10: David Sloan Wilson
Welcome to Episode 10, where I talk to DAVID SLOAN WILSON, Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, about, well, a lot of stuff, from Skinnerian behaviorism to multilevel selection theory, to the behaviors that impede and facilitate scientific progress and even to what Wilson calls “the science to narrative chain,” which is the process by which scientists might most effectively engage with the general public. Wilson is the author of numerous classic papers in the field of evolutionary biology and several books, including Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, 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, Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, and others. And as if that weren’t enough, Wilson also founded Binghamton University’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program, as well as the Evolution Institute, which sets as its goal the application of evolutionary science to the solving of pressing social issues, and, ultimately, to improve quality of life around the globe. The Evolution Institute in turn publishes a fascinating online magazine called This View of Life, “an online general interest magazine in which all of the content is from an evolutionary perspective.” I was a little starstruck during our conversation, but David was an amazing sport about it, generously engaging with each topic and happily spending time with me. I’m extremely grateful for this. My advice for listening is to keep a notepad handy. David Sloan Wilson is almost perpetually quotable! Enjoy! * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page.
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Jim Coan
From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is Episode 10 of Circle of Willis, where I chat with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson about multi level selection theory and the ways in which scientists communicate both with each other and with society.
Jim Coan
Hey everyone, it's Jim Coan. This is my podcast Circle of Willis. Guys, I'm sick. I got a nose thing and a lung thing and God knows what else. I've taken a lot of medicine and it's got me feeling a little bit funny. But if my voice sounds a little off, that's probably why. Okay, for this episode, I'm talking with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson about... Well, about a lot of things. I was I was at an annual meeting of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science or ACBS and I spotted him there. I just went up to him and I sort of nervously asked him if he'd be on my podcast. And he said, Sure. And the next thing I knew we were up in my hotel room, recording the conversation you are about to hear. Fun fact: this recording literally captures the first conversation that we ever had together. And I kind of love that. As we enter the conversation, I asked him what he's doing at a psychology conference and he sort of talks about his recent collaboration with clinical psychologists superhero Steve Hays, the inventor of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and an old school behaviorist. Turns out the two of them are working to reunite the sciences of Skinnerian behaviorism and Darwinian evolutionary theory. And I think it's long past due. This leads to a really nice discussion of how science progresses, and how scientists communicate with each other, and actually how scientists get their work out into the general public. That's good. Many of you will already know David Sloan Wilson because he's one of the biologies most prolific and impactful scientists. He's been in the spotlight for more than four decades now, poking holes in evolutionary orthodoxy with his multi level selection theory, which we also talk about, by the way. And doing just a tremendous amount of work to bring the theory of evolution more broadly into the public consciousness. Just a few points to mention here, more than a few, as a matter of fact, David Sloan Wilson is distinguished professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University, where he started the evolutionary studies program also there. He's written a bunch of books, quite accessible books. I highly recommend. They include Darwin's Cathedral, Evolution for Everyone, The Neighborhood Project, and Does Altruism Exist. The guy also founded the Evolution Institute, which has as its goal, the application of evolutionary science, to help solve serious social issues. Issues that matter to all of us. And you know, through that institute, he also publishes an online magazine called This View of Life. And there's more stuff too. A bunch of more stuff, but I'm going to stop now. I'm going to stop because I want to get to our actual conversation. And I gotta say, in this conversation, I was a little starstruck, a little nervous. And I think that might come through a bit but you know, whatever. It's good. My advice is to just listen to what the man has to say. There's a lot in here that even his harshest critics I think would want to high five him for. And this is another episode where you want to keep a notepad handy. This guy is nothing if not quotable. All right. Okay. Here he is everyone. David Sloan Wilson.
Jim Coan
So what led you to be working with someone like Steve Hays in a setting like this?
David Sloan Wilson
I want to begin with a social history.
Jim Coan
Okay.
David Sloan Wilson
Because Steve Hays is an ex generation Skinnerian.
Jim Coan
That's right.
David Sloan Wilson
A lot of this emminates with BF Skinner.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And Skinner regarded himself as an evolutionist.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
His paper selection by consequence ha more or less staked out his position. But then this kind of weird history happened. And Skinnerian behaviorism was eclipsed in academic psychology by the so called cognitive revolution.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And it's still found a home in the applied behavioral sciences. And then the cognitive revolution was then critiqued by evolutionary psychology of the Cosmidies and Tooby variety.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And which then kind of demonized the so called standard social science model. And so you get this bizarre state of affairs where, what most people associate with evolutionary psychology is totally divorced, diametrically opposed to Skinnerian psychology.
Jim Coan
It's incredible, isn't it?
David Sloan Wilson
It is incredible.
Jim Coan
It really became sort of oppositional also, I think, because people started associating anything having to do with evolution with, you know, sort of nefarious social programs that we're going to-
David Sloan Wilson
Well, there's a big piece there.
Jim Coan
Racism and sexism
David Sloan Wilson
Let's set this aside for the moment. If we want to get back to it, we can. We can do a whole session on it. I call this truth and reconciliation for social Darwinism. And so, the term social Darwinism refers to basically, the moral justification of inequality.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And the question as to whether it earned that reputation ever in its history, is a very interesting history. So let's set that aside for the moment.
Jim Coan
Okay. Sure.
David Sloan Wilson
But so, what my relationship with Steve, and other people like Tony Biglan, and Dennis Emery represents is a reuniting of these traditions as it should be. So for a fully rounded evolutionary perspective on human psychology, it needs to have that Skinnerian element. Now elaborated, because what Steve and company represent is not just the same old Skinnerian, it's this whole relational frame theory.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
This whole attention to symbolic thought.
Jim Coan
Yeah
David Sloan Wilson
And so on. So it's definitely gone way beyond Skinner. But in any case, that tradition is now fusing thanks to us, back with a more modern evolutionary psychology tradition. And so that's why I'm here. And that's why Steve and Tony and more or less made sure that I would be here and have gone to great effort to do this integration through this great society, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. And Steve and I are doing an edited book. We're in the middle of it right now called Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science colon, A Reunification. And the organization of that book, is that we are for a number of subjects, we are pairing someone from the CBS world with someone from the evolution world. And each is writing an essay, and then we're getting them together for a conversation. And then if you like this...
