The Groupish Gene: Hive psychology and the Origins of Morality and Religion

Alright, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the next speaker in the hexadecimal series with three college students. This is Jonathan Hyde. He is a leading researcher in moral

psychology

. He is at the University of Virginia and recently visited New York University's Stern School of Business and published a book. the righteous mind and in its first week it reached number six on the New York Times best-seller list. You've already had a conversation with Bill Moyer. You're going to have a conversation with Stephen Colbert. We'll give you the UBC pop soon, okay? ? thank you very much, okay, I was hoping this would be like a little seminar where I could present some ideas in progress and, you know, get critical feedback from some experts, so I was going to start by apologizing for putting up this talk. together throwing garbage in the last days.

Never, this is the first time I've given it, so it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, cool animations and beautiful images, but I thought you know this is going to be just fifteen for Twenty kinds of experts we're sitting at a table, no problem, but Well, this is known, so this is a story that could be, well, it's a complicated story, but what I'm trying to do is make it intuitively plausible. So let's look at a couple of questions first. How many of you know more or less what

gene

-culture coevolution is? Raise your hand. Well, most of you, many of you come to the seminar regularly.

I guess that's all. Well, and how many of you read the chapter that I sent around Chapter nine of my book? Well, most of you didn't find it. No, no, it was good. I'll sulk and go home. Well then what am I going to try? What I do today is tell you the story of an idea. I think it is one of the five or ten main ideas, that is, after evolution itself. I think it's one of the top five or ten ideas in the social sciences, or at least it could be. I mean, I think multilevel selection is true and I'm going to try to explain it in a way that I think you'll see, it's important if it's true again.

I can't be sure that we are products of multilevel selection. but I'm going to make the case and raise your hand if you were at my talk this morning, okay, a little less than half of you so that those who are there know that one of the fundamental rules of human

psychology

is the bias of confirmation, we are all very good at finding evidence for our ideas and depend on others to find contradictory evidence. It is very difficult to find evidence against our ideas, so I hope you will counter my confirmation bias by being critical about Again, this is presenting the argument in as much detail as possible in the book, but it is the first time I have done it as a talk to make the story coherent and, if you see holes in it, if you know other evidence, please. in the discussion let's say what is our time period how long when we finish I don't have very good, okay, very good, so the story of an idea is divided into five acts and then if we have time, I will give an application. which is high, what I call

hive

psychology, let's say okay, so here's the story of Charles Darwin's first act, well, first he writes The Origin of Species, but then he writes The Descent of Man when She tries to apply all these evolutionary ideas to humans and him.

He knew even in On the Origin of Species that

morality

or cooperation and altruism in other animals is a problem for his theory. It's not that he doubts he can explain it, but he knows he has to and he's not sure how, in the offspring of man, he fights. with the problem, especially in book five, he proposes all kinds of different explanations and most of these explanations are what you would call individual level selection explanation, so for example, you know he's Victorian, he's writing in the Victorian era. , reputation is extremely important for a gentleman in the Victorian era. era and Darwin recognizes that previous humans could do good for others because if that improves one's reputation then all kinds of good things come to them, so altruism is done to improve one's own reputation, that is not a paradox, That's not a problem for his theory, if you know. survival of the fittest, if not of his race, but I think he actually used the phrase.

I think he did it. Someone knows? I didn't even express it, but did Darwin ever use it? But yeah, okay, in any case, others used it. To describe Darwin's theory, I'm not sure where the German endorsed that phrase, but in any case, while wrestling with all these possible explanations for why there is so much cooperation, altruism and virtue in the world, he raises in three or four different places, not just a paragraph in three or four different places, brings up the idea that groups compete with groups and explores that as one of the mechanisms that could have been passed on and I didn't know about the

gene

s, but they could have been passed on. . a trait you know descent with modification, especially for some virtues that don't seem to directly benefit the self, so here is the crucial passage that is cited very often, but there are three or four others that are similar elsewhere in the book when two tribes of primitive man who lived in the same country entered into competition.

If a tribe included a large number of brave, understanding and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of dangers to help and defend each other, this tribe would triumph better and conquer the other. He is proposing that as long as there is competition between groups, if one has certain characteristics that bind it more closely, it will win the conquest and, as you know, he has been thinking for decades about making individual animals more fit to compete with others, so which is now simply applying the same logic to groups and then has this great line: selfish and contentious people will not go here and without coherence nothing can be affected, a tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and emerge victorious over other tribes, in other words, Darwin.

I was suggesting, well, group selection is what people called it for a long time, but we can use the term multilevel selection as the more general term, it's just that there is selection at multiple levels, sometimes genes compete with genes within of a single organism, but especially with individuals. compete with individuals, that's the level we're used to looking at and then Darwin says, but at the same time groups compete with groups, you can see it here. I mean, the best metaphor I can think of is to imagine any type of sports team. and if the crew team is the best one to think of, I think these guys are rowers in a crew team and, like all that, in all groups, especially in a youth group, there is some competition between them. not everyone can be part of the varsity team so the worst the weakest or the worst of them on the team will get not everyone can be the captain of the team not everyone can make it to the Olympic trials and if they make it to the trials they don't everyone can make the US Olympic team or whatever country they are from, so this competition between them could be beneficial because for each individual there are times when they might want to badmouth the other.

One of the other guys on it may be your rival for a certain spot, so there are reasons on an individual level to get ahead by hurting your teammates, but at the same time that that competition is taking place inside the ship, there are competition between boats and now suppose that in this particular boat race, suppose you have 50 boats at the start and there is a race and when they cross the finish line, the last five boats to cross, they all die and sink in the bottom of the Charles River. Now you can imagine in this case that the boats that have more more than a free, lazy, evil guy trying to beat his friend, those boats tend to get wiped out, so if there are occasional mutations that lead to selfishness, they will usually spread through the population, but if you have a elimination mechanism so that any ship or any group that has more than one or two of these defecting cheaters and if they are eliminated, then the selfishness trait gene will not spread through the population and that was basically Darwin's multi-level logical selection now. so that was act one um wait a second today this is the right thing let's say I think it should be fine so it's in one that Darwin proposed I mean I thought this was left oh I see I hope this is the file correct Did I wait a second?

Wait a second. Let me make sure this is the correct file. No, this should be a UBC group. It's gen. Okay, I thought I made changes. I hope I haven't lost the changes. Anyway, it's okay, it should be like this. Oh, pretty much the same thing, then, group selection, uh, oh no, this is definitely not the rifle. I'm so sorry, let me take a quick look here because I mean this should work, but I made a ton of improvements to what it is today. today the second one, well, there we are, let's use this one, okay, come on, come on, come on, very good, come on, very good, so that was the first act.

Darwin proposed the explanation for act two. Group selection proliferates and so on in the following years until the 60s and in the 70s, you get all kinds of claims about virtue among animals, animals seem to be displaying many of the virtues that people display, you get theories about why birds don't breathe as much as they can or animals don't overgraze or eat as much as they can as long as it's for the good of the group, all these kinds of statements proliferate and Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene describes this period as in the intervening year, since the intervening years since Darwin has seen a striking retreat from his individual-centered position passed in sloppily unconscious group selection and you are right, this is very sloppy group selection it is not some kind of Pangloss Ian oh well, if animals do it it must be for the good of the group and no animal will only work for the good of the group. good of the group in very, very special circumstances and you have all kinds of situated characteristics that need to be in place before you can achieve an evolution for the good of the group, in fact, that's what we're here to talk about.

