built refinements that allow it to function much more effectively than it otherwise would, which is exactly why we say there’s a missing layer.

And as a placeholder for that, the terminology which I've used, which has gotten me in a ton of hot water, is "explorer mode." The idea is: how does evolution 10.0 explore design space in something other than a haphazard fashion?

Because, of course, a lineage that explores in a haphazard fashion is a terrible disadvantage.

I've got to say something—I've got to say something about that. So I had this vision of play, okay? So, and I first saw that the fundamental role of the patriarchal spirit in a household was something like the provision of a safe place for play.

And then I could see children as experimenting with different manifestations of their physical being—that's in play—and that's relevant epigenetically, as far as I'm concerned, because what they're doing is modeling potential ways of being in their play.

And then they instantiate those physically. And I don't know how deep into the biology that goes, but it's not trivial because they are playing with alternate forms of being in play.

And of course, we are neotenous, you adult human beings, and we play a lot. And so we've retained that ability into adulthood.

So take what you just said about play and epigenetics and extrapolate it to birth order effects, right? Birth order effects, which are either a failure of selection because if there's some best way to be, then where you are in the birth order shouldn't affect it.

But there's another way of interpreting it, a much better way of interpreting it, that says depending upon what has come before you, what you should be will have been changed, and there may be predictable patterns in the way it will have been changed.

And so your point about a child exploring—your child is effectively exploring developmental niche space, which is altered by the siblings that came before.

Yes, okay. And so now you have built into your genetics... this is maybe a discussion of something like human potential.

So, you know, when you go into a new environment, new proteins are coded for by genetic structure. So partly you think up new ideas in a new place, but that isn't all that happens; is that when you go into a new place, there is new biochemical potential that's being unlocked within you.

And that's part of the reason why going many places makes you, you know, more than you were.

And so that's deeply coded all the way down to the molecular level, by the looks of things.

That's right, and that's, to your earlier question about doesn't an evolutionary interpretation of what we are fakes us to a preordained conclusion—well, no, it doesn't.

And part of the answer to why is this concept of reaction norms, where you can start from a very similar starting point—you and someone else—and end up in a very different place because of the environment to which you were exposed.

And so some of the examples from non-human space of this would be tadpoles of some species that if they are raised among kin, they become sort of docile vegetarians with small mouths.

And if they are raised among non-kin, they become carnivorous, you know, cannibals.

I want to tell you a story about that, if you don't mind. So when my daughter was very little, we went to a pool, a swamp, you know, on someone's farmland. And she collected about 50 tadpoles and brought them home, put them in an aquarium, and one tadpole lived, and it ate all the others.

And then it turned into a frog, which she had for about three years. But I had no idea tadpoles were carnivorous.

But apparently, if you adjust the niche properly, then there you go. So I didn't know it was only non-kin.

Well, it's different in different species, but it's a density-dependent response to the environment—density-dependent and kind-dependent response to the environment.

And this suggests that, you know, just to say that we are evolutionary beings does not fade us to one particular thing. We have to be paying really close attention to what our environment is.

And just one more story that's a bit similar here with regard to the bower birds that you brought up—and play in explorer modes—is that in one species of bower birds, where the males build these beautiful bowers, you know, much like palaces, for the females to come by and assess, the males know as they build them which direction the females are going to come through.

And in fact, they, in some cases, sort of build the pathway so the females always come from a particular direction, and they actually build forced perspective—just like human artists—forced perspective into their bowers, such that from the place that the females will first view them, they look bigger and grander than they actually are.

And, you know, this again is the way that males can modify what females will think of them and enhance...

Okay, so let's think about that really seriously.

So what exactly is it, do you think, that the bower bird male is demonstrating, and what is it exactly that the female is looking for?

Because you might think, well, what the hell does nest building, artistic creativity have to do with a bower bird?

But something, and there's some analogy to, well, human beauty because they actually make beautiful things. These birds and they look beautiful to us, which is, you know, kind of peculiar all things considered.

What are they selecting for?

It's a very good question. I'm a little bit—in some sense, this is part of the subject of the next book—but I will maybe preview that a little bit for you, since you asked such a good question.