Jim Coan
Well, that's great. So yeah, the general principle again, is like you were saying, the Skinner titled, Selection by Consequences, right? That seems to be just a general principle of nature, of at least of biological systems.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah. So to elaborate on that, and this enables us to say more about the reuniting part. When an evolutionist talks about phenotypic plasticity of the evolved ability of an organism to respond to its environment. Then there's two kinds of phenotypic plasticity, which are often called closed and open. Closed consists of a fixed repertoire. It's like Plan A, B, C, and D.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And you can employ one of those plans, but you can't do anything that's truly novel. And each one of those plans was basically like a record and a jukebox that was coined during genetic evolution.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And the narrow school of evolutionary psychology of the Cosmidies and Tooby variety is very much one of closed phenotypic plasticity. Evidently, there's like hundreds of modules, right? This is called massive modularity.
Jim Coan
Massive modularity.
David Sloan Wilson
And if you want to explain why we're behaving in the current day, what you need to do is you need to find the environmental trigger, the current day environmental trigger, which plays one of these previously cut records from the jukebox.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And the jukebox is a metaphor that's often used to describe that.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Open phenotypic plasticity is more open ended than that. And for that reason, it is based on a variation and selection process.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And so in the operant conditioning case, then you have basically organisms behaving every which way. And then the ones that are reinforced, are then adopted as behaviors. And so that is a evolutionary process built by an evolution. It's an-
Jim Coan
That capacity.
David Sloan Wilson
It too evolve by another evolutionary process. Sometimes it's called a Darwin machine. The word Darwin means that it's an open ended evolutionary process where there's selection by consequences. The word machine means is that it evolved and actually has a fairly complicated structure. So I mean, the whole concept of a reinforcer, for example, is something that evolved by genetic evolution that does the selecting.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
In a more proximate sense.
Jim Coan
You mean, what counts as an unconditioned reinforcer?
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. And then there's secondary reinforcers.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And so on.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
So a really good analogy that I've employed, along with Steve and company is the vertebrate immune system. Which is much better studied than other systems. And it includes what's called an innate and adaptive component. The innate component is this closed form of phenotypic plasticity, an amazing arsenal of like automated responses.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
But actually keeps away most disease organisms, but doesn't have that open ended flexibility. That's what the adaptive component does. Which of course, is our antibody system, our ability to make approximately 100 million different antibodies, each one acts like a hand as it sometimes described.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Capable of latching onto a narrow range of organic surfaces. But collectively being able to grab on to almost any organic surface, and then an ability to amplify the ones that actually do latching onto a surface. So that distinction between an innate and an adaptive component is exactly the way we need to think about our behavioral systems. And it's at that point that more or less narrow school evolutionary psychology stands for the innate component. And this Skinnerian tradition, now elaborated to include symbolic thought, stands for the adaptive component. Now we're really getting somewhere.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's right. And now we're sort of finding the bridge, but also revealing the some of the reason for the conflict. It's sort of like the way that popular media reports things. So you know, depression is genetic, or depression is because of your bad childhood, you know, whatever it's both. It's about sort of sleuthing out how they're sort of titrated. And I think that people that are really in the evolutionary psych camp sometimes get a little bit protective of their modules. And people in the in the Skinnerian camp historically have gotten really dismissive of those modules.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. Well, this raises issues of literacy and science as itself a cultural adaptation. And that's actually an important point to make, because that science is an open ended evolutionary process. It's a Darwin machine. But that doesn't mean that it necessarily works well. And I think the idea of science working poorly and something that can -if we're more mindful about it- that science can work better, you'll look back upon certain scientific controversies. I can mention the group selection controversy. And then we've talked about the controversy over these schools of psychological thought. And we've talked about social Darwinism. In each and every case, these are definitely scientific controversies. They often take decades to resolve. So they're a counter trend. And if you look to see why, often with the benefit of hindsight, then you see I mean, it didn't have to take this long. It shouldn't have taken this long. There was a certain kind of like illiteracy, lack of scholarship, and other factors, which cause these controversies to be as protracted as they were. And so actually, we can do better. And I think we need to think about the more we think about the scientific process in this way that we actually can improve upon it and accelerate it to cause it to work better.
Jim Coan
So one of the issues for us that's going to accelerate our winning of our way through these controversies is literacy. But also when I think about your work, especially in the last decade or so I think about engagement, and really bringing people together who are sort of, you know, nominally in these these camps, and having them actually engaged with each other. You do that yourself quite a bit.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah. On a number of levels. One is engagement among scientists.
Jim Coan
Yes.
David Sloan Wilson
And the other is, of course, engagement with the general public. Which is, for example, happening at this moment here, this podcast.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And earlier you were... before we got started, you were describing your dissatisfaction with little news spots, basically.
Jim Coan
Yes.
David Sloan Wilson
If you're lucky enough to be featured on NPR, right day or something like this. That's the good news.
Jim Coan
For your three minutes.
David Sloan Wilson
The bad news is that actually three minutes would be a long time. So... but over at the Evolution Institute, where we've really been seriously applying evolution to public policy, we developed a concept that I'm proud of. It might not be original, but it's called the science to narrative chain.
Jim Coan
The science to narrative chain.
David Sloan Wilson
And what it notes is, is that science is necessary, but not sufficient to solve the problems of modern existence. It needs to be- There also needs to be powerful narratives, capable of reaching large numbers of people. And those narratives need to be connected to the science by a chain of intermediate material, of providing successive depth. So that no matter where you start out on this chain, you can learn more. So no matter what you currently know, in the first place you need to be engaged, and that's often with those three minute news spots.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
That reaches very large numbers of people. And then from that point, there needs to be a way to learn more. Such as a podcast. And from there, a book or-
Jim Coan
Right, so that each one points to the other, perhaps.
David Sloan Wilson
And then it provides a path to the scientific literature. And then that way, among other things, the narrative is held accountable.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
To the science. One reason that we developed this was, we were working on the topic of economics. And academic economics, by itself is a huge mess. We're sorting it out, actually, doing a pretty good job. But then we realized we'd published like special editions of economic journals and things like that. And we realized, can I swear on air?
Jim Coan
Absolutely.