The question today is whether it is ever possible to get behavior to evolve for the good of the group, so Dawkins is right that there were a lot of bad ideas and these bad ideas are what motivated George Williams to write Adaptation and Natural Selection , in fact, an introduction. In it he describes how he attended a lecture by a termite specialist who talked about how termites will die to make room for the next generation and I need to apply that to other species and he said, you know, he likes the term, it's a model for others. species that do not have the same reproductive structure, so it was very careless thinking and Williams even conveys a bit of disgust for this type of thinking and says that he created the purge by using the word purge, metaphors for purity and cleanliness. get rid of his dirty, ugly, degraded thinking, so he says he talks about multiple selection, group selection and says you know in principle there could be later group applications for dad, he's all these guys, Dawkins Williams, all They agree that group selection is possible in theory. but Williams then says that chapters 5 to 8 will mainly be a defense of the thesis that group-related adaptations don't really exist, so everyone agrees that in principle it is possible if you get the issues right. restrictions on this issue and the question is: will that ever happen in the world? natural world and both books are kind of walks through the natural world, oh, here's something that looks like it could be cooperative or, you know, it could be a corset, but it's really, let's look closer, no, it's not Now, let's look here, oh, here it is.

More or less they both go through this kind of debunking, all these cases of apparent altruism, cooperation, in fact, in a later article, Williams wrote that

morality

is an accidental capacity produced in its limitless stupidity by a biological process that normally occurs. He opposes the expression of such a capacity, so he does not believe that morality is an adaptation. Dawkins similarly says, let's try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish, so this is a very cynical view of human nature, not that cynicism makes it wrong at all. I am simply saying that this is the ethos and the purchase is the basic argument they most raise against group selection, but the main one they raise and Darwin raised it in very conscious terms of this is the problem of the stowaway that this self.

I'm about to show you a little simulation I just commissioned from a friend of mine using agent-based models and you'll see the blue cells. Let's assume they're primitive bacteria or something. They could be anything, but the blue cells are co. -operators, that means that when they interact with each other there is a positive sum, so they generate wealth every timethey touch, but you will see that at the beginning it starts with the simulation that starts with a green salad. Green is an exploiter when a green touches a blue it gains wealth at the expense of the blue and as these little creatures gain wealth they grow once they have doubled in size they divide this is how reproduction occurs in this model and let's see what happens you know What happens, you always read about it, but you may not have seen it visually.

I think it's fun to see visually, so if you start with just a green, as it interacts with the blue, it gains richness, it reproduces and there's kind of a tipping point at this point where you know it's kind of a curve. exponential, so very soon everything will be green, that is the basic process that everyone talks about. Freeriders condemn cooperation because cooperators will be stupid and therefore the cooperation gene cannot evolve, so there are many things against group selection. raised, but this is the main one, in fact, in The God Delusion, where Richard Dawkins raises the selection of groups, this is the only argument he gives.

Against this like the stowaway problem, many other things are discussed, for which a group selection can only work if there is intergroup competition and anthropology in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even the 90s believes that war was not common in our ancestry, it is just a one-time thing. you get property, land and territories, then war becomes very common. Anthropologist Keely writes about this about how to know how much resistance there was to his findings. That is, wherever you look, as far back as you go, you will find evidence of war and in human beings. societies, so anyway war war is not frequent humans are like other mammals is the assumption, so if so, if we look at what all these other animals are doing, that will tell us about the evolutionary processes that they gave rise.

It was thought that eusociality was caused by half -- diploid E that's what I learned in college the reason bees and ants are so cooperative is because they share three quarters of their genes so there were a lot of ah and what lasts is that there has not been enough time for group selection. This could happen in part because the groups are not stable and if the evolutions are really slow, it is simply not possible for it to work. Sorry, that's actually a slightly different argument. The point is that there are all these assumptions that were made in the '60s and '70s when Dawkins and Williams were rejecting group selection, so I'll show you as we go that all of this turns out not to be true, so now let's go. to act 4 because remember one time the purge went through group selection.

He was dead, no one was talking about him except David Sloan Wilson and a couple of other people, but basically a scientist could get on with his work and just ignore Wilson the gadfly and it was really spectacular. Lee was productive in making this assumption that genes are selfish, there is no debate, but selfish genes make basically selfish individuals, with the exception of kin selection, reciprocal altruism and a few other things, so we have this golden age of methodological individualism once all the social sciences are on the same page and you can model individual agents pursuing self-interest and as computers are coming into place, many social sciences are starting to model it, they make models, so in evolutionary biology everything is placed on this clear, simple, direct and clean theoretical base, economics is simultaneously focusing on the theory of rational choice, it simply models the individual. behavior as if people were utility maximizers and were allowed to do so in political science, you get the rational actor theory that people take political stances to maximize their self-interest, as I said this morning, politics is the national level.

I think it's much more like

religion

than

religion

. It's like shopping, but the political scientist at the time thought it was more like shopping in social psychology. This was especially surprising to me. I mean, I studied, I entered moral psychology in 1987 and equity theory was one of the great social psychology theories in morality. and the theory of equity this is a theory about justice this is the main theory of social psychology about the psychology of justice they agitate and border on identification and they say that in their great theoretical article they say that theories in a wide variety of disciplines are based on the assumption that man is selfish and state as an axiom that people try to get everything they can and, therefore, to the extent that people behave fairly it must sometimes be because Fair behavior will get them more in the long run.

This is just an axiom and they appeal to all other social sciences for verification, well of course everyone thinks this and also during this period, the phase of methodological individualism, social psychology is reduced, it used to study people in interaction , all the great studies that we show to our students in our society. psychology class that all involve real people interacting and compelling situations, we never show videos of a single sophomore sitting in front of a computer pressing buttons, but that's what the social site has turned into sophomores, sometimes freshmen pressing buttons, so it's all coming down to this kind of idea. of solitary individuals, does that sound familiar to some people in this room?

Well, first let me know if there were some people who opposed this trend. Don Campbell, one of the great thinkers of social psychology, got it right, he says that the method is written in 1994, methodological individualism. dominates our neighboring fields, so all other social sciences are methodological individualism. He says that this is the dogma that all processes of human social groups must be explained by laws of individual behavior. That social groups and organizations do not have an ontological reality. It sure might seem like there's a group. but really analytically, if we just look at the behavior of the individual, we can model and get and recreate the behavior that looks like a group and he says we're used to making references to organizations and soon, oh, we'll be kind of sorry, but they're convenient. . summaries of individual behavior so this is again a huge simplifying assumption that allows all the social sciences to talk together work together simple models that can be programmed into computers now when I said affiliated people in this room you all know the critique of That people think differently than most people and one of the things we tend to do is see individual items in categories.

We're not that good at seeing holistic patterns and relationships, so social science basically became really, really weird. I mean, this is the kind of logical end point of the strange methodological individualism of the social sciences. It's no longer social now anyway. It's pretty cool with that, so that was act 4, we had this long period of research in science. pretty productive socials, but I think you know I was studying morality and it just didn't make sense to me it just didn't seem to fit with what I was seeing, so act 5 and this is what I really want to focus on today, where we are now is in 2012.

Several of us are filing a petition for a new trial of the conviction by group selection. He was condemned banished between '66 and '76 and my book just came out in Chapter 9 that I submitted and Adam, it's you, maybe you'll find a way. make it available to anyone who wants it, so my book came out a couple of weeks ago. Leo Wilson's book, The Social Conquest of the Earth, is about to be published. Ultimately, he makes a very strong case that group selection is needed to explain a lot of things. of animal behavior and human behavior and then a month after that Chris Bones book, he's an anthropologist who studied hunter-gatherers and worked with Jane Goodall on chimpanzees and he also concludes that at least for humans, not for other animals, but for humans, it is necessary to invoke group selection.