The problem—so this kind of behavior is very common amongst birds, right? And birds create a special hazard—the females face a special hazard in choosing a mate because birds can fly.

So let's say that a female is selected to find a male who's in very good condition. If he's only going to get gametes from him, and therefore genes, then his very good condition might indicate that he has very good genes.

That's standard evolutionary theory. But the problem is, what does good genes mean? Does it mean some general good genes, or does it mean good genes that will be good for her offspring, where her offspring will exist?

And so if a male has gotten well fed in a remote location and then flies in and demonstrates that he is well fed, it may indicate nothing at all or it may even be counterproductive from the point of view of her searching for genes that will be well matched to her own in the environment in which her chicks will grow up.

So one thing she may want to assess is, did you get well fed here?

And the thing about bower birds, we could go on for hours about this, but the thing about these bowers—which have no function whatsoever—they are not nests, they don't provide shelter; they are simply these structures that demonstrate something, is that males will steal from each other.

So a male who is not present will lose materials, and his bower will degrade as a result of theft from neighboring males. He will also typically have a behavior like a dance, right, in which he will perfect in the exact location.

He will dance around the objects of his bower, and so if a female—let’s say that a male does the worst; I want to see my etchings—let's say that a male flies in, right, or a well-fed male flies in from somewhere where food is abundant, and then he, because he's a big brood, evicts a local male who's built a beautiful bower.

Alright? And then a female comes, and she assesses the bower; looks great. Then she assesses the dance—won't look great because he hasn't practiced it there, right?

He just flew in. He’s a faker, right?

She'll detect that, okay?

Whereas if he's... you're a thief, and you're a thief from far away, furthermore, right?

Now, let's say that he flies in and he gets the bower, but he has to stick around long enough to learn the dance that he didn’t build. Well, he’s going to have to spend a lot of time foraging away from the bower, right?

And so, he may look well, but the bower may be degraded—even if his dance looks good.

Also a no-go.

How about a male who's, again, done the worst thing, and he's evicted the local resident, and he flies in, he evicts the local resident, he manages to feed himself but spends enough time at the bower that he can defend it and practice his dance?

Well, then, even though he's stolen the bower, the female is getting a proper indication that his genes are well suited to the local environment.

He's feeding himself well here, he's been here long enough that he's learned the dance, he's defended his bower—probably a good bet.

So, even in the case of the bower, isn't his construction? It might be an honest indicator of his genetic quality.

So one of the things, when I was reading evolutionary psychology and trying to parcel out, you know, differences in sexual attraction markers between men and women, I'll tell you a brief story as an intro to this.

So when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, I had, you know, I had some success with women, but not much. And then I went to McGill, and I was a graduate student, and nothing changed, really, in the couple of months between when I was a senior undergraduate at—in Alberta and when I was a low-level graduate student in Montreal.

But how attractive women were to me changed a lot, and I thought, well, that’s not you—that's something about status.

And I already knew that evolutionary theory there—and you know, that women are more affected by, let's say, social status in relationship to sexual attractiveness than men are.

But then I thought that through too, and I thought, no, no, women use status as a marker for the ability to gain status in novel environments.

It's something like that. And that's partly why they can be criticized.

You know, and they're no more accurate than the claim that just because you're rich you’re good, but it doesn't—but status is not exactly wealth, although wealth is a proxy for status. Status is more subtle.

And but symbols of wealth are pretty good instantaneous proxies for status, like they're subject to all sorts of flaws, and they're not sufficient.

But, you know, you have to screen most people out, so you need simple markers to begin with.

So, Heather, let me ask you, how do you view, as both someone who's female and someone who's an evolutionary biologist, how do you conceptualize the difference in status hierarchies in human females and human males?

I'd really be interested to hear that.

Yeah, well, this too could go on for ten years. We are one of very few species that has hierarchies and females in hierarchies and males. Other species tend to have one or the other.

There may be a couple—maybe Japanese macaques, if memory serves—that have both. But in those few species that have both, and in all of the species that have one or the other, the hierarchies are created and maintained via different means.

And you know, there's variation, of course, but in general, the hierarchy in males in other species and men in humans is through overt means—through fairly direct claims.