David Sloan Wilson
They're shit.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Even if we do this, the disconnect between academic economics and economics in the public sphere, it's so disconnected that we hadn't finished our job yet, had we?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And that we needed to communicate this to the general public, in addition to cleaning up the mess, and yeah, right. On the science end.
Jim Coan
Right. Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And we've succeeded in doing that through our magazine, Evonomics.
Jim Coan
Evomics. I was gonna... I wasn't sure that was the name. I didn't want to say it without more certainty. But I remember that.
David Sloan Wilson
E V O nomics.com Less than a year old. And now we're reaching over a quarter million pageviews a month. So this is really getting out. And there is now- we're doing the whole job of the science to narrative chain, for the topic of economics. And then our other magazine, This View of Life, does it for all else.
Jim Coan
And you've got This View of Life includes things like podcasts, right? Podcasts and articles and...
David Sloan Wilson
That's right.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
That's right.
Jim Coan
It's this view of life.com. or what?
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah, This View of Life. Type it into Google.
Jim Coan
It's a tremendous resource.
David Sloan Wilson
Thank you. I'm proud of it and I think it has to be much better. Even better known. So.
Jim Coan
Yeah. Well, I mean, I could- It's the sort of resource... I mean, it pulls off a kind of a magic trick for me and it's something that I don't really know how to do. And I've talked about this with a lot of scientists over the last few months doing this, where you somehow- I feel comfortable pointing my mom to This View of Life and not worrying too much. Because she's not- She you know, she didn't go to college. My parents, working class, family background. My parents are not college graduates, but they care about stuff. One of the things that coming from that background has really left me feeling is that it's really not correct that people who don't have a college education are either dumb or disinterested in science. They actually are. They're fascinated by that stuff. The trick is helping them access it.
David Sloan Wilson
That's one trick. And by the way, you paid me the very highest compliment by saying that your mom can go to This View of Life. That's what we aspire to. And at the same time, it's widely read by a professional audience.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And some of those articles, probably your mom wouldn't want to read because they go on for 6000 words on...
Jim Coan
Multilevel selection. Yeah, yeah, right. And fitness.
David Sloan Wilson
But it's nice to have both. The point I want to make is that there's no such thing as a single common sense. What counts as common sense depends so much on background assumptions, that every theory brings its own common sense with it. And one of my favorite stories about that is the young Darwin, he recounts this, in his autobiography, recalls taking a fossil hunting expedition with his mentor, Adam Sedgwick. And they were going to valley and Wales, which had no fossils, because it had been scoured by glaciers. And Darwin looks back and he says, You know, all the evidence for glaciers were there, the moraines, the scored rocks, the perch boulders. Everything was there, he says, A house burned down by fire did not tell that story more plainly than this valley. But the theory of glaciation had not yet been proposed. And so they could not see that. And so they were looking for fossils. So the idea that we need a theory to see what's in front of our faces and once we have that theory, then a house burned down by fire does not tell its story more plainly, is the main trick that has to be turned. And once you do that, that's why This View of Life, which alludes to the final passage of Darwin's Origin of Species where he concludes his book by saying there is grandeur in this view of life. So, you know, once you adopt this view of life, then it acts as a lens for viewing anything.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And is the new common sense. So and anybody can can do that a mom, a high school student, any inquiring mind can don these glasses, basically.
Jim Coan
That's right.
David Sloan Wilson
And in my experience, which is very extensive, having created a campus wide evolutionary studies program that teaches evolution across the curriculum, and written my book Evolution For Everyone. And I know that more often than not people who don these glasses, they never want to tick them off. It's just basically it's so clarifying that it's like walking through a door and not wanting... ever wanting to go back.
Jim Coan
Yeah, well, you you have an explanation that works. In short.
David Sloan Wilson
It organizes experience.
Jim Coan
It organizes experience. I mean, that in my own experience is exhilarating. That's part of what keeps me hooked.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Doing what I do.
David Sloan Wilson
And that, it becomes a master narrative back to a narrative. As strong a narrative as a religious narrative. I think that somebody who really gets this and gets its scope is as motivated to get out of bed in the morning and get things done as any religious believer I know. And isn't it nice that it's a fully scientific narrative. It doesn't require false, factually incorrect beliefs. I'm someone who is an atheist who admires religion. So I'm not speaking, disparagingly of religions. I think that any worldview that causes community of people to behave well towards each other and outside their group. \
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Oh, I mean, I'm not apologizing.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
For religion, but it's nice to have a secular worldview, that that can be as motivating as a as a religious worldview.
Jim Coan
And do you find that your own grasp of evolution and sort of knowledge of how evolution shaped minds to regard the world, to cope with problems, to deal with suffering is that something that gives you some distance when you're engaging with religion? For example, that gives you some perspective on you know, this is a religion is a thing that people do for for understandable reasons, whether you buy the particular narrative or not. Do you find that helpful in engaging with that or?
David Sloan Wilson
Sure.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah, I think that the basic- And this is deeply philosophical. This is what I think basically, epistemology should be based on is the recognition that every belief needs to be evaluated by two criteria. First of all, how does it correspond to reality? That's the scientific criterion. And secondly, what does it cause you to do? What does it cause you to do? I call these practical and factual realism. And I like those terms, because the word realistic when you think about it, in natural language actually has two very different meanings. If you tell me something, and I say that's realistic, or that's not realistic, I might mean, two things. One is it doesn't conform to the real world. Secondly, it's not very practical.
Jim Coan
Yeah, who cares? Candles dancing on the head of a pin.
David Sloan Wilson
We actually employ these two meanings. So first of all, we need to make that distinction. Then we need to realize that as far as evolution is concerned, our capacity to form beliefs is overwhelmingly based on their practical realism. What they cause us to do. And their correspondence to factual reality, strictly speaking is irrelevant, right? I mean, that-
Jim Coan
That's a pretty strong statement.