Groups are competing, groups are structuring and shaping themselves, so this is the year. I think the battle, well, what metaphor should I? I will stick with the metaphor of the room. This is the year in which the trial will take place and in one or two years we will see what the jury, which is the entire community of scientists and social scientists, thinks. Here's why. Now we want to really focus on what is at stake here so that everyone agrees that group selection or multilevel selection including groups is possible in principle, I don't think there is anyone important who will say no, mathematically I did it, just I mean the math that comes from the price, I think that is not the case, so everyone agrees, it is possible, historically speaking, the consensus that was reached was that selection at the individual level is so strong that everyone recognizes that the individual selection is very, very strong, it is so strong and at the group level, Conca's group selection is so weak that even if there is something to do it is so that we can be swamped, we can ignore it, it is not relevant, okay?

That's what happened historically, but my claim for the next half hour and twenty minutes is that there is actually a lot of new evidence that wasn't available in 1976 that this consensus was not only premature but erroneous, that actually for humans the group selection processes are much stronger than We think that individual selections and selective processes are weaker, so you are the grand jury. What do you think this is just my initial appeal? Do you think we should reopen the case or do you think a science has decided that something was done and we should do it? not to revisit please raise your hand if you think we should reopen the case okay let's proceed so in the case of Wilson V Dawkins 2012 the jury will decide one issue of fact there is only one issue for you to decide and that These were vehicle groups for human genes, that's all, that's all you have to decide, let me explain, here is a quote from the extended phenotype.

I love Dawkins' distinction between replicators and vehicles. DNA is a replicator. No, there may be other replicators. He talks about cultural replicators. but since biological evolution, DNA is the replicator, it has very high fidelity, it can make copies of itself and the greatness of Dawkins Dawkins was that he developed his metaphor of the selfish gene and taught us to see chickens as a way of generating more chicken genes. That's the view that the chicken is just a vehicle for immortal genes, a very powerful perspective. I think that's right, so we think about replicators, DNA, and we think about the vehicles that replicators used to travel through time generation after generation and like Dawkins.

He puts it this way: Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than others in ensuring the survival of replicators. The controversy over group selection versus individual selection is a controversy over the rival claims of two suggested types of vehicles that genes clearly travel. From generation to generation in individual animals and plants, no one disputes that obviously the whole question before us is: do jeans sometimes travel in groups? the genes? Do the genes we have in our bodies today come to us exclusively because they were written into successful individual humans? or prehumans competing with other humans to reach us in part because they traveled in groups and that success could be with other groups, that is the question in fact here are the four exhibits that I will show you in this legal case the first They are important transitions in the evolution that was not understood when Williams and Dawkins wrote between their two books.

Lynn Margulis publishes her theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells, which was later developed into a theory of major transitions in evolution and here I will think. It is clear, graphically, what these are. Margolis, his explanation for why eukaryotic cells have mitochondria and mitochondria have DNA that has no relation to the DNA in the nucleus, is that they used to be separate free-living bacteria and somehow they got together. once they swallowed another one without digesting it, they entered into a symbiotic relationship and, in a sense, a eukaryotic cell is a group, it is a group in which separate organisms came together and now they replicate one for all, all for one, they replicate as a group, so a eukaryotic cell is a group that is a vehicle for the genes, so the genes later, their genes are here and they don't just travel in this mitochondria and this mitochondria does not compete with that mitochondria, no , they travel in this group, this is a group. of creatures here travel in this group and this group competes with other groups, that is, other eukaryotic cells, soThat eukaryotic cells are an example of a major transition in which a new player species takes the field, which is a group of what we were previously separate organisms.

I'll show you this visually. Now let's see. I think I'll know what's next. Okay, so here's an animation showing what happens when you get separate organisms that now have a membrane around them. And I had this. I just had a friend. mine do these animations that I made deliberately. The internal organisms are blue because they cooperate but they cooperate with each other. The membrane that surrounds them is green. That is the color of selfishness because the group can be extremely selfish with other groups, other eukaryotic cells, but the. competition to cooperation is locked inside, so all the surplus, all the wonderful productivity that comes from dividing labor, all that shit is kept inside the membrane and that's why eukaryotic cells are so successful once they are invented or once they are formed, they spread throughout the earth. but I animate it this way to show that this is a very general process, so here I'm sorry, I animated it this way to show and let me go through again, okay, now I want to run that simulation again where we had. the egoists the freeriders took control before so now with a superorganism there look what happens the superorganism when it interacts with the egoists it can crush them it is so big and powerful that it gains resources the egoists the selfish individuals lose this is not a generosity matters a lot since simple size superorganisms are really big and powerful and now I didn't complete the animation.

I ran out of time before showing this at the TED Conference a few weeks ago, but if I continued with this animation, what I would do is I would occasionally have internal organisms transforming occasionally. It would have occasional inner cells turning green. We let the cancer assume that one of the mitochondria becomes selfish and stops cooperating and becomes a stowaway and tries to replicate itself like a cancer. Well, what if we had these super organisms competing with each other? So, like in the case of the crew race, if you kill, you know, if you just kill the losing 10% every round, any cell that develops selfish advantage is going to end. lose in that competition so that the Free Riders cannot spread through the population, they are eliminated, that is what this is intended to show you, you can see it once again, so this is an important transition. once you get a new way of Cooperation in the field can be extremely powerful and for those who know the work of EO Wilson, this is what happens with bees, ants, wasps and termites.

It is an extremely successful way of life. I think it's 2% of everything. insect species, but 80% of insect biomass is insects, so the point I really want to emphasize here is that this is my little flashy power point in a major transition, groups start to function as individuals and in an important transition is indisputable looks perhaps because of some terminological sense that groups become vehicles for genes Dawkins and Williams did not know it but now we know it here is another example: bees and ants are not actually come together as strangers, but the point is that once you bring individuals together in a

hive

, you unleash the force of cooperation again, you keep the cooperation locked inside so that there are no free-riding problems and this hive competes with others hives and the most cohesive hives win and now I will show you one more time, this time with humans, so humans are like other primates in many ways and I think until 500 thousand years ago we were very similar to other primates, but then we started to divide the work. we started cooperating and descending into larger groups, we gathered around, we tamed the fire, we gathered into larger groups, we divided the work and now we started to have tribal markings which can be thought of as a wall surrounding a group and Joe, Where's Joe, yeah? in front of me, okay, you know, I mean Joe's book, Joe Natalie, about

origins

, cooperation, ethnic markers, so many things that groups do that in a sense are like putting a boundary around that guy of means, it is not permeable, but it maintains internal cooperation and those who can share these tribal marks can trust each other, so I just want to show that it is a very general process when evolution discovers, whether biological or cultural, now finds a way to put a membrane around it, so to speak. a group and generates great wealth, security, success and therefore the genes that are in that group are passed to the next generation in the security of the group and individuals who do not have good roots like that do not make it into groups. they become vehicles cultural evolution is affected by many types of vehicles, the type of natural form of religious worship is going around, literally going around, raise your hand if you've been to Burning Man, okay, wait, that's what You know, that's what you say, God, I can.

I don't think I thought that you guys on the West Coast are all cool, so there's something literally about spinning around that is deeply appealing and when groups get together and invent rituals, very often they will include spinning around something. It just makes us feel good to go around so we don't always have to go around. Here is another example of a superorganism. The reason I'm not a historian, but from what I understand, one of the reasons why Alexander was able to conquer the known world and defeat much larger armies was because he came up with this innovation, which is that if you line up your soldiers of In this form, they are like a gigantic millipede and it is terrifying to face and they can just march through a much larger army, they are so cohesive, they win again in history and there are several historians who have been writing about this, Peter Turchin, one of which says that history is basically military, history at least is very Darwinian, that is, cohesive groups are less cohesive groups, so exhibiting a multiple transition is the main transition. just to draw a few places, major transitions are rare, the first list included only seven, now some lists list about fifteen or eighteen of them that occurred in the history of life, they are rare, but when they happen, they are revolutionary, I want That is, it can transform the planet, do you know why we have flowering plants on earth?