Sometimes it's physical, but usually the physicality is under the surface, right? It's there as a possibility, maybe you want to call it a threat, but usually things don’t get physical as men are deciding what the hierarchy actually is.

But there's direct confrontation of a linguistic sort, of a gestural sort of, oh, you're doing that? I wouldn't do it that way. Or here, let me—you know? We're often couched in a joke too.

Oh, and so maybe that could be seen as sort of an end run around the direct provocation. But there's very rarely, with men—and you know, maybe this is changing in modern times—but if man A is interested in critiquing man B, he’s very unlikely to say, "I'm going to take this to man C, or see first I'm going to go talk to our joint friend" before I take it directly to the guy with whom I have an issue.

Whereas, so, that's, you know, that tends to be overt, and female hierarchies tend to be covert in nature.

And you know, this probably originates in part through the fact that even though we seem to be moving more and more towards a monogamous mating system, and we are therefore losing our sexual dimorphism in humans, we still are sexually dimorphic and are still on average smaller and less muscular and less powerful.

And so, you know, the ability to back up disagreement with the threat of physicality would have been less successful, certainly engaging with men, but also with other women.

And so we’re more likely to use social signals and covert signals and less direct signals to assess and to change what the hierarchy is. There's ton more to say, but maybe I'll leave it at that for the moment.

So let's switch. You have a chapter on sex and gender, and that would be fun to talk about.

So first of all, I'm really curious about if you think those terms are importantly different, and if they are, why and what they both mean if they're different.

So let's start with that.

All right, they are different, but the way in which they relate actually you can deduce from the omega principle, which we haven't talked about yet.

But essentially the way of conceptualizing it is Heather and I say this slightly differently, but I would say that gender is the software of sex.

And I tend to say that gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex. And what this means is that these things are housed at a different level.

What it does not mean is that they are pointed towards different objectives. So the omega principle, which is one of the important principles that undergirds the logic of the book, is that epigenetic phenomena, including culture and all of the software layer, is more flexible than genes and therefore more rapidly adapting.

But it is also subordinate to the genes in terms of objective because genes are in a perfect position to shut down anything behavioral or cognitive that does not serve their interests.

Which, it won't do instantaneously, but over generations it will.

So what we find is gender has to be serving the interests of the genes, and therefore sex and gender should be pointed in the same direction.

Now there's a lot of variation in the gender layer, but it is not a completely independent phenomenon. It is not superior to the underlying genetics.

So let me ask you about that in terms of personality then, because I've been thinking a lot about the sex and gender issue.

You know, the idea that there's an infinite number of genders, you know, I like to give the devil his due as much as I possibly can, and one of the things you do see in the personality literature in psychology, which is reasonably well developed, right?

I mean, we have a pretty good model of human personality—five basic personality traits. Maybe they're subdivisible into two sub-traits each, so that's ten.

It's five dimensions of variability; that's a lot. Reality only has four dimensions of variability.

And so what you see is that there are reliable differences between men and women in aggregate in personality.

And one of the big differences is that women are about half a standard deviation more sensitive to negative emotion, and they're about half a standard deviation more agreeable.

So more compassionate and polite. And you can... it's not that hard to point out that, well, that might be a logical consequence of sexual dimorphism.

So women should be a bit more sensitive to threat because they're a bit smaller, but also that they have to... I don't think human adult female personality is adapted to human adult females.

I think it's adapted to female infant dyads.

And a female infant dyad—because here's why: you don't see those personality differences emerge till puberty. Now that's also when you get sexual dimorphism, but boys and girls under 12, 11, they're not different in terms of sensitivity to negative emotion.

But then puberty hits, and the transformation seems permanent.

And so it makes sense to me that a creature that has an infant is going to be more sensitive to negative emotion and also going to have to be more agreeable, more compassionate, because, well, it's an infant, right?

And compassion is the right emotion for someone under nine months of age; it's just compassion because, well, they're born so young, right?

We have a very short gestation period, and so they're completely helpless, so of course it's compassion.

Okay, so now having said those differences exist—and there's some other ones, but they're more trivial—there are lots of women who have male personality patterns, so you find women who are low in negative emotion and low in agreeableness; they're quite masculine that way.