David Sloan Wilson
It follows from evolution 101. So, because... Now, but there's a connection, basically. What's the relationship between perceving the world as it really is, and behaving adaptively in that world? What's the adaptive value of something which is factually correct? And the answer to that question is, it's complex and very contextual. We can say that with confidence. There's contexts in which the more clearly you see the world as it really is, the better you can function in that world. Hitting my prey over there, I need to know exactly where it is.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And so often, there's a positive relationship between factual and practical realism. But in many, many other cases, we behave more adaptively by departing from factual realism. So the idea of adaptive fictions, fictions which are better than fact, in terms of how their causes us to behave, you know, there's going to be buckets of them. And so an adaptive worldview is going to be a mix, basically, of these two. And once you really take that on board, then it does cause you to see something like religion in a new light. Because what's obvious about religions and what puzzles and intrigues the scientific imagination about religions, is that they do involve so many goofy counterfactual beliefs. There's no evidence for them.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
Plus, they cost you to do costly things.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
So how can they exist? And the answer to that broadly, and I think the study of religion from an evolutionary perspective has more or less established this. Which was a great achievement, is that most enduring religions have what Durkheim called long ago, secular utility. Great secular utility. Appearances, to the contrary, these goofy beliefs, and seemingly costly practices do have a utility, and it is typically to create a moral community, a strong community, organized around these beliefs, and those typically evolved by between group selection. And then I'd like to make a final point, which is that if we look at all the worldviews which are not religious, but you call them secular worldviews, they are also shot peer with adaptive fictions. This is certainly true of economics. And it is true. Almost any ideology.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And it's even- To me, I find this disturbing, just to absorb the full import of these very simple... Evolution- All of this is evolution 101, by the way.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
It's so basic, it's very unlikely to be wrong. That just everything we think about ourselves and our culture, and our histories are shot through with adaptive set of value
Jim Coan
Or some fictions. But also value, right? I mean-
David Sloan Wilson
Values is all part this.
Jim Coan
That's assumed. Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Well, that's values masquerading as fact.
Jim Coan
You know, and it strikes me that this is actually, this as a principle, if this is a principle, and I think it is. It's sort of functionalist as a principle. This is built into our basic perceptual systems physiologically, right? I mean we- You know, James Gibson, I don't know if you know-
David Sloan Wilson
Ecological.
Jim Coan
Yeah, the ecological analysis of perception. And you know about how you know evolution abhors waste. You know, we don't want to be carrying a bunch of- We don't want to be perceiving every spectrum of light.
David Sloan Wilson
I make that point quite often. So let me just play that back for you. Your point played back, is that if you look at basic perception, you see that every species is ignoring most things. So those things are invisible. In our case, we can't sense electrical waves or gravitational right poles. We see only a narrow spectrum of the light spectrum, narrow spectrum, segments of the sound spectrum and even those we distort. Such as flooding a continuum of light into discrete colors and things like-
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Things like that. So that kind of distortion of reality takes place at the basis of our basic organs of perception. And there's no denial of that. Nobody denies that.
Jim Coan
That's pretty much...
David Sloan Wilson
And then there's just one more step. All of that is also true for our cultural beliefs. There's a book that I read recently, it's not a new book, and it's well known in some circles. It's title is Invented Traditions, and we should provide our listeners with the author and so on. But it's an edited book. So there's chapters. And it recounts... This was like such a demonstration of my own theme outside religion. And the first chapter was on Scotland. And everything you might think you know about Scottish traditions, clans, kilts,. None of it is true.
Jim Coan
It's all bullshit. Is it? Really?
David Sloan Wilson
It's all invented traditions.
Jim Coan
Come on. Is that really true?
David Sloan Wilson
Is there you go? You're behaving like I did. I'm not Scottish. I have no-
Jim Coan
Yeah, I don't. I mean don't have skin in the game. I've Irish ancestry that is utterly irrelevant to my daily life. Now...
David Sloan Wilson
If you go back- And so this is why historical scholarship is so important. The only ones with a motive to get it right, are the historical scholars. Scholarship is like science, basically. It has a it has a goal of getting it right.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Everyone else doesn't have that goal. And so... But just like Darwin said about, you know, the house burned down by fire. All you have to say is this, for example, go back to any pictorial representation of Scotland.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Of which there are many paintings and things like that. Beyond a certain period of time. Which was not so far ago, like 17th century or something like that.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Try to find a kilt.
Jim Coan
There's no kilts. Oh, my God. I've been lied to all this time.
David Sloan Wilson
All this time. Yes.
Jim Coan
And so the function of the kilts, and the bagpipes, maybe and the god knows whatever else, haggis. That's partly to create a national identity or a cultural identity or... And then the function of that is to organize the sort of social behaviors within a group. You could say. I mean, I'm just throwing that out there.
David Sloan Wilson
Well, this actually brings up an important thing to bring up. There is both an adaptive and a non adaptive side of the evolutionary coin. And Stephen Jay Gould was tireless, and reminding us that not everything that we see out there is an adaptation.
Jim Coan
The spandrel.
David Sloan Wilson
The spandrel, the byproduct.
Jim Coan
Yes.
David Sloan Wilson
And so on. And part of what's I think a little subtle about being a good evolutionist is to be able to call an adaptation when you see one.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And to call a byproduct when you when you see one. And in the case of the history of the perceived, invented traditions of Scotland, there's a lot of stuff that says, byproduct.
Jim Coan
It's just there.
David Sloan Wilson
Well, it has to do with
Jim Coan
People create these, right? That's just what people do, right?
David Sloan Wilson
Well these two brothers are were total charlatans. And they just wanted to invent an aristocracy for themselves and they did. And this involves among other things, forgeries. By which I mean, books that are written that camouflage themselves as scholarly books, complete with long reference sections and things like that. And they're just made up and in the interest of the authors that were wanted to establish these and they just they had to be consciously fabricating there was nothing.
Jim Coan
But what do you mean? What are the what are these- I'm so I'm so unsettled by this. What kind of books you're talking about?
David Sloan Wilson
I'm bringing it up from memory, but I think I remember the broad facts. The problem with Scotland, way back, was that it was like a backwater. And-
Jim Coan
Nothing wrong with that.
David Sloan Wilson
It turns out that it was the cultural transmission from from Scotland and Ireland, they were separated by water. But water was easier to cross. Even more so than going over the mountains. So that... And as I recall, Scotland was just like where the losers went. And when people wanted to-
Jim Coan
So much for the scotch, Scots, I should say.
David Sloan Wilson
And when people wanted to actually create a social identity for Scotland, they invented, as I remember. Listeners, please forgive me for not getting all the details, right. They invented a Homer.
Jim Coan
They did?
David Sloan Wilson
A Scottish Homer's called Ossian, I think.