Well, it's because the bees had this transition and changed the biosphere. You can't evaluate human evolution by comparing us to other animals that haven't gone through the transition, so almost all the examples in those two books by Dawkins and Williams are irrelevant, you know, as Williams said, a herd of fast-moving deer is in Really just a herd of fast deer. That's true, but there's no reason to compare us to deer. Would you say a cohesive pack? The tribe of humans is actually just a tribe of cohesive humans, that doesn't make sense, so we are different. The human group is NIST is different, it is unique, so the question before you is: can human groups be vehicles?

Here are the other exhibits that are shorter, mainly because I didn't really have time to do them properly, but they are all described in chapter nine of my book. So why are we different? What makes human groups different? Mike Tomasello's work really blew me away and changed my way of thinking. I used to think we were very, very similar to chimpanzees in our sociality and obviously we are in most ways when it comes to morals. I think we are very, very different. They have some of the basics that we have, but I. I think we have some that they don't have and this is this line especially from Tomasello who I have seen give talks.

It is inconceivable that you will ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. Now these are brilliant creatures, they are Machiavellian. They can do social cognition They can guess the intentions of others They are brilliant as individual thinkers but they can't put their heads together even for something as simple as you know, let's leave this and then we can climb up and out They can't Do that Thomas Salomon in a new article I think the current anthropological measure establishes what he calls two steps towards ultrasociality, so the first in Thomas Ellis's story is joint foraging, so chimpanzees never do joint forging and never work together while could. greatly increase their productivity and you know that one could remove a mark and the other get the berries and they could share them.

Chimpanzees can't do that, they can't share, they can't work together, but he was incredibly good at it even as young as two or three years old when children work together on a project, if they were both, if they both worked together to create a benefit, they naturally share it easily, very little fighting, so the story of Thomas Ellis is that humans began to jointly forage for more food and Once they began to make just a little, working together was so beneficial that those who were able to do it and recruit good partners got a lot of food, had more children and those who were able to spread throughout the human lineage, so that's the first one. step being able to be on the same page and a crucial point this is not the result of language this is a cause of language you cannot do language until you get this because language is not a relationship between a thing in the world in a sound language is a relationship between people, it is a convention between people about what is in our world and how we are going to refer to it when we talk to each other about it, so this comes before language is not caused by language .

So once we have this ability to share intentions and work together and be on the same page, groups can become much larger, and as groups get larger, groups are growing, taking more territory, and colliding. with neighboring groups, you now have group competition. versus group and as Thomas Ellis says, Darwin says that cohesive cultural groups win now, this is a lot of this is cultural evolution, but Tomasello even calls it biological selection for greater group mentality, so as long as there are groups that are are putting in the way. On the same page we have shared cultural representations growing up competing with other groups, now the fittest groups are going to win and physical fitness is a combination of having genes that give you brains that are good at culture and group agility, as well as having developed cultural institutions that work well to keep them together, including, for example, things like religion or program in a very early prototype, so this is Tomasello's story about shared intentionality and I think it's a crucial part of the story that, a Again, Dawkins and Williams could never have guessed that they didn't think this way now. that I will simply bring up Wilson's great idea, which I think is very useful, that ultrasociality in every species, he says, every species, including us, every species that has, is not caused by a high degree of relatedness, no, it is caused by having a shared defensible nest I only read that it said something about there being a species of woodpecker that bores into living trees which takes years, normally they just hatch and die which doesn't take that long but if they are a species in the south, they bore holes in live trees, it takes years to make a nest, well if it takes years to make then it is a very expensive nest, it is the only species of woodpecker in which the young are left behind after they are born to help care for other brood, so you're transitioning to ultrasociality like bees, so the key is ash, it's a persistent defensible part, so the behavior protects a persistent defensible resource from predators, parasites or competitors, the resources are invariably a nest plus reliable food within the feeding range of the nest inhabitants, there are no exceptions, so I just want to make it clear that in the caves, I mean, obviously we find all kinds of relics of the first humans and caves and that is not a random process that preserved the editor, so we cannot conclude from that that humans always lived in caves, but yes I can imagine living in nature, where it is cold, there are predators and also are there some caves?

Where will you live? It seems to me that a cave is quite a desirable property and once you have humans living in caves and working together. to defend them maybe make some minor improvements at least make hearts whatever. You have the same logic that you have with all the other animals, a shared defensible nest that you work to improve and now it's really adaptive for the young to stay behind and everything. work together to raise the next generation, so it's possible that Caves really was something of the crystal seed placed in our evolution that allowed certain types of relationships.flourish, so it seems that humans are following the same path as all other ultrasocial creatures, which is that we seek or create shared defensible nests and once humans became culturally accretive creatures in the last five hundred thousand years, more or less that is the number given by Boyd and Richardson and they could improve their physical condition. nests and we started to make symbolic nests, so now we live not only in these physical buildings that we have created, but we have cultures, we have group identities that protect us, give us access to resources, so we make nests that we can carry with us. we who are not completely physical okay exhibits see coevolved genes and cultures and here I did such a poor job with this section with Joe Henrik sitting right in front of me so this is embarrassing but just a quote from Richardson and Boyd .

In the tribal instincts hypothesis we talked about as we begin to become more tribal, making more group markings such environments favor the evolution of a set of new social instincts suited to life in such groups, including a psychology that expects life to be structured by moral norms and is designed to learn and internalize these norms, new emotions such as shame and guilt, which increase the likelihood that the norms will be followed, and a psychology that expects the social world to be divided into groups symbolically marked, so that it is a whole period from 500,000 years ago to 70,000 years ago, before we began to leave Africa.

I don't know the course, but somehow during that period we acquired the ability to become truly cultural creatures who make a big difference as a group. We get our tribal instincts. This is a very long period where I think we evolved some new modules, some new emotions, so maybe there will be precursors and chimpanzees, you know, submission will be related to shame, it's not like we evolved something out of nothing, but we really stray and convert. psychologically very, very different from any other creature that has existed during this period, we become tribal, we become very group-based, that is, now that this happens, there are tribes competing with tribes, so selection is accelerated, that is in a tribal environment who gets married or who has children is not the psychopath who is not a group is not tribal is not loyal not that person is expelled or killed is us, as Chris Boehm says, we begin to do social selection to be able to follow the rules by be a good member of the group and so we domesticate ourselves, we domesticate ourselves and our bodies show many of the same signs of self domestication as we appear more youthful, just as bonobos are more youthful compared to chimpanzees.

The same process happens with us, wee-wee and the bonobos. We are similar not because we are more closely related but because both species seem to have gone through a process of self-domestication in which there was selection against internal violence and we become more peaceful, so there is social selection. The selection of cultural groups accelerates as our minds become more cultural. There is a race between six groups to achieve successful tribalism and during this time, during this very long time, that has to be the gene configuration. This cannot just be cultural selection and selection of cultural groups.

It would be strange to think that genes would just sit still for this long period of time, so what I'm trying to suggest here is that tribes emerged in the last five hundred thousand years, especially in the last 100 thousand years, probably the tribes became vehicles of the The genes we have in us are not simply because our great-great-grandfather beat the boy next door.he is because his group beat the group next door, so that is my statement in the last exhibition, evolution can be fast, so the general view in the social sciences and biology has been that for human evolution at least there hasn't been much change, I mean, that evolution in the last ten twenty thousand years is not something that we should To think, as Stephen Jay Gould said, there has been no biological change in humans in 40 or 50 thousand years, we have built everything we call culture and civilization with the same body and brain.