And there are men who are quite feminine in their personality characteristics.

And then you could also say, well, insofar as personality is associated with gender, well, there is tremendous ten-dimensional variation.

And so the idea that gender is fluid in some sense and that it's, you know, not exactly tied to the underlying sexual structure—there's some, when it's not pushed too far, when it's not political in its intent, there's some validity to the claim.

So what do you think about that, biologically?

Yeah, I know. I think this is exactly right. I would—before I answer that, though, I would say that no woman who had ever brought a child to term would claim that gestation was short in humans.

But I know—I do know what you mean. I get your point.

But it feels interminable when you're actually undergoing it.

With regard to sex versus gender and the sort of, you know, gender is way more fluid than sex.

It is—you know, sex is binary. We have, you know, we are a binary sexually reproducing species with two and only two types of gametes.

The intermediate type of gamete, which has a little bit of cytoplasm and kind of moves around a little bit, you know, a little bit eggy, a little bit sperm—doesn't work.

There's lots of good reasons for this, but the evolution of anisogamy, the two different types of gametes, is well understood from both a theoretical perspective, and it's just manifest in plants and animals, right?

So that is true. Sex is binary, and then the expression—the software, to use Brett's framing—or the behavioral manifestation of sex, to use as mine, of course, behavioral manifestation only works for animals; it doesn't work as well for plants.

But, you know, we see the same kinds of sort of, I don't know, cultural behavioral manifestation of sex even in plants, even with regard to eggs being more choosy than pollen in plants with regard to who to mate with.

So of course there will be a greater manifestation of ways to engage the world when you're talking about, say, the behavioral manifestation of what your underlying sex is than there will for, you know, what your actual sex is.

And, you know, I say that as someone who is gender non-conforming and who was never confused about whether or not I was a girl.

You know, this is the conflation these days, right? The idea that gender disorder—yeah, it's real.

Well, it's weird how it's flipped around too, because there's an infinite number of genders, so let's say—and well, but if you're kind of acting girly and you're a boy when you're three, well then your sex is wrong.

It's like, wait a minute, I thought that gender was fluid and that it isn’t binary. It's like, how come it's linked to sex so tightly all of a sudden when you're talking about, you know, non-stereotypical manifestations of behavior?

It's super progressive too!

I mean, the idea, you know, we growing up in the 70s, I was a girl who didn't like dresses, and the idea that that made me a boy would have been considered completely anathema to the second wave feminists among whom I was growing up, right?

I was just a girl who liked to get myself dirty and play in the dirt and go look for salamanders. That didn't make me a boy, of course not, right?

So, you know, being interested in things that are maybe more likely to be things that boys are interested in is awesome, and it is a hallmark of modernity that we can embrace such children.

And same thing for boys who are interested in things that have traditionally been more likely to be things that girls were either natively interested in or encouraged to be interested in.

But it doesn't change the underlying sex at all. When my son was young—three years old, at about that, my daughter was about four and a half—and her friends used to get together and they'd dress him up as a princess or a fairy, and then he'd prance around the house—and he's quite a masculine boy, by the way.

And this actually bothered me, you know? And so I sat down and thought about it for a long time because, well, I didn't know why it bothered me exactly.

And then I came to the conclusion that, wait a second, you know, because I didn't want him to get confused. Maybe it was something like that.

And some of it was probably like arbitrary northern Alberta prejudice or who the hell knows, but what I realized was that if I interfered with this in any way—that's raised eyebrows or any of that non-verbal stuff—I would be sending a message to my son that playing at being a girl is wrong.

And what that meant was that I was telling him that embodying and understanding what it meant to be female was unethical, and that was a very bad idea.

And so when you see that sort of gender-crossing play take place with kids, especially at that age, you should, you know, take somewhat of a hands-off approach and understand that they are... one of the ways I know who you are is to act you out, to play you out, and to imitate you.

And it's easy to shut that down, and then you get the kind of divisions between the genders, let's say, or the sexes that aren't good.

You can interfere with that very young, but so it goes to your earlier point about children effectively exploring epigenetic space and discovering who they are.