Jim Coan
Uh huh.
David Sloan Wilson
And it was an invented person who who gave an antiquity that didn't exist.
Jim Coan
Wow.
David Sloan Wilson
And this was part of the beginning. And then the kilts was actually the invention of a ,and this is like really offending nationalistic sensibility.
Jim Coan
Yeah you're in for it.
David Sloan Wilson
I don't blame me. This is all documented by historians. But a textile maker from England, who was basically spinning clothing, clothing for-
Jim Coan
He's gonna cash in.
David Sloan Wilson
And then he had all these incentives to invent the kilt. And then, of course, it was expanding your market.
Jim Coan
Which in and of itself is a bit of a mystery. Incentives to build kilts
David Sloan Wilson
And to expand the market so that every clan had to have a different pattern at this point was... And all of this taking place in like the 19 century in the 18th century, a completely shallow history. All, like a house burned down by fire.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
All there to be seen, once you view it from this. Now, just imagine that was one chapter of this goddamn book. And then there was a chapter for every- For Wales, and India, Africa, the manufacture... Yeah, what's true is...
Jim Coan
What's true.
David Sloan Wilson
And this is why I don't knock religions. I think, because everything that we associated with, what's false about religion is false about our knowledge. Unless you make it your explicit goal, to be a good scientist or a good scholar, then these forces will hold sway. We are lost in a fun house of adaptive fictions and byproducts.
Jim Coan
To which we're often emotionally attached.
David Sloan Wilson
To which we are buried attached, sometimes defending to our death.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
So that's kind of a shocking realization. How much work is required in order to see the world the way it really is. And it's never been more important to do so.
Jim Coan
That's why they call it a discipline, right? Discipline.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
It's not intuitive, necessarily. The act of uncovering factual. You know, approaching verisimilitude, reality.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
It's not an intuitive approach.
David Sloan Wilson
But needed.
Jim Coan
Desperately, desperately needed.
David Sloan Wilson
Yep.
Jim Coan
Wow. Where did you get started? Where are you from? You from the east, like northeast?
David Sloan Wilson
I'm from the East. I've told the story elsewhere, but very, very briefly. My dad was a famous novelist. He wrote The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place.
Jim Coan
Holy shit.
David Sloan Wilson
Those were his biggest best sellers. And I admired him, but didn't think I could ever measure up to him.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And so my boyish solution was to do something he would respect but couldn't possibly understand.
Jim Coan
That sounds like a good plan.
David Sloan Wilson
I succeeded at that.
Jim Coan
That's a good solution.
David Sloan Wilson
And so I became a scientist. And I also love nature. So as soon as I realized I could be a scientist who studied nature, in other words, an ecologist. That's the kind of scientist I became.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And I was lucky to enter to be trained at a time when historically, the fields of ecology, evolution, and behavior, which are historically separate disciplines were fusing.
Jim Coan
In Behavioral Ecology? Is this-
David Sloan Wilson
All of that. 1970s. Dobzhansky said, Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
It was the 1975 was the publication of sociobiology.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And I was a graduate student. And so this is was part of my, my training. And as soon as I realized that the evolutionary lens could be trained on humans, then I realized that I could do the same novelistic enterprise as my dad. Because that's what a novelist does. Tries to understand the human condition.
Jim Coan
Sure.
David Sloan Wilson
My dad did it through the lens of his personal experience. I realized that I could do that through the lens of evolutionary theory. And so that gave me a special attraction for studying humans from an evolutionary perspective. What scandalized many people about the final chapter of Ed Wilson Sociobiology, had positive appeal to me and others.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
So I was among the first to jump on the idea of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, in the 1970s.
Jim Coan
One of the first books I read as an undergraduate was On Human Nature.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah. So, and it's interesting. Ed Wilson is an interesting figure, because a lot of times...
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Just to say one thing about it, though. He had a long, long interview with a colleague of mine. Lasted for a couple hours in which he went through his own life story from this sense. And I actually transcribed that interview. So...
Jim Coan
You did? You typed it?
David Sloan Wilson
Because it was for This View of Life. It took me hours to.
Jim Coan
It must have.
David Sloan Wilson
But it penetrated more than if I had just read it. So Ed Wilson was a young assistant professor at Harvard at the same time as Francis Crick. And he said that nobody thought that the inheritance code was going to be cracked that soon. And when their paper came out, Watson and Crick and the- It was Watson, I'm sorry, Watson not Crick. It was at Harvard.
Jim Coan
Got it. Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And in the 1950s, ed Wilson could see the writing on the wall. He knew that this was going to be so huge. He basically saw the future of molecular biology and molecular genetics. And he knew that every position at Harvard, and the Biology Department was going to be thrown in that direction. If something were not done. And that his field somehow had to match-
Jim Coan
He had to come up with a similar... A statement of similar strength.
David Sloan Wilson
He had to somehow compete for evolutionary biology, whole organism biology. To compete with what was going to take place in molecular biology. And so as he thinks of it, and I'm not sure he so wrong, he deliberately went about to do such things as putting natural history on a more quantitative foundation. He worked with Robert MacArthur. And that was the beginning of a more quantitative approach to ecology.
Jim Coan
That's incredible timing.
David Sloan Wilson
Island biogeography was another quantified approach. Then sociobiology, then then non human nature. Deliberately trying to upgrade whole organism biology, modernize it. In order to keep pace with molecular biologists.
Jim Coan
It's just an incredible contribution.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And so when he's doing that, when he's writing those books, you're coming through grad school. Or you're finishing up grad school in the 70s, or the mid 70s?
David Sloan Wilson
Right. He-
Jim Coan
And where were you at?
David Sloan Wilson
I got my PhD at at Michigan State.
Jim Coan
Okay.
David Sloan Wilson
And I started out as an aquatic ecologist studying zooplankton. But part of this fusion meant that I realized I didn't have to be like the old joke about the expert learning more and more about less and less and everything about nothing. I can study anything from with my evolutionary turns, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's right.
