Generation 1 — How Evolution Impacts Different Branches of Philosophy
I’ve mentioned in quite a few different posts now that I’ve been working to create an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle (EPC) on a platform that has been built by ProSocial World. PW is an NGO that was co-founded by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who is famous for championing the idea of group selection, so in keeping with that, this PW platform gives tools to groups to help them cooperate better and make meaningful change in the world. One of the common ways these groups act is via 12-week “sprint sessions” that are modeled after Robert Shaffer’s 100-day Rapid Results programs. This also aligns with the length of a semester at a university, but we speak of them in evolutionary terms so we call them “generations” in order to emphasize that they are something that can be varied, selected, and retained as they hopefully improve over the lifetime of the group.
For our generation 1, we spent several weeks going over ProSocial methods (which I discussed previously in theory, and in practice) and we also had an amazing talk from David Edmonds (author of a recent book about the Vienna Circle) about why Vienna and why discussion circles work so well. After that, we had 7 events over 6 weeks, which gave us a brief survey of how evolution impacts different branches of philosophy. We recorded videos of these events and hosted online chats about them on our members-only platform. And while anyone who joins ProSocial can see these recordings in full and engage in the online conversation with our members (currently about 50 people), I also wanted to share a summary of these talks here. That will help old members to remember what we’ve done, new members to catch up, and prospective members to decide whether or not to join. We’ve completed three such generations on very different topics (and are about to start a fourth), so I’ll share similar summaries for other generations in future posts.
The seven talks we hosted were:
- “Evolutionary Metaphysics — How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy” by Ed Gibney
- “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
- “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
- “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
- “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
- An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
- “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst
These were a really wonderful way to kick things off. They built a lot of momentum for the group and I’m excited to share their main ideas with you now. Enjoy!
1. “Evolutionary Metaphysics” by Ed Gibney
This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy. For metaphysics, Ed began by arguing that after examining the most famous philosophical thought experiments in history, he felt that, “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This position of physicalism/naturalism was recently supported by the stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci in his essay “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” In that essay, Massimo claims that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there.
Within this school of thought, Ed shared a favorite paper of his from Dan Dennett which shows how evolution ought to shape this synthesis of what exists. The paper was drawn from the book How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper—“Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism”—was the first entry in this edited collection. Ed shared 9 key passages from this paper, including these 3 quotes:
- “Ever since Socrates…the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy [but] Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.”
- “In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”
- “There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.”
These quotes clearly show how the naturalist view within metaphysics ought to be mindful of the gradual emergence of phenomena in nature. But this, of course, has not been the case in the long history of philosophy. And so, there is much work now to be done in many areas.
Ed then gave several examples from his own work that show how “this view of life” has impacted the philosophy he writes. These included essays about the meaning of life, what good is (ethics), what harm is (politics), how consciousness and free will evolved, and how knowledge (epistemology) is evolving as well.These examples all show how important the evolutionary view of the world is and how it can continue to help us make significant changes to the way philosophy is done.
2. “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by noting how the arts include what we traditionally think of in this sphere—music, dance, painting, sculpture, storytelling—but they should also include rituals and religion as a collection of inspiring activities organized around the sacred. What’s important to consider here is Durkheim’s definition of religion: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things…which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
Arts like these have long been considered puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Why are they fitness enhancing? Do these traits exist because of mismatch, spandrels, drift, or as by-products? Or as a sexual display? David has weighed in on this debate by writing about art (including religion) as a group-level cultural adaptation.
To David, multilevel cultural evolution provides a new theoretical foundation for group-level functionalism. The study of the arts as group-level cultural adaptations is more general than just the study of religion, though.Other good examples include works from: Ellen Dissanayake, Kathryn Coe, William McNeill, Steven Brown, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll. Far from “cheesecake of the mind”, the arts are “vital organs” in the “anatomy and physiology” of cultures that act as “superorganisms”. David finished his brief talk by sharing some good examples of how people are acting on this: the Science to Narrative Chain, StoryAction, New Stories, Story Commons, and InsightShare.
3. “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
Natalie’s talk took a look at how art has helped advance human thinking in general and about evolution in particular. She did this be examining how art has helped to depict aspects of the evolution of life and how then these depictions have evolved over time. These depictions are part of the cosmologies of an evolutionary philosophy, where Natalie defined cosmologies as the parts of worldviews concerning the nature of matter, space, and time, and what has happened over the course of natural history.