And the fact is you can start with a perfectly random approach to that.

Right? I'm going to try being anything at all.

And the point is certain things land somewhere where there's something useful to be done, and other things don't land at all, and some things are fun for five minutes.

And you know, Heather points out I think it's a lovely point that, you know, we don't rush to get the child who declares themselves a dinosaur to the transition clinic, right?

We just maybe think that'll pass.

And the fact is we know enough—or at least, you know, as Douglas Murray might say, we knew until five minutes ago—that kids should be allowed to try out different gender stuff and usually it just works itself out.

My granddaughter, for example, she watched Pocahontas a lot, and she had a Pocahontas stall, and she insisted for about a year and a half when she was, I think, three, that she was Pocahontas.

If you asked her if she was Pocahontas or Ellie—she has two names: Ellie or Scarlett—she would insist that she was Pocahontas for a long time.

And I thought that was remarkable, you know, that she'd caught something out of that movie that attracted her so much that she was trying to embody that spirit.

And, well, that is the point of these sorts of animated movies is to put that spirit forward.

But it was remarkable how committed she was. I could think about that over a year at that developmental stage. She's not Pocahontas anymore, by the way, but I tested it for a long time.

And so that play, that's really deep—that's a really deep phenomenon.

So, and it gets to the human imperative to create story to create meaning through narrative.

And, you know, there is—we've talked about this a little bit—there is not—the hero's journey is extraordinary and universal, and in modernity I think it can just almost just as easily apply to many female's journeys.

But there aren't as many universal stories for girls and women.

And Beauty and the Beast is pretty good; I think it’s the best Disney animated film.

And like beauty is really smart because she doesn't pick Gaston.

He's got all the markers, right?

Right, right.

And she actually wants a civ, a beast who can be civilized.

That's right.

And he's the one advantage that he has. Gaston is all persona, so he's all the fake bower bird.

Now, he's a big guy and all that, but even that's fake.

And she's wise because she doesn't fall for the status markers; and he's completely nonplussed by this because he's, you know, he's devoted his whole life to just developing the status markers.

And so I think it's Beauty and the Beast is... there's a hero's journey in that that's very deep, and you know these very—some of these fairy tales, some of them have been traced back like 12 to 13,000 years.

And so, you know, if it's that old, it's like, a hundred thousand years, right?

Right, but this actually goes to a point that you and I have been dancing around forever, Jordan, which is the point about to which level— to what level are these very ancient things effectively timeless and to what level are these things in need of change?

Because we now face an environment for which they were not built.

And so the hero's journey, I would argue, just painting with a broad brush, the hero's journey is timeless.

What does the hero's journey look like? Well, it can look like Odysseus or it can look like the Fellowship of the Ring, right?

Those are very different versions of the hero's journey.

And in fact, at the moment, one of the things that we need are stories that are not built by the market to fill some need but that actually reflect the transition in what males and females do in the world.

That, in some sense, one of the positive things that has flown from birth control is that women, because they can now engage in family planning that works, are free to compete with men in every realm that isn't physical.

Yeah, well, one question we're wrestling with is, well, you know, to what degree are they just men?

They are not, right? Since the birth control pill—well, that's...

That—well, but they are in some way, which is just what you said— they're way more like men than they were before 1950.

We are free because they have control.

Yes, exactly.

And so part of what we are trying to sort out in our culture is, well, you know, to what degree are they just men, or better men even?

I mean, look at what's happening to university enrollment, for example.

And so we don't know.

And that our—that issue of universality. So a student once asked me in one of my classes at Harvard, it's like, well, if these stories are archetypal, why don't we just tell the same story over and over, like exactly the same story?

And I thought, that's a really good question.

And then I thought, well, there's actually an answer to that in Christian symbolism.

So one of the things that's really strange about Christian thinking is, well, there's God, you know, so he's the sum of all good—very abstract, though maybe he's a father, but he's way out there, and who knows what to do with him?

But he's really abstract.

Well, you have to take that abstraction and make it concrete. You have to make it embodied. Right?

You have to make it incarnated.

And so I'm speaking psychologically about the story—not religiously.