David Sloan Wilson
And so, although my starting point was zooplankton, by the time I got done with grad school, I was an all purpose evolutionary biologist. And my first article on group selection was written as a graduate school. It was a model, and I immediately knew its import. And I contacted Ed Wilson to ask him to sponsor it for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So that was a year before sociobiology. So I went, I met him. And he ended up doing just that. So I was a grad student, just finishing up at the time, when sociobiology came out. I was briefly at Harvard on a postdoc not with him. And then later on, a lot later on, we started to co author articles together.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
But that wasn't until 2007.
Jim Coan
Got it. Right. And that first statement of group selection was very, very theoretical. Like a possible- I haven't read that particular paper, but was it a sort of a statement of possibility? Or did you feel like you had sort of, we're moving towards solving.
David Sloan Wilson
Well, at that time group selection have been much maligned and have been dismissed, kind of categorically. And so the consensus was that group selection is almost invariably weak compared to individual...
Jim Coan
If it even exists at all?
David Sloan Wilson
Well, the consensus was, and it's very important to establish this because I think actually, memory is fading about the group selection, controversy. And that's not a good thing. So let's spend just a couple of minutes on it.
Jim Coan
Sure.
David Sloan Wilson
So, I like to say that, if we go back to the Christian worldview, it's very much that if the world was created by an omniscient and beneficent God, that it must be harmonious, from top to bottom. From the smallest insect to the heavenly bodies.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And the first Enlightenment thinkers such as Isaac Newton, although they were placing their authority on science and reason, not Scripture. They thought that science and reason would affirm, the Christian worldview, in this respect.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And what was shocking and disturbing about evolution, was the possibility that the kind of harmony and order functional design that we associate with a human implements such as a watch, or a single organism, such as an insect, might cease to exist at a higher scale, such as a social group, or an ecosystem, not to speak of the cosmos. So the idea of order leading to disorder is the shocking possibility that was introduced by evolutionary theory. And Darwin was led to this conclusion by contemplating traits that are for the good of the group. The traits that would be considered moral in human terms altruism, honesty, bravery. And he realized that these traits did not give an individual an advantage compared to other individuals within the same group. The advantage would go to the selfish individual. The individual that behaves immorally in human terms, would beat out, would exploit the moral individual within the same group. And so that was the dilemma. And the solution to the dilemma that Darwin realized was that even though selfishness beats altruism within groups, as Ed Wilson and I put it. Groups of altruistic would robustly out compete, groups of selfish individuals. So that if natural selection operates on groups, then there would be an evolutionary force favoring all of the traits that we associate with morality in human terms for the good of the group traits. So as Ed Wilson and I summarized in our 2007, article, selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups, everything else is commentary. There is your theory of social behavior, standing on one foot. So what happened- Now this remains true. This is what everyone should learn. And this is basically the logic of multi level selection. What actually happened in the history of evolutionary thought was that in the first place, that clarity was lost. As important as this was, it was actually marginalized by even more important things. Just imagine that at that time, people were trying to figure out the basic mechanism of inheritance. Reconciling like Mendleism with Darwinism.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And so the three main pioneers of population genetics Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, and JBS Haldane, each considered this group selection problem, briefly. More or less building simple models, emulating the logic, the verbal logic of of Darwin. But none of them paid it much attention. And the other biologist who didn't even know about population genetics, often assumed naively, that adaptations could evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy. Or if they understood that group selection was needed, they assumed that group selection easily trumped within group selection. And so that there was basically not a problem invoking adaptation above the level of the individuals. And it was not until the 1960s that this basically began to occupy center stage in evolutionary biology. This was after the modern synthesis.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Modern synthesis took place in the 1940s.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And GC Williams is the major figure there. And he actually- The anecdote- I knew him well. He was a good friend of mine.
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Despite the fact that we were on opposite ends of the group selection controversy. So what actually happened was, he was trained in- He had good evolutionary training at UC Berkeley. And then his first postdoc was that at the University of Chicago. And that was the home of of ecologists, such as WC Alli, who were naive group selectionists. Ali was a termite biologist, and of course, termites-
Jim Coan
Naive group selectionists.
David Sloan Wilson
Well, I mean, naive is always a retrospective designation.
Jim Coan
Sure.
David Sloan Wilson
So Ali was a termite biologist. I mean, termites are super organisms, but he-
Jim Coan
But they also are highly genetically...
David Sloan Wilson
Well, none of that was known at the time.
Jim Coan
Okay, right, right, right. That's right. Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
There were definitely group organisms. We know that today.
Jim Coan
Sure.
David Sloan Wilson
But he overgeneralize, he thought all of nature was like a termite colony. And he didn't have the clarity of thought of population genetics or anything like that. So Williams encounters this, and he understands that they have no theoretical foundation to this. And so that's why he writes. He begins to read his book Adaptation and Natural Selection. So what the book says, first of all, it affirms the logic of multi level selection. Basically, you cannot invoke adaptation, at any level, without also invoking a process of selection at that level. No group level adaptation without a process of group level selection. That's what Darwin said. He affirmed that logic. But then in step two, he made an empirical claim that as a matter of fact, that group level adaptation seldom evolved, because group selection is seldom strong enough to counteract within group selection. And then that became the consensus view. And by the time that I was on the scene, then that was the dogma. And dogma is the right word, because it was just like taboo.
Jim Coan
Well, it was dogma, but also you had inclusive fitness theory to turn to and Hamilton's rule and all of these kinds of these things.
David Sloan Wilson
These were all treated as- Developed and traded as alternatives to groups selection.
Jim Coan
Well, and the way I read it, I mean, as an undergraduate, even in the 80s, was that they were canonically the solution to the problem of altruism and cooperation and social...
David Sloan Wilson
And they didn't invoke group selection.
Jim Coan
No, no. I read On Human Nature and Selfish Gene. Those are my, like my entrees to evolutionary biology.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah. And so what my model showed, which was purely an algebraic model.
Jim Coan
A really simple math model.
David Sloan Wilson
So it wasn't connected any particular organism. But in the first place, its main innovation was that it defined a group as a set of individuals that influence each other's fitness with respect to the trait that's being studied. And that sounds complicated, but basically, what it duplicates is in the first place, the way groups are used in common language. When we say my class, my society, my family, my army, my whatever. We're always talking about collections of individuals in relation to a certain activity. And so the definition of the group is joined at the hip with a particular activity. In an evolutionary model for social behaviors, you need to determine the fitness of an individual. And if it's a social behavior that requires identifying the set of individuals that are influencing the fitness of a given focal individual-
Jim Coan
Well, in his in his much, at least as the social group is part of the individual's ecology.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. So if you're if you're studying a warning cry, the evolution of a warning cry, the salient group is the birds within earshot.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
If you're studying resource conservation, not over exploiting your resource, the salient group are the group of individuals that are drawing upon the same resource.