An illusion, as I said in my talk this morning, each group has something sacred in the academic world, where almost everyone is liberal, people lived through the 60s and 70s. I think that racial issues are the most conflictive area where there is unity, so you plant a flag in the ground you say there are no racial differences and that means that then you reason from there if there are no racial differences there cannot have been evolution in the last 50,000 years and I think that is why this vision was so there's no there's no evidence for this, I mean, Darwin knew that he talked to readers of plants, an animal, I mean, evolution can be very, very fast, Darwin knew that and most of you know about the belly eye of Fox's experiments, clear morphological and behavioral changes are obtained in ten generations. at 30 you essentially get a new species that has very strong selection pressure, but still the point is that genetic evolution is much faster than Gould thought.

In fact, we are now starting to get some indications. I mean, there are different methods, but there are some indications. that genetics this rate of genetic evolution accelerated in the Holocene this is a very important study by Hawks and others where you can estimate based on what you know, since when you sequence the genome of many people you can guess which genes were carried over by selective pressures because they dragged along other DNA fragments in meiosis versus which ones are moving simply by random drift and so they have a method of calculating the number of genes that appear to be under selectivity pressure and when they started moving their populations and what they conclude is that there are some kind of pace of selective pressure applied to the human genome around here and then it starts to accelerate after 40,000 years and reaches a pinnacle in the Holocene.

Well of course you do, once you have farming you have an increasing group size. Well, first of all, you have to speed up the feeding of the wheels. You know, humans leave Africa. We have all kinds of diverse environments. We have increasing populations. We have new ones. technologies, new diseases, I mean all these things that happen, all these new selective pressures, of course evolution is accelerating, so the lesson I would like to give to the graduate students here is that if you are interested in evolution, stop focusing so much on the Pleistocene. The Holocene is the core, to see, that is at least my prediction and if Hawks in AU is right because they say that the quarters of his graph here at least the pace of evolution accelerated a hundred times, that means that in the last fifteen thousand There has been as much evolution in years as there was in the last 1.5 million before that, meaning the Holocene could literally be as important to our genomes as the entire Playstore.

You already know almost the entire Pleistocene. That's probably not the case, but the point is that the Holocene was a trivial lot of genetic change. a policy, I think I mean, is debated in terms of methods, but that's what I think is happening, so I would like to summarize from time to time. We will stop talking. I have some things I can save to Hive. psychology, but I don't want to overwhelm you. I want us to talk about this right after these four presentations, so I think the prosecution's case has collapsed. The most important argument they always made was that the free-rider problem condemns the altruist.

Well, that's right. It's not because humans do it in species that they can't solve it, but humans are really good at solving stowaway problems, that's largely what morality is. Secondly, it was thought that war was not frequent until recently, but for those of you who read, neither Keeley or Steve Pinker know that no, in reality we have been subject to so much war and Sam Sam Bowles has some models that show how this might affect genetic evolution and group selection, yet, you know, the new thinking since the '90s is Wow, we've actually been subject to lethal violence and all kinds of intergroup competition for a long, long time, you know.

He thought that humans were like other animals, other mammals, so we can consider eliminating jays, gerbils, and all kinds of other examples. in the book of books of those naturalists, but no, we took a truly unique path once we became cultural creatures gene-culture coevolution the fourth eusociality is explained by genetics no, it is not genetics at least half of the diploid ii turns out to be a consequence of what is needed to maintain the nests now. I disagree with eeeh Wilson that kin selection has produced mega results. I don't know, you know the 150 biologists who disagreed with him on that?

I'm not on his side, not that I have any right to be. I don't understand the math at all, so I can't really comment. I'm just saying that I think well, that eusociality is caused by Happ low. diploid is not true, it is actually caused by shared defensible nests and this suddenly gives us a much closer bond between bees and humans, it is not that we are descended from bees, but that we are shaped by the same process as them, which is the evolution to protect the shared defensible. nests and finally there is not enough time no, it has been a long time one hundred and fifty thousand years is a long time for new abilities new emotions new tribal instincts and ten thousand years is a long time not for new modules but simply to adjust the established ones to be more o less more or less aggressive more or less prone to magical thinking, there are all kinds of little levers that you can move up or down in that period of time, so let me stop there because I imagine there's a lot to say, a lot of objections and I'll see If I have time to delve into the psychology of hype, what do you think of my case so far?

Let's wait, let's vote in agreement, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you find? Do you think the groups have been vehicles used to transmit human genes from the human being to the current generation raise your hand if you say yes raise your hand if you say no, okay, so far it's a majority majority, although I don't know which ones It's the laws in terms of well, I guess so. in psychology we have a P less than 0.05 and we stick to it through a kind of magical thinking. I think the most important questions should be decided with P less than 0.5, in which case I win this argument.

Oh, Aaron, what do you think? Questions, comments, criticisms. Yes, Jo and I think the key thing to distinguish is two different types of hypotheses. We wanted you to have similar cultural groups. The selected three surely did not hurt, yes, and created all kinds of things like shame and taking advantage of your favor. Not all of that without this between the group variation, as always had a very important one and one of the Cubans. I need to be skeptical between your variations as you said and kill you if you vote for those discrete group competition reports, what happens is the mail. they show up and when they win right they take the females yeah and you take all the females right which creates massive genes right groups and it will eliminate you okay so this is what I don't understand.

I was talking to your grad students earlier, I mean, like me. Understand, it's a question of how strong the different levels of selection are, but they were talking about it as if there is some gene flow that just destroys it, there can't be group selection. I don't understand that this is releasing their The groups completely surprise all the females bringing the minutes as reproductive partners, that's right, I see, okay, um, and the other thing would be, what are the empirical implications? And I mean, one thing about the world, if you look at the granite logs. is that you have groups that do not have any type of outstanding behavior, so groups like the matcha Ganga that I lived with living in a single family scattered around the bars there is nothing good, they have no rules or cooperation, all kinds of cooperative opportunities They don't manage to take advantage, that's fine, but Thalía assumes that there isn't much competition between groups.

Is there a lot of war between them? Well, they have a long tradition of trying to escape sleep time. Okay, okay, depending on the local ecology whenever. Intergroup competition has increased. I guess they have the same modules and latent systems that we have, so if you put them in a situation where there were intergroup skirmishes and they escalated, they could do all of these things, but as far as I'm concerned, if there are some tribes here and there they have been rejected in the setup for that and it could even be genetic, I'm just saying you could I know I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying we have this tendency to say well, if the machi gang goes, don't do it, so it's not, you know, it's not a date.

Do you like robotic intelligence? What is it?this, um, anyway, I just want to make this clear to everyone that when we talk about innate in the old model where there has been no evolution in 50,000 years, if coincidence works again, don't do it, then it's not innate, in I actually even said oh yeah, but here are some predictions, okay, but NF 708 the two hypotheses are what cultural group selection plus all sorts of gene-culture coevolution just wasn't driven by each other, Darius and the other is that or the things were driven by each other, okay, thank you, that's very helpful because I think if you put Dawkins' position here and then David Sloan Wilson's position and myself here, I think the evidence clearly points this way, but you're proposing an explanation that I think gets you most of the way, okay, it's Boyd and Richardson, yeah, but I've had some conversations, I think Pete Richardson thinks there have been some corrective genetic choices, okay, okay, so thank you, but yes, clearly.