So to bridge that gap between the ideal image, which is archetypal and universal, and the particularity, the way the Christian imagination solved that problem was to say, well, that ideal was embodied in a particular time and place, which seems extremely arbitrary.

But that's us, right? Because we are arbitrary embodiments of that—whatever that abstract humanity is.

And we have to particularize the universal to our time and place.

And that's why we need new storytellers all the time, right?

You need new storytellers, and you need effectively a process of selection.

It may or may not be affecting the storytellers, but it affects which stories resonate.

And so a perfect example of your—what we do instead of telling the same story over and over again is we tell a story in a way that is relevant to the current moment.

Right? The allegory of the cave is the perfect example of this, right?

The Matrix is the allegory of the cave. Arguably, The Truman Show is the allegory of the cave.

And the point is there are ways in which this needs to be....

You know, we probably needed an updated version of 1984 because we're living it again, and apparently 1984 isn't good enough to get us to recognize that at a level that will stop, right?

So, in any case, there is a sort of need, and actually maybe this is the way this intersects with the book is hyper novelty is the out-of-control process by which the acceleration of change outstrips the capacity to adapt—this suggests that the pace at which the stories that we need must be updated is accelerating and probably too fast for us to get those stories.

Well, you know, it's something—here's something that's worth thinking about too in that regard.

Okay, so what drives innovation in computer hardware? It's the attempt to tell stories, to portray stories realistically, because that's the most technically demanding.

And I mean this economically—I’ve talked to people who've designed these chips.

Why do we need more and more powerful chips given that our computers are already too fast for us?

It's like, well, we keep building these virtual worlds, and we build them because narratives think about the game market are so unbelievably compelling.

And that provides the economic rationale for making our machines more and more intelligent.

And so we are hyper-motivated to solve that problem in some real sense.

Now how successful that is, that's a whole different issue. But you know, it's just worth taking seriously.

After all, we've all been told that politics is downstream from culture.

So I certainly like your point about it’s the desire for the realism and the narratives that’s actually driving technological process, although if you complete that story at the moment, it may be alchemy, right?

It's the mining of digital gold that is actually driving the hardware—it's in fact—yeah, well that's a very strange thing too.

Yeah, so various sorts of ways, yeah.

Yeah, it certainly is. And God only knows how revolutionary that is.

So I talk to a lot of the bitcoin thinkers now, and I have a better sense of what it is, and I can't believe how smart the person was that made it.

It's really—and the story is just beyond belief. The, you know, this guy pops up, he makes this thing, he disappears—no one even knows who he is for sure.

It's like, who could make that up, right? If he's even a person.

Well, and I'm, you know, what I'm trying to do... yeah, if he's even a person, I'm trying to update our understanding of stories.

You know, that rather than the stories themselves, I suppose— and also to point out how important they are.

That hero archetype, I really do think that that's the story of niche switching, right?

Because, see, this is why I want to do a series on Exodus, and I really like Exodus. And you think about it in terms of a story about adaptations to niches.

Okay, so—and all that that adaptation gets tyrannical, it gets cast in stone; that's Egypt—it's all stone symbolism.

It worked once, but now it doesn't. Well, that's an adaptation because the niche keeps changing underneath it.

Okay? So then you have to switch the adaptation.

Well, Moses is the king of water, and it dissolves stone. He's the master of water.

Well, what happens when you lose the adaptation?

Well, the tyranny disappears—hooray! But then where are you?

Well, you're in this terrible space between adaptations. You're in a space between adaptations—that's the desert.

Ah! Space between adaptations! We call it the adaptive valley, and you’re very right that a desert is a perfect analog for the adaptive valley.

It is not a productive place; it is some place one must cross.

And frankly, it has the same problem as the adaptive valley on the evolutionary landscape, which is you have to cross it in the right direction, or you're cooked.

Hmm.

So elaborate on that a bit.

I don't know the valley so...

That theory that we have, it’s very interesting.

Yeah, we have this very old metaphor in evolutionary biology originally penned by a guy named Sewall Wright in the 1930s—1932, I think.

In any case, it describes basically niches and opportunities as peaks and the obstacles to moving from one opportunity to the next as valleys.