Jim Coan
You know, I always get that part. The part that I always get hung up on is the statement that that within group selection always favors the selfish.
David Sloan Wilson
In the first place, it's not as true as a general rule. There are exceptions.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And the reason is true as a general rule as a basic matter of trade offs. Here's an easy way that I sometimes describe this. Imagine that you're playing the game of Monopoly. Okay?
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And I offer you 1000 monopoly dollars, but that's subject to the condition that I give everyone else that you're playing with 2000 monopoly dollars. You are wise to reject my offer, because relative wealth is all that counts in the game of Monopoly. And now imagine that I changed the game. We're going to have a monopoly tournament. And so there's many groups of people playing Monopoly. And the winner of the tournament is the one that develops their- collectively develops the properties faster than any other of the groups as the monopoly tournament. The way you play the game of monopoly in the tournament, is going to be utterly and completely different than the way that you play the game of Monopoly when you're just trying to beat the other players within your own group. And so generalizing from that, if you were in any situation to think about the treads that maximize relative standing within a group, as a rule, as a pretty good rule, those will not be the same traits that will be required to maximize the welfare of the group. And then so it's that basic trade off. As a basic matter of trade offs, you can't do a. If a and b are different things, then what it takes to maximize a is with some exceptions, not going to maximize b, holds for maximizing relative fitness within groups versus maximizing the fitness of the group relative to other groups. And in a multi group population.
Jim Coan
Interesting. I guess, when I think in terms of selection, I maybe part of what I get hung up on is the concept of altruism, generally. Because altruism from a strictly evolutionary biology perspective is a pretty strong statement. Altruism is, you know, sacrificing my reproductive capability for another. And I keep wondering whether that's getting conflated with cooperation, which is a different kind of thing. Cooperation doesn't necessarily entail me forfeiting my possibility for reproduction. But it does potentially increase my fitness a lot. Because if we pool resources, then we create scale economies, right? We, you know, we pay half as much for twice the gain, right? And so cooperation, it seems, could fuel pro social behaviors within groups, pretty powerfully.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. So there, you raise a great point. And that's well worth spending some time on. And then you can chop up this interview, however much you want. And so what this calls up is a distinction between our relative fitness thinking versus absolute fitness thinking. And to understand multi level selection theory, you have to be thinking in relative fitness mode, and you have to be applying that and then there's nested levels. So what's the fitness of a gene relative to other genes within the same individual? What's the fitness of an individual relative to other individuals within the same group?What's the fitness of the group relative to other groups in the multi group population? Now, if you do that, and if you take a trait that anyone would consider cooperative, and I find this so ironic, because once you are thinking and call it a fitness mode, this is another thing that's an evolution 101 no brainer. So let's say that there's something that we can do together.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And we can
Jim Coan
Move the table again.
David Sloan Wilson
Equal benefits.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
I gain you gain. Shouldn't we do it? Well, maybe. But if you do that set of comparisons, the fact is, is that there's no fitness differences between us, if it's a win win situation. Do you see what I mean? I call this a no cost public good. So let's say that it's possible for an individual to do something that benefits its entire group, including itself at no cost to itself. This is unrealistic, but if-
Jim Coan
Yes, that does. Yeah, that's not what-
David Sloan Wilson
So imagine a group where there's 20% of these individuals. Thanks to them, everyone does better. What's the proportion of those individuals after they act? Everyone's doing better, but what's their proportion? They started out at 20% where did they end up? And I hope that you're saying, thinking 20%. Well, evolution requires differences. And there's no differences in that scenario. Now, if you now have a multi group population, and the groups vary in their proportion of these no cost public good providers, even if there's only one of them in the entire world. And so that means there's one group with one of those with that mutant individual, that group will do better than other groups. But the fitness differences at the between group level is not of the difference at the level of within individual, between individuals within groups. Actually, you need group selection in order to evolve a no cost public good, what anyone would call cooperation.
Jim Coan
Even if you factor in the development of reputation and the sharing at different points in time.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. So-
Jim Coan
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's thing about, you know, cooperative breeding.
David Sloan Wilson
This is like, I'm not, I don't- Please don't take this as a criticism.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
But this is like my standard sequence of ideas when I talk about this. So I might say, as I do in my lectures, after getting through the no cost public good example, you might think that a system of rewards and punishment would be able to do some work here.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
But if you think carefully about it, then these are what's called second order public goods. If I reward you for being a solid citizen, or if I punish you for not then I'm providing a public good of my own. And the same problem-
Jim Coan
It's another iteration of the same problem.
David Sloan Wilson
And so the dismal conclusion is, is that- And this is what Williams asserted in 1966- is that natural selection within groups is insensitive to the welfare of the group. Anything that floats all boats or sinks all boats it's not visible.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Because it doesn't generate differences. But don't be too alarmed because it actually does generate differences at the between group level. And often, random variation is enough. In the case of a no cost public good, then what you get is that it's neutral as far as within group selection. Neither for or against, right? That's not weighing- Natural selection within groups isn't weighing against the no cost, public good. There's a zero as far as within group selection is concerned. And so therefore, any amount of group selection based on any variation among groups, it doesn't even have to be random variation. Just any variation above zero will select a no cost public good. That's why we see them. But please credit between group selection for it. Don't credit within group.
Jim Coan
Because it changes the social ecology. And the social ecology gets basically iteratively selected for.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah, so if by altruism, you're thinking in absolute fitness terms.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Is that I benefit you and my absolute fitness goes down.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And that is how many people think about altruism.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
Then there's another category recall a cooperation.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
We envision it as a win win situation, and so on. But if you're thinking and relative fitness terms, then most of the things that you think about in terms of as cooperation, actually are altruistic. When we think of altruism in relative fitness terms. So and the prisoner's dilemma, all of these things, if you look at them, count is altruistic. But if I could return quickly to my model, my first model.
Jim Coan
Sure, sure.