I'm fine, what I'm going to have to do, thank you, is what I have to do before I debate Dawkins: come up with the best, most compelling story where you get genetic culture, you get cultural group selection where everyone is okay, i think. reduces what I certainly do and you get gene-culture coevolution and that can be proud of the work without saying that there has been some group selection, okay and it's also a story to deal with this other problem that I mentioned, I mean more attention? Okay, so this is where, so this is what I think the vehicle replicator thing helps because some versions of group selection point out that Dawkins is very opposed to it and I think that's okay, yeah, very opposed to treat the groups as replicators and if you go Treat the group as the unit of information that replicates itself then the gene flow would devastate it so no I don't mean that the genes are moving and then there is this distinction which I don't fully understand. although I talked about an extended footnote, there is a book by Akasha called levels of selection.

Multiple weight. I can read the title, but it's on me. There is a very long footnote in Chapter Nine of my book. We distinguish between MLS, one in which the genes are the. the groups are constantly changing, they don't have to be stable groups over time and then MLS two, which is the situation you are referring to, where the group is stable and the group competes with other groups and they would live or die as a group , so I totally agree that humans are not at that stage, we are not the Borg, we are not a hive, we are not an obligatory group --it's-- creatures in that sense, so I need to develop a clearer distinction in the MLS, thanks Okay, yeah, because this is straight from Tomasello, he says that, you know, efforts to teach language to chimpanzees and other animals haven't worked, I mean, they can communicate, they can develop, but , but establish the language, there is something you don't understand.

Tomasello is like when you read his work, you really get this idea of ​​how easy it is for us to be on the same page, to have a picture of almost like a piece of paper that we're both working on. right now and we're all working on a few pieces of paper about the rules, what we're doing here today, what the rules are, we're all on the same page on this, just once you get that, you can have it. language as an agreement between individuals about how we are going to communicate with each other, and in fact, I received a 16-page email from Steve Pinker criticizing this in this chapter, but one of the things he said was that he agrees with Tomasello and I about this shared intentionality precedes language and is not the result of it.

Sorry, it was an appeal to the Authority, that's terrible. I shouldn't have done so well, read my chapter and then go, go, read. Thomas Ellis, all I can say is that yes, I've been following the recession for a while and I'm sharing the second one, but I never actually saw Gould anymore on various levels in Lisa's last book, so although you don't have any kind of On the other hand, I think I was a defender of human minks, I thought humans were generally other animals or I assumed it would include the fad of weather facilities, I was actually interested in it and I probably mentioned this in the book .

I know why you care why. I care a lot about this, so just so you know, some of you know I'm interested in, well, I mean, I got into this to study cultural variation in morality and if you're studying weird morality, you're studying more Lawrence Kohlberg and Carroll Gilligan's Morality, you don't need any of this and this is part of the era of methodological individualism if morality I know it's just me cooperating with you and exchanging whatever you don't need any of this, um, but there's all these strange things that we do and that I think are very difficult to explain, so I have been interested in conservative morality, traditional morality, for example. so I open the chapter with a description of what I felt after 9/11.

I had the urge to put a flag on my car and it's weird, it was embarrassing because you know I'm a teacher, I'm not going to do it. I put a flat tire on my car, it seems like people would think I was a Republican and what I finally did was put an American flag in one corner, but I put a UN flag in the other to calm people down. but then this was not so. I wasn't under cultural pressure to do this. It went against the cultural pressure to fly the flag. I just felt like I had to show the flag.

I think similarly and how did that evolve? I mean, it is because the individuals who well here is another example, there is a very strong need to kill traitors and appetites kill, you have to kill them, not just fine them or kill them, now, how did you do it? and you read the Quran, it's all over the Quran and you see in many places how Do you think whatever the genetic basis of this evolved? If you join me in thinking that we are great modular minds, there are all these instincts, buttons and levers in human nature, how did it evolve?

Was it because the individuals who were strongly motivated to kill the cheaters in Napa States had more surviving children than the next guy who didn't try to kill the cheaters in Napa States? I don't see how that could happen or is it that the groups that co-evolved tribal markers and all kinds of waiting, you know, the tribal sentiments of killing cheaters in the Napa states, those groups are the ones that spread and we descend from them , so that's group selection, in other words, this bra looks ugly to modern secular liberals. horrible this is close to Nazism this is racism and genocide there are all these bad things but this is a big part of human morality and I want to study it and I can understand it using Dawkins' framework I could probably understand it using Joe's I could probably do that but it's just once I think about the constant group versus group, it just diminishes, so how insistent the following is, in terms of the now and the evolution of society now, we bring him into these questions that we're busy with now.

How can I break well? So I just understand, yeah, how we got here, yeah, that's who you are, obviously, that's really important, relevant, right, so I think there's a big payoff in understanding this, so David Sloan Wilson has the book. last year, the neighborhood project, and in Si cites a lot of work by Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for looking at how small groups or groups are able to solve cooperative fisheries, they are basically able to create a moral order and put restrictions on behavior, and a lot of that fits. with an MLS framework it's kind of like if you think I should have the list somewhere in these design principles, but when you know, if you think we're really competitive with each other, but as soon as there's competition between us and then, then cooperate very well and if you have the framework of methodological individualism in which everyone goes out on their own and you have to make it worthwhile to cooperate with you, you can't solve many problems, but there are many principles.

Now I'm at a business school and I teach some MBA classes and you know people are in business, they're different than us academics, they probably joined fraternities when they were in college and it's a great pleasure. Much of the Pleasure is working as a team and when there is team-on-team competition people love it, it's fun, so there are many principles for designing groups or designing effective institutions that I think can be improved by understanding multilevel selection as our origin. story I have a website at Epic Assistants org that is just getting started, but I'm trying to lay out what they know and what we can take from social science to design systems that will end up producing ethical behavior indirectly, so at least a small answer to your question, we have all these ethical crises in the corporate world and then the answer has always taught the NBA more ethics, that is a complete waste of time, there is nothing that you can't teach ethics in a class, but I think we can use, we can use. this framework to teach the NBA how to structure their companies and their teams when they go out into the world of work so that they obtain better results.

Yeah a couple just say come in groups like they come more to say hello to each other, that's crazy. I'm just here with America and individualism and when you talked earlier about how we focus on individual life, maybe it's also a complete reflection of that kind of autonomous focus and let me address it just because my attention span is decreasing, an influence of colic type. You may be expected here, but I'm just tying this to the kind of biological affiliate that we're drawn to in those environments, yeah, so I agree, first in terms of what's going on with a country like the United States, where the people are individualistic.

Well, the first thing is that we evolved to live in tribes that have this internal recursive structure, without larger clans, so we are good at that and there is that Arabic proverb me against my brother me and my brother against our cousin me my brother and my cousin vs. stranger, so it's that recurring sister, we're very good at that and I think nation states are the biggest level we can get to now. All of this was shaped by genetic and cultural coevolution or whatever process before nations existed. The states, according to Peter Church and others, days before, in the first city-states, could have actually been competing, in reality they did not, they generally did not eliminate each other any of the problems that Joe, but they immediately obtain city-states in the nation. says history changes but like America now, it's not like we beat Russia and therefore we took their territory and maybe their women are fine, actually I guess we are taking their women, that's another history that is economic, so these property processes are not necessarily happening. today, but Americans, while they are individualistic, they are also very patriotic, and of course it varies, on the right they are very patriotic on the left, they are more ambivalent about America and its history, so everything that I would say is that we are running nation states using this old tribal psychology and I think that actually helps us understand a lot, like the need to display the flag not all the time when my tribe was attacked, which only happened, you know, two Times in the last 150 years, when I tried, I was attacked.

