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Following My Interview of David Sloan Wilson

12/22/2020

2 Comments

 
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Hey all! This is just a quick post to let you know that I'm having a conversation right now on Letter.wiki with the amazing evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. I have so much respect for his scientific contributions as well as his work founding The Evolution Institute think tank, the magazine and podcast for "This View of Life", his Neighborhood Project, and the non-profit Prosocial World. He's undoubtedly one of the most important evolutionary thinkers in the world right now and I'm absolutely thrilled to be interacting with him more and more lately.

In my last post, I told the quick story of how I came to write a blurb for his latest venture, the novel Atlas Hugged. After I read AH, I sent David a quick review (which he turned into the blurb), but I also sent a longer paper asking about some of the deep philosophical issues he discusses in the novel. David welcomed the analysis and asked if we could discuss it in public, so we're doing that using the exciting Letter.wiki platform. If you haven't used that yet, it's a way for people to share 1-on-1 conversations where each letter is limited to 1,000 words, and anyone can subscribe to the conversation to follow along. It's a bit like getting access to the email exchanges between people you would love to hear talking to one another. Here are just a few of the other conversations that I've enjoyed:

  • Noam Chomsky and Lawrence Krauss talking about Trump
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sarah Haider talking about culture wars
  • Dan Dennett and Alex Rosenberg talking about purpose
  • David Sloan Wilson and Massimo Pigliucci talking about cultural evolution

And now I'm about halfway through my own conversation with David Sloan Wilson. You can quickly subscribe using any of the usual social media logins to make sure you don't miss any of the exchange. Go check it out!

2 Comments
Robert Minard
12/24/2020 06:02:34 am

I've been reading "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson while reading your letters about cultural evolution. I wonder whether the human tendency to establish class and racist caste systems isn't some sort of cultural imperative?

Reply
Ed Gibney link
12/24/2020 10:58:02 am

I've only seen a bit of Wilkerson via an interview with Oprah but I thought she was stretching the definition of caste a bit too far for how I think of them operating in India. But I take her point that classes develop and often along racial lines too. Given our plasticity, I wouldn't call it an imperative. I believe we can overcome these things with consciously designed politics. But as social creatures with natural variations we do seem inclined to sort into hierarchies. There's no law of the universe, though, that says they have to be so unequal.

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