This metaphor doesn't work as it was initially instantiated because we didn't really know enough about genes and epigenetics for it to work, but it can be easily updated.

And the basic idea is, well, I would argue it has to be updated again, that to think about a mountain range with valleys between peaks doesn't quite get it.

Because if you're really in a mountain range with peaks, you can see where the other peaks are.

But that's not how selection works, right? You cross into a valley because your opportunity is no longer good enough, and you guys have to talk to Jonathan Pageau about the symbol, the religious symbolism of mountains, because it's dead relevant to your biological theorizing.

Well, it wouldn't be so, because the perceptual landscape, in some sense, is predicated on the symbolic notion of a divine mountain.

So imagine at the center—it's like the fovea of the vision, right? Everything's clear there; it’s closest to the center of what would you say mastered territory.

And so pyramids are a representation of that, and that's partly why they're sacred.

And so this idea, it’s not fluke that that metaphor sprang to mind for the biologists, and it's dead relevant for a study of religious symbolism, right?

It could be—it could be convergence, or it could be that Sewall Wright, somewhere lurking in his mind, had religious stories that hinted at this and, you know, basically preconditioned him to see that meta for his particularly resonant—

Well, on you—I mean, Brett has—Brett actually has been too modest here. You have actually updated the model in your dissertation to shifting landscapes of dunes, ridges, and plateaus, where, you know, the selective pressures can yield, you know, lines along which you might be a most adapted form or a, you know, an area that can fail.

You know, and also a volumetric understanding where you can fill a space where latecomers may be less adapted, not because they themselves are any different, but because they’re late to the game.

So there's a lot to be experienced; there's a whole lot to be done.

But so far, I've been mapping out the relationship between the mountain symbolism in religious thinking and also the relationship between that and perceptual categories and cognitive categories.

He's the only person I know that's done that.

He did that partly because he spent a lot of time talking to John Vervakey, who's an expert in the cognition of perception and also interested in religious ideas.

But there's a biological under...

So, okay, so then back to the niche switching idea.

So imagine these mountains and valleys and the adapt— in the adaptive landscape, in some sense, well, you want someone who is at the top of the mountain, but more importantly, you want someone who can travel from one mountain peak to another.

And even more than that, you want someone to travel from a lower mountain peak to a higher one.

Well, so, boy, there’s a whole lot here. One thing is that the skills that allow you to ascend a mountain tend to be in a trade-off relationship—an important trade-off relationship—with the skills that allow you to cross these valleys, right?

And so, in some sense, those who are good at starting up businesses aren't necessarily the people who should implement them, and of course, yeah, openness versus conscientiousness—that's what that boils down to, basically.

I once heard a very good discussion about whether or not this is why God kept Moses out of the promised land.

Exactly.

Yeah, because that was going through the back of my mind. He was the valley crosser, right?

So there's a lot—there's a lot to be said for that.

But the other thing is that human biblically—he wasn't Christ; that’s why he couldn't get to the promised land.

Yeah, that's the Christian version of that.

And so—and it's related to this; it's related very much to the idea that you just put forward—with different skill sets, in some sense.

Yeah, I mean, he wasn't David most fundamentally, but yes, yes.

Well, but let’s just say that if all creatures are caught in this adaptive landscape issue, where you—they can't see the other peaks, and crossing happens as a result of some process, human beings are in a special condition.

And this is exactly what we talk about in the second to last chapter of our book, which is the consciousness—the collective consciousness process actually allows us to effectively debate and discover the probable location of future peaks without having been there.

Right, yes! To know that a peak ought to lie in that direction, and to move in that direction in some coherent way.

This is a uniquely human capacity.

It is why niche switching is our special gift, and you know, hopefully it's dependent on the free exchange of ideas, which is no different than thinking.

And we do it collectively.

Yes, we do it—that's the thing that not every free exchange of ideas works this way.

It is a collaborative free exchange of ideas where people who are agreed that what we need to do is get into the future, how best to do that is the question around the campfire.

Yeah, this collaboration involves ideas being exchanged, which can be altered by the exchange.

Yes, as opposed to as opposed to read-only receiving.

I think so; I think that's why