I had an overwhelming unconscious or overwhelming need to show the flag. Yes, yes, I'm pretty convinced, but your case is that the group is the carrier, but I wonder if it has to be an either/or situation where the vehicles for the Replicators arrive, sorry, no, it's mainly individual , the vast majority of evolution is individual. Could it be that there are certain groups that become cohesive or share some group-level traits that allow them to completely dominate or succeed, but then at certain points, groups? they merge and at that point there may be various problems at the individual level, so that certain members of this individual, certain individuals of the other group, perhaps five types of this new group and then after that confusion has taken place, although then the group is maybe even more cohesive, so they can be successful and down the line we might merge with another one, so it's kind of bad because if you get bigger, you know, you get bigger, go out into the business world, like groups come together, they can form more cohesive.

Empire or something like that, you suggest that we know well that the idea was that when two or more groups merge into one, then there is, so to speak, a group competition at the individual level so that certain individuals can continue while other individuals globally their genes, we have a limited time with you and I'm sorry, no, I'm not really following it, except to say that in modern times, I mean, I think it is in a democratic society. I think he's really good at Health Aide. There are many groups that are transversal and the situation in which all thegroups are perfectly fitted is the most volatile and dangerous place you can be like Bosnia.

I mean, you can have really nasty tribal fights. I think people are on the left. They are often distrustful of our group's business and want to sort of suppress it, but I have read some stories where the best way forward is to celebrate the richness of our group and encourage it, but just make sure that there are many cross-cutting groups, but my point is that when the group sniffs, that means what you mean when groups merge if it's in multiple different ways. I think that actually gives us the benefits of group security without a lot of the risks of a sort of Asti intergroup conflict, okay, yeah. a lot of intentionality sub single cell what sale sub individual what does that mean intentionality Michael the mitochondria actually cooperated in certain ways and repeated in certain ways the processes president of the cell, so if it gets that small, what are we talking about? terms of cooperation cooperation well, biologists would have a meaning that would decide any issue of intentionality or consciousness and I hope their sides do.

I hope they are not attributing consciousness or true intentionality to them. I mean, to the extent that evolution is a very general paradigm as long as you have what competition and variation and heritability, then if it turns out that, as I understand it, our immune system also has this kind of evolutionary aspect to it, I mean. Cells know that they compete and replicate according to certain rules, so you might believe that mitochondria are competing or cooperating, it's only if their replication meets the criteria of Darwin's three simple conditions for an evolutionary system beyond that, not I can. say, but if so, if there is a simple quote or a complex quote, you can send me, please do it.

Thanks, yes, when your groups mentioned tribes, nation-states, religious groups, mitochondria and eukaryotes, they sit on various levels, that's my middle name, but I'm kind of like that. of asking yourself what it takes for you to be such that you can repent is selected correctly, a selection that is a good question that captures the heart of this distinction MLS one MLS two, so what Akasha is saying is that at the beginning of an important transition The groups can change places and David Sloan Wilson calls these business groups so you know, if some of us are trying to do something and we cooperate and we're more successful than some other group and then we break up and I. go to a different group of people trying to do something and we succeed, so the genes for group business in me can spread because I get a little boost from all these different groups that I'm participating in, so in that sense there is a group.

It's not very cohesive, you just have to stay together long enough for at least one round of competition and as long as you have it, humans benefit a lot from participating in those types of groups, chimpanzees and other animals, that's not so much, I want say. There are dyadic coalitions that we know from all of you and they do politics, they do a little bit of that, so that's the beginning now later in the main transition, the group is truly cohesive, one for all, all for one, that's when The mitochondria were enclosed within the membrane. human groups are never like that some people who say we're part wait, we're still the guys, change your name, we're stuck in the middle of a major transition, we're not the Borg from Star Trek, we're not bees, so we're gone . through MLS one and there may have been brief periods of time in a revolution where you know the genocide and the war was so intense that we were briefly, maybe there were some periods where it was really erasing this or that, but if it was always In the event that you include women, then it wouldn't be so I guess we're just one of the MLS that we never made it to the MLS.

Yes, it seems that if hierarchies grow, some groups have more sadness for some in Jerusalem. more status, notice that those individuals who have more of the coarser traits you're talking about benefit individually beyond what they get from being part of the group, so when that area, in addition to route selection, there is individual selection within groups to have more than rump streets oh yes, I think individual selection is generally more important, it explains most of our nature and a lot of that, so the real test would be the extent to which the people show signs of loyalty, patriotism, group business, all that kind of stuff that they sent.

They pretty much do it only when others are watching or when they get some benefit, so maybe you could explain everything that way, but to the extent that people do it, even when they're not going to benefit, they just feel motivated to do it. . Regardless of the circumstances, that would at least indicate that this was not Machiavellian group or strategic group type of affairs and that is my example of wanting to display the flag. I mean, you know it was a little embarrassing, so yeah. I and again with the question "this or that" most of the story is always at the individual level, the question is was there some degree of group selection that I think explains so I'll just show you so here I'll just give you an example of the payment, like why would you do this, right?, right?, right?, right?, right?, right?, right?, right?, right? , no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no? no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no?, no? , right?, right?, right?, right?, Well, what really got me into this is what I've been calling hive psychology and the reason why I'm going to know very quickly how much time we have .

We have 15 minutes. Now I'm going to take 5, 5, 7 minutes to show you this. name, so I was studying all these moral emotions and moral elevation and then that led me to everything and there are all these things that we do all these moments where we seem to get lost, the self seems to close off the religious conversion experiences that we wrote William James these losses of self in nature Ralph Waldo Emerson mean that selfishness disappears again loss of self closes the self in meditation as technology developed over a couple of thousand years to make this self disappear drugs Psychedelics were so popular partly because you can direct 30 minutes, which would otherwise take years of meditation to achieve, and then repetitive movements are also widely used in religious cultures, all these different ways of turning things off weren't so interesting, what is the purpose, what is the function of that and why A big breakthrough for me was reading this book by William McNeil called Staying Together Over Time and McNeal describes how when he was a soldier in basic training recruited into the army at At the beginning of World War II, at the Anna base in Texas, they simply marched up and down the countryside.

All day he thought it was stupid just because they didn't have guns so they make us march, they can't really give us target practice so they just did this march but then when his unit got it they were able to move and light up. a dime and the real thing had the feeling that we were one functioning as a single unit, he said that words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by prolonged movement in unison while drilling implied a feeling of general well-being, that is what I remember a strange sense of personal enlargement from the collective ritual, so I think I have a video here to show you.

This is a passage I animated from a book about war. Many veterans will admit the experience of community effort that has been a highlight of their lives I pass insensibly two a week my becomes ours an individual faith loses its central importance I believe that it is nothing less than the security of immortality that makes self-sacrifice of these moments is so relatively easy I make fun of it but I don't die from it which is real and I move on and live off the comrades since I gave my life when I say that I animated which means that I paid someone to make this great video , but that's from the book called The Warriors by Jesse Groot Glenn Gray. who describes being in World War II interviewed many other combat veterans and again they have this ability to lose themselves not so much for the country but really for the bodies it's because of the small group they are very, that's what makes war so intense and what makes it so exciting and even pleasurable for many soldiers, that is the passage that I just showed you, so the hype hyoe psychology hypothesis, this is one of the metaphors in my book, is that human nature is 90 % chimpanzee, 10% B, so We are primates, you know, we do all the same things that other primates do, but we also have this recent overlap in the last five hundred thousand years, maybe especially minus hundreds of thousands, but I think we were subject to a bit of group selection. level select that maybe gave us some new skills or modules or at least just tweaked some existing builds so we were better at doing this so you know if you read the wall and of course wealth can bring out a lot of goodness.

Among chimpanzees, some people think it goes too far, but we have the ability, in special circumstances, to forget our own interest and lose ourselves in something bigger than ourselves. This is what really interests me. Why do so many of us do this? different ways and therefore in almost every culture, why do we do this? You know, screw that guy and have more kids. I mean, it just doesn't make sense, but the groups that could had a lot of people doing this and then they had a religious technology that did this, which was one of the keys to human cohesion. and here it is, we're really good at every man for himself, we're also really good at one for all, all for one, here it is, this is a really fun video if you want to watch it, it's just an example of how it works. and how this could be adaptive is from the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, so watch what they do before each game and then feel sorry for their poor opponents.