Nathalie shared four major western cosmologies. The first one was from the Ancient Greeks, which has roots all the way back to the neolithic and the origin of agricultural societies. Typical diagrams from this worldview include wheels of time and chains of being. An example of that is the zodiac. A second cosmology is that of the Romans and the Judeo-Christians. These relied on scales of nature, presenting concepts of chronologies and different categories of pedigrees. But later, with the rise of classical physics, natural history, and the origin of scientific thinking, we see the third cosmology where linear diagrams are changed into more precise timelines and phylogenetic trees. Finally, today, in the fourth cosmology, these views are being changed into networks.
Nathalie presented more details on all of these, looking into the different kinds of artwork that have been introduced and from the three elements that define a cosmology: matter, space, and time. Wheels of time, for example, adhere to a circular notion of time The Romans and the Judeo-Christians introduced a linear notion of time. Classical physics saw the introduction of evolutionary trees which introduce a multi-linear notion of time. And modern physics in evolutionary biology today questions the very existence of time or whether it is multi-dimensional.
In conclusion, Nathalie said that art enables us to depict worldviews, and there is a back and forth where art influences science and science influences art. And therefore, it's very important to choose the right images to convey the right messages, especially when you look into scientific illustrations of evolution.
4. “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
Andy began by noting how the roots of philosophy started 2500 years ago with the intentional search for wisdom. Since then, there have been notable successes but we've largely failed to create a human population that is significantly wiser. And the discipline of philosophy has mostly lost sight of its original objective. However, a new form of epistemology that draws from the biological sciences might help. A colloquial way of talking about epistemology is “how do we sort bad ideas from good ideas”. This simple description shows the relevance of this project to what's going on in the world today since there are a lot of people who are learning fake facts online and who are really having trouble distinguishing between sense and nonsense.
Andy described some current cultural assumptions that are causing this “epistemological crisis”. For example, our view that we “have” ideas, as if they were separable from us and we alone have agency over choosing which ones we believe. This discounts the view of ideas as something like bugs or germs that (without intention) can replicate and multiply all on their own. We also tend to regard ourselves as “entitled to our opinions”. This stresses our cognitive rights to the exclusion of our cognitive responsibilities. And since a right is something that you're not supposed to interfere with, and critical thinking does in fact interfere with belief, there's a very short path to seeing critical thinking as trampling on one’s rights. This kind of culture excuses closed-mindedness and ideological rigidity, making us even more vulnerable to infectious nonsense.
Andy then laid out what an alternative might look like, which he called his mental immunity framework. On this view, minds are actually infection-prone colonies of ideas. Mind infections are common. Cognitive contagion is real. But the good news is that our minds actually have immune systems that work to ward off mistaken information. It’s an observable fact that some minds ward off bad ideas better than others, so we need to scientifically understand why some minds are relatively immune to such things and other minds are more susceptible.
Some research about this has emerged from the last 70 years of studying “inoculation theory”. Just as white blood cells swarm an injury, something similar happens when information that people feel is threatening comes along. Their minds generate antibodies and the antibodies of the mind are doubts. When doubts swarm to the scene of a new piece of information that you find distressing, dangerous, challenging, or upsetting, that's your mind's immune system in action. And Andy envisions a world where we develop cognitive immunotherapies to protect vulnerable minds and make humanity substantially wiser and more prone to engage in things that promote our collective flourishing.
5. “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by sharing a memorable quote from the British philosopher Simon Blackburn. David had asked him to define morality as you would in an introductory philosophy course and Simon said, “I think at its simplest, it's a system whereby we put pressure on ourselves and others to conform to certain kinds of behaviors.” So, David noted, there are two sides to morality—one more coercive (pressure on others) and the second more gentle and humane (pressure on ourselves). And this is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective. Moral systems are somehow designed for the good of the group (defined as within the moral circle). There's a compulsory component and there's a voluntary component.
From a multi-level perspective, this social control has the effect of suppressing within-group selection where cheaters and free-riders can prosper. Instead, between-group selection becomes the dominant evolutionary force. That's the definition of a major transition and it explains just about everything that's distinctively human (for example how violence is 100 times more likely in chimp societies compared to human ones). And these two dimensions of morality must go together—the compulsory dimension makes it safe to express the voluntary dimension. Without the compulsory dimension, the voluntary dimension would be too easily exploited. That accounts for the two faces of morality.
Turning to religion, David noted two major definitions. One is from Durkheim, which is all about moral communities. He called religion, “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” The second definition, of course, is a central belief in supernatural agents. But these definitions are orthogonal to each other. It's possible to imagine evolutionary pluses or minuses for each of them. David then went through several examples of examining religions through this evolutionary lens, all of which showed how religions have adapted to function in their particular ecologies. And in the same way that different cells of our body have the same genes but are differentially expressed, David has produced research that shows how different congregations within the same broad religion can exhibit very different behaviors by means of differential activation of different passages in the Bible.