David Sloan Wilson
So one innovation of the model was to come up with an extremely general definition of groups. And it pointed out that actually any model of social evolution, no matter what it's called, is going to define groups like this, because they can't even get going as models. You can't even- So since all theories of social behavior are multi group theories, they all have to postulate that social interactions take place and in groups that are small compared to the total population. That's biological reality. And then the model showed that actually, between group selection cannot be dismissed categorically. It doesn't always trump within group selection, but neither can it be dismissed out of hand.
Jim Coan
Right.
David Sloan Wilson
And so that conclusion was sufficiently general. That without applying it to any particular case it was a game changer, compared to the background assumption of that time, which was the group selection could be categorically.
Jim Coan
Now, was that the start of- I mean, did you start the change of mind or change of heart in Ed Wilson as well? I mean, with that paper? Because at least the story that I understand, he's not thinking in group selection terms or talking about group selection much before then.
David Sloan Wilson
Right. That's the way. Again, that's the- You can't exactly say it's a legend, because Wilson is still around. Ed Wilson is still around.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
But I think actually, my reading of that, and this could all be validated and Ed will I think will validate it himself is that back then, when he wrote Sociobiology, and two years later, actually, the chapter on group selection and sociobiology was also published as an article in 1973. He was giving the most sympathetic interpretation to group selection that he possibly could. And nobody at the time, including Hamilton, appreciated that kin selection was a form of group selection. And Hamilton arrived at that-
Jim Coan
Didn't Hamilton come around with that?
David Sloan Wilson
Yes, in 1975, based on his encounter with George Price. So, that timeline is that before that, Hamilton developed his theory as an alternative to group selection. And then he encountered this enigmatic figure, George Price, who came up with a statistical partitioning method. Which has become known as the Price Equation. And what it did was it partition selection in the total population. What evolves, all things considered, into within and between group components?
Jim Coan
Yeah, I think of it as a regression basically. A regression equation with different weights.
David Sloan Wilson
Exactly.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And so basically, what Price did was similar to what I did. It was a very general model, that showed that you could not dismiss the between group component out of hand. The between group component in the Price Equation is not always small as compared to the within group.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And Hamilton saw this right away. And when he translated his own theory into the Price Equation, he could see that what was causing altruism to evolve in his own theory was between group selection. In other words-
Jim Coan
That was a big shock.
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah, and he writes about it in his own autobiography. And this is another thing where- This is why I was saying that the controversy didn't need to drag out as long as it did. It should have been over by the 1980s. Should have been resolved. And the fact that it's still not over in some sens or...
Jim Coan
No, no, it's still not. I mean, it's all over. I mean, I have-
David Sloan Wilson
This is showing you what's not working about science.
Jim Coan
That's right. But, you know, this is part of why I admire what you've been up to trying to get people together. Trying to sort of solve the problem. Not just the problem of- Not just the the intellectual problem, this scientific problem. But yeah, but this sort of sociology of science problem that-
David Sloan Wilson
Yeah.
Jim Coan
That's also impeding progress. And I, that's something I believe I strongly share. And that's part of why I'm doing these strange outreach kinds of things now. I think I'm intuiting the same kind of thing that you have. Which is that when we behave badly, we impede scientific progress, as well as as much as anything else.
David Sloan Wilson
There is a scholarly book by Steve Chapin and called The Social History of Truth. And it is basically a cultural history of the emergence of scientific norms. And I'm not sure if his thesis is quite correct, but what the thesis is, is that the norms of science emerged from British gentlemanly society. And this was like a genteel society, which calls for certain kinds of conduct of civility.
Jim Coan
Rules or something.
David Sloan Wilson
Of civility.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
And that we're going to have a civil discussion. And we're going to hold ourselves accountable to the results of our experiments and so on, and so forth. And there's some things that you do not do. And I think that there's been an erosion of that. In the first place I wouldn't, you know. Maybe none of that was explicit, that could be true. But I think there's a lot of scientific conduct that's eroding that. And we need to think carefully about science as a social construction that can work well or poorly. And that we need to think of the design of science more than we do. And if we were more mindful about it, then there'd be- It would, it would proceed better, and it would not take a fucking half century. That's like, you know, more than 25% of the history of evolutionary thought, folks.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
David Sloan Wilson
To know that it was not required and it does not reflect well, upon scientists. And the whole educational method that most people are taught about groups selection in the most fundamentalist way and says what they learn is, nobody thinks this. You shouldn't either. And the underlying logic, they seldom learn and then then like any boob, they're just... they don't do what's prohibited in their society. And if you try to suggest otherwise, then they just don't have the resources to... So that's how this has been transmitted. This and other things has been transmitted. It did not reflect well upon the scientific process, and is not the only case. We can do better.
Jim Coan
Yes, indeed. Well, on that note, David Sloan Wilson, thank you so much for talking with me today. Such short notice too
David Sloan Wilson
And thanks for doing what you do, basically. Because this is one of the things that's going to upgrade the not only literacy in the general public, but scientific conduct among the scientists.
Jim Coan
Thanks. I'll keep at it.
Jim Coan
Okay, that's it. Very many thanks to David Sloan Wilson for sitting down with me for that stimulating and enjoyable chat. And now, believe it or not, David, called him by his first name now, because we became friends. David had such a nice time during our chat. That chat you just heard. That the very next day he decided to sort of turn the tables and interview me about an aspect of my career. Specifically my discovery of Behavioral Ecology, and how that discovery sort of radically changed the way I view my own scientific work. And I'm planning on releasing that conversation shortly as sort of David Sloan Wilson bonus material. So watch out for that. Okay? Folks, the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stoffer and Jean Rulli and performed by their band the New Drake's. For information on how to purchase their music, check the about page at Circle of Willis podcast.com. Don't forget that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And that Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJ FM network. You can find out more about that at T E E J dot F. M. People if you liked this podcast, how about giving us a little review and iTunes letting us know how we're doing? It's super easy, and we like it. We do. I say that every time. I'm saying it again. Or you can send us an email by going to Circle of Willis podcast.com and clicking on the contact tab. In any case, I will see you at episode 11 where I talk with neuroscientist Nicole Prowsi about... Well, about sex. She studies sex and I have a hard time talking about genitals but we got through it and I'm excited for you to hear it. Until then, bye bye.