Okay, all I'm saying is a Maori war dance that they've adapted. Oh, for or color, so again, you know, I think it's just if you take a step back and look at human nature human social nature human moral nature is really very group-based and I think it's extremely ha ha ha, ha, I don't know, but anyway, so it's just an example, I think it's me, so this is my last slide again. I think this general perspective that Darwin presented that intergroup competition has been really important in making us who we are and I think we see it all around us, but keep in mind, everything around us is the worst possible place to look on earth. because we're a strange society, so you know, it's less true for us, but we're the least representative people on earth, well, that's it, what a great place to stop for Klaus in this group.

Okay, so that was, I guess, Mr. subliminal suggesting applause we have what's the time we have with a few more questions or okay, okay, I'm hype psychology or the group levels, the legend of the goose says I like this point , I'm very much on the last point of the sector, but ah, hello, so the rituals join, you are a great example of why you might suspect a genetics, there is a cultural group selection limit because, for example, the military drill is, hopefully the autumn, something is very marked that we have been transmitting from a successful group leader to another extension and that is a Mallory chirp that was a cultural product of a long history of war in New Zealand at the time, so These are not things that people realize, or they are products of cultural evolution, it's time to get together anyway or not.

That's right, I think the process can start with selecting a cultural group, but now suppose you know that good innovations are copied and now suppose you have a whole island in New Guinea or some place where everyone is doing this kind of thing. . or New Zealand, everyone is doing this kind of thing and maybe it's just a selection of cultural groups where those who do it better have stronger rites of passage, whatever it is, they end up waiting, maybe it's that , but if it continues long enough. and by long enough I mean just 1,000 years or 2,000 years, if it goes on long enough there are likely to be some feedbacks, that's fine, it's just co-evolution between genes and culture, but if it goes on long enough the groups in which There genes give them minds. that make it easier for them to do this they are going to be on average more successful, so the groups would do it, but everyone is doing it and everyone is trying to innovate culturally, that always happens, but as long as there is some variation, Genet some slight variation between groups as to how prone their mind is to this, take the case of what we now consider liberals or conservatives, there is a personality dimension and theLiberals and libertarians don't like these things and they keep their social terms, they love it. and so, a group that has more liberals with liberal dispositions will not be successful than one that is more conservative now, in peacetime, the group full of liberals are going to be innovative, they will generate more wealth, maybe I mean there is not a only way of being that is correct, but as long as there is genetic variation in these traits for group business and we have a lot of variation between us in our group business under some ecological context where there is a lot of war between groups.

I think it could still count as genetic groups. Group selection for a single group. Taekwondo. Can you still have many protein selections? Oh, if you don't have them, for example, if you're not good at doing things. ritual that you don't see when the time came that we were punished by a peer group that is within the group selection, yes, so you can still select the same moment, so that is your social selection once the group is selecting for group business, okay, that's right, but that fits well, that's the general approach that Darwin took, which is how to get to this level of cohesion in the first place and his answer was always through individual level mechanisms like the ones had, but once you get to that point, once you get the all-around competition going, that's group selection, so I'm not, yeah, it's subtle, I'm not and I could be wrong on that, maybe what you're saying, Kennex can explain everything we'll have to think about this, okay, yeah.

Right there, with the white shirt, León, you said: "Everyone would agree with the possible selections." I'm just wondering, "Well, why is it possible? What do we mean?" Again, I don't know the whole history of the pricing equation and it's just one way. to model trait transmission or gene transmission rather than partitioning the variance between different levels of competition. So, does anyone know more about mathematics or the history of mathematics? I mean, I can't explain anything better than that. yeah, oh, I see, this is like that, if you have a scientific experiment mindset and you want an experiment to disprove it, I don't think that's the right way to think about this, like we know what the strength of smoking is.

Darwin's theory of evolution, I mean, many of you know is a framework for understanding why the radiation of variation exists in biological life and I think it's the same thing here now, there are experiments, there are the same There are experiments in the that you can show genetic evolution in the laboratory, you can show group selection in the laboratory, but I don't think that's the right expectation. I think ultimately it's a question of consistency with human nature and I think again. swimming against the current here because we are the group of tribal people with the least fish, so I'm just trying to do what I say here.

Dawkins gave us this very persuasive, cohesive metaphor-rich approach and people loved it and embraced it. I'm trying to offer another one. and then we will see which approach explains more phenomena. I'm trying to include a lot of these grouper tribal phenomena that I see in other cultures and in fraternities here and among Republicans here, so it's a consistency quote again, yeah, I want to. To ask you, the nation sees the highest level of group connection. I guess we say: Is there something that I suppose would motivate that? Or yeah, intergroup competition just Turkey, so, oh, just like a competition, yeah, so nation-states emerged in what sixties France. and XVI, so the competition between them begins to intensify.

Before there was feudalism, there were feudal lords, so depending on the local political structure, the appropriate level of competition will be different right now, which is why the European Union joins in part because of competition with the United States and Asia now again, We are not in a situation where we have nations replacing other nations here, but I think the evidence is coming that the European Union is not functioning very well as a cohesive and cultural country. I know it works well as an economy, but in the European way? Europe? Do Europeans have a sense of being European first?

Are you willing to make sacrifices for Europe? Oh, okay, that wasn't my feeling, I mean my feeling that their national identities are stronger. Okay, okay, okay, what does that do? Oh yeah, all right, so Islam is yeah, okay, that's right, so there's nothing special about nations. I'm just saying that nations are the biggest level where I think you can really recruit all those tribal feelings. maybe Europe can do it one day, but I think it will not be tribal sentiments or European tribal Europeans or they tribal Italians and Swiss, the nation, Asian is under attack in Europe, tribalism and supranationalism, since what does what?

Safe human Europe is based on us, except I have the original 12 and there are a hundred and twenty-five tribes in Europe that you can go through, you can ignore them, they look different and these are the people who have decided to put down Iran to cooperate. as groups, yes, okay and they are in shock, oh yes, as an economic unit, okay, others others are okay, are there other Europeans here who can weigh in on this or does European identity really activate the tribal 'there is no sin of the same way as the nation?' the states do it the same way sure it's an emergency thank you what you've gone can only happen at this level it can't happen you don't like your bank I can't see any before it's ready ok I think he said If Europe feels it has competed with United States, then it might happen that we agree with my view that nation-states are whatever the level of competitive intrigue is, that's where that's the highest level you can get to for this tribal identity, I thought.

I mean, you're right, did you try the dances of the United States when they first formed well? All this, thank you. Very fun, at least the additional areas of difficulty in Europe are that you have these four languages, a communication, well, there are many more things happening in Europe. I mean, America is a unique case of not having much of the original, having many kinds of natural tribal markers of race, language, religion, and therefore maybe becoming super patriotic. and enshrine the founding fathers on the flag and we do all these other things. I mean, Robert Bellah calls it the American civil religion.

We have to fake it because we don't have much of it completely separated faster than anyone else. nation state or base, but they exist because the location is close, you know, the Roman Empire faced a lot of external pressures, but I would be curious to know if in the Roman Empire everyone felt like they were Roman or if it worked because they sort of left. each group could keep their gods, they could know if it's something like with Europe, you know, it somehow successfully took advantage of lower level identities and got people to form a kind of union of traditions, that's a question for historians , not for me, okay, no, we.

You're a little confused, there were two of them. Today's talks must be exhausted.