David finished his sketch of morality by noting the “universal elements of spirituality” that were named by a Catholic and Hindu contemplative named Wayne Teasdale. These are key to a subgroup of ProSocial World called ProSocial Spirituality and they may show how a vital part of spirituality comes from both recognizing the individual as part of something larger than itself and also a willingness to subordinate one's self-interest to a higher good. This straightforwardly makes sense as the psychology of an individual within a group organism and it may just be how we are programmed to think in situations where we are functioning in the context of a highly cooperative group.
6. An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
"Examined Lives" sessions are conversational and meant to produce "mosaics" of individual viewpoints, so that when viewed collectively they yield a greater understanding. These sessions usually start off with a brief five-minute introduction on a topic followed by a few thought-provoking open-ended questions just to kind of get the ball rolling. Then a few follow-up questions can be inserted from time to time just to help refocus, redirect, or re-energize the discussion.
The topic for this session was broadly about the science of evolution, but the conversation mostly revolved around the ideas of what "biophilosophy" or "evolutionary philosophy" are as opposed to the "philosophy of biology" or the "philosophy of evolution". The latter (Philosophy of X) brings philosophical tools to a field to help clarify thinking there. The general consensus in this meeting, however, was that this group brings learning from the science of evolution to classic philosophical questions. This fits the format of X Philosophy, which in this case is Evolutionary Philosophy.
Many other points were raised about the implications of this. By tying ourselves to the science of evolution, we seem to tie ourselves to a metaphysics of naturalism which considers evidence received by the senses. Just like evolutionary psychology, this can be thought of as a lens or approach. Noting “Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning”—where absolute ignorance replaces absolute wisdom as the starting point for the universe—has all sorts of philosophical implications. Being aware of the proximate vs. ultimate distinction from evolution can help clear up confusion in other fields. The universal mechanisms in evolution of variation, selection, and retention can be fruitfully applied to many problems. This is different than mere “change” which is sometimes implied by casual usage of the word evolution. Tinbergen’s four questions (function, mechanism, phylogeny, and ontogeny), which is a standard tool in evolution to understand the entirety of a biological phenomenon, also provides a comprehensive framework for many issues in philosophy. The field of evolution is the properly large umbrella under which other sciences and philosophical subdisciplines can fit. In fact, the concept of evolution can even be applied beyond the realm of biology, which only considers living organisms. The gradualist view of life that comes from considering evolution is something very different than the essentialist view of life that came from the Vienna Circle studying physics. It helps cross the fuzzy boundary between life and non-life. Understanding the “major evolutionary transitions” that life has gone through sheds a lot of light on why the world is the way it is, where it might go next, and how it might do so.
7. “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst
JW sketched the contours of an understanding of organizations and institutions as “major evolutionary transitions.” And at the same time he tried to give an idea of how this might improve social science theory. He noted that one famous question in economics is simply “Why do firms exist?” In fact, Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this topic. But it was largely in contrast to markets. Markets are efficient, so why then would firms exist? Oliver Williamson won another Nobel Prize in economics for this topic, also framing the question of why firms exist as an alternative to the market. So, this runs very deep in the field.
However, where might we go if we ask this question from an evolutionary explanation? We can start with Tinbergen's four questions. There are both proximate and ultimate explanations. And within the ultimate explanations there's a functional explanation and a phylogenetic explanation. So, “Why do firms exist?” This calls for us to develop a functional explanation complemented by a phylogenetic historical evolutionary explanation. (Perhaps a Nobel Prize is waiting for this.)
Another question to consider is how could or should we think of firms? Firms are in some sense higher-level collective entities so if you start with individuals that are competing, then something like a firm is an organized unit of individuals. In this sense, it is a collective entity, a higher level of organization. That quickly brings one to the so-called major evolutionary transitions (MET) and for JW there is a very close resemblance between these METs as discussed by Smith and Szathmary and our understanding of firms. This, then, also brings in the topics of multi-level selection as well as social dilemmas and collective action problems. So, the evolutionary lens brings a rich set of questions to consider.
JW went into further detail about each of these questions and concepts. And for social scientists this involves a new quote-unquote language. The participants in this session may be familiar with this language, but for JW, there is much work to be done in his field to spread this kind of thinking. And this brings in even broader topics such as moral psychology (studying how individuals react in collective action problems), and politics (how governance is accomplished both within firms and also across firms within societies).
