Tag: Evolution

Book Review

The Cultural Evolution Revolution: Inside ‘A Theory of Everyone’, by Michael Muthukrishna

Rocked by a steady stream of failed replications and allegations of outrageous fraud, behavioural science stands at a crossroads. Ironically, the field of psychology finds itself slumped in a period of piercing introspection, being forced to answer tough questions.

Diagnoses abound, with blame being placed on perverse incentives in academia, statistical methods in dire need of rigour, and the media’s battle for our eyeballs. But a more fundamental, yet often overlooked, factor is the sturdiness of psychology’s theoretical foundations— or rather, its wobbliness.

Amidst the cloud of this uncertainty, Michael Muthukrishna steps forward with A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. In a bold play of the concept ‘a theory of everything’ from the weird world of physics, Muthukrishna, a professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, ambitiously aims to unify our understanding of human behaviour, culture, and society.

Michael Muthukrishna is a trailblazer in the field of psychology, having recently been recognised as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. With the precision of an optometrist, Michael brings into focus the intricacies of human uniqueness and the subtle forces of cultural evolution. His scientific work acts as a lens, magnifying our understanding of the evolutionary forces that mould our behaviour and drive cultural change.

Arguably, it was a young Michael being exposed to a rich tapestry of cultures that paved the way for his scientific accolades. Muthukrishna was born in Sri Lanka, and was also raised in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and Botswana. During these formative years, Michael witnessed first-hand the horrors of tribal warfare, including the blood spilled between the Tamils and Sinhalese, and the Sandline Affair, the violent coup of Papua New Guinea. But his childhood wasn’t all drama. Muthukrishna also recalls experiencing awe camping in the depths of in the Kalahari Desert, and the exhilaration of neighbouring South Africa abolishing apartheid. “When you live in so many places, you see how we differ and how we are connected. We swim in different shoals but we are fish in the same body of water.”

While applauding the achievements of popular science books like Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Muthukrishna frames A Theory of Everyone as their negative image. Rather than offering ‘The One Thing That Explains Everything’, Muthukrishna reveals a comprehensive framework that can unite a bewildering array of scientific theories, whilst detailing the evolutionary forces that shape all living things on planet Earth.

Just like living creatures, scientific disciplines also pass through key stages of development. Mirroring Newtonian physics, Galileo’s revolutions of astronomy, and Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection, Muthukrishna argues the social sciences are currently undergoing a similar revolution, making the awkward transition from a scrawny teenager to a mature adult.

The human and social sciences are going through puberty. Its curves are showing; its muscles are growing. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. This scientific revolution is a theory of human behavior that, when combined with theories of social evolution, is close to being a theory of everyone.

Which framework does Muthukrishna propose uniting the social sciences under? Dual Inheritance is a theory that outlines how we humans we have two lines of inheritance. No, I’m not referring to the money you’re expecting to inherit from your parents, but rather, the genes and cultural know-how you inherited from them, and the cultural software you’ve downloaded from the world around you.

Since the day bands of archaic humans learnt how to control fire, we’ve inadvertently created a feedback loop where genes and culture continuously shape one another. Sparking fire for cooking is a great example, and explains why we humans have pathetically small teeth and guts, but also abnormally large brains.

Cooking saved us from sitting there like gorillas chewing plants all day or needing four stomachs like a cow munching on grass. We reduced the size of our gut and lost a lot of muscle, saving us a lot of energy. We used that extra energy to fuel a larger brain. What did we do with that larger brain? We learned more useful stuff, including figuring out how to hunt larger, higher EROI [Energy Return on Investment] animals.

At the heart of this theory of everyone, Michael proclaims, is the quest to capture and control energy. All living beings are essentially in a struggle for survival, requiring an energy budget surplus to pay their exorbitant biological bills.

As stated by Michael:

All organisms, including humans, harness the energy around them – from the rays of the sun to the movement of the wind and water – to evolve. Humans have evolved an entirely new way of capturing and controlling energy through cultural evolution. But ultimately energy is at the heart of all that we do and all we can do.

Most of us take for granted the marvels of the modern world. We’re literally surrounded by unfathomably sophisticated technologies that most of us have no idea how they work. It’s as if we’ve been handed inventions created for us by intelligent aliens. But just as fish take for granted the water surrounding them, Michael reminds us how energy-intensive our modern lifestyles are, and how utterly dependent our civilisations currently are on fossil fuels.

As climate science has solidified and the perils of global warming have sharpened into focus, the recent surge in the availability of fossil fuels— thanks to the fracking boom— has muted voices warning of ‘peak oil’. Muthukrishna acknowledges that predictions made by the likes of Thomas Malthus and M. King Hubbert have repeatedly been cast into doubt by the march of technological progress. Yet, he cautions against complacency, pointing out that a technological plateau may loom where no further innovations can make fossil fuel extraction economically viable. “Technology seems to have saved us from the Malthusian trap and delayed Hubbert’s peak oil decline. But those technological advancements have been in the efficiency floor, not the energy ceiling.”

A sceptic could claim that Muthukrishna’s analysis is too reductionist. For example, Muthukrishna circles in on energy scarcity as the biggest threat to large-scale cooperation, and in turn, world peace. Whilst competition over scare resources is one of the main reasons why we fight, wars are messy business that have multiple, tangled causes, where ethnic tensions, balance of power politics, security dilemmas, and the human drives for glory, status and sex all playing leading roles in the outbreak of war. However, I believe Michael is broadly correct in pinpointing energy as one of the ultimate crises of our time. Whilst concerns over the security of our energy sources have been heightened in the Western world following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, so too have concerns about the cost of energy and the sustainability of our fossil-fuelled economies.

Cultural evolution surely encourages us to be humble in our understanding of how the world works. As the biologist Leslie Orgel famously quipped, “evolution is cleverer than you are”. Despite this, Michael proposes bold solutions to address some of the world’s most pressing problems. One of them is championing nuclear power, including pivotal development to make nuclear fusion a commercial reality. The mastery of nuclear fusion would be a major breakthrough for humanity, as it offers the prospect of cheap and inexhaustible energy without poisoning Mother Nature. And contrary to Bane’s brash threats in The Dark Knight, it is impossible to hijack fusion reactors and turn them into bombs. Ultimately, nuclear fusion could well be the technology that saves us from ourselves.

As stated by Muthukrishna:

Once we reach the next fusion-fueled energy level, we will enter a new era of peace and prosperity. It will make our current era, with all its conflicts, seem to our descendants as primitive and barbaric as we see the Middle Ages with its superstitions, witch burning, and horrifyingly brutal wars of conquest.

How can social scientists contribute to such moonshoot missions? Muthukrishna illuminates the way, reminding us that today’s distant planets become tomorrow’s landing sites, powered by the engine of innovation. “Innovation is a social process – a product of a collective brain. Once we realize this, we can become intentional in how we seek information and connect people to maximize the probability of good ideas emerging and spreading.”

This is not mere armchair intellectualising. Muthukrishna has worked with some of the world’s most disruptive companies, sharing his secrets of innovation to enhance their corporate strategies and help solve their thorniest commercial challenges. The cornerstone of these lessons is what Muthukrishna terms the ‘paradox of diversity’.

Much digital ink has been spilled in recent years on the benefits of diversity for promoting innovation, which Muthukrishna’s research backs up. However, it’s also the case that teams who are the least innovative are also the most diverse bunch. How can this be the case? Without a common set of values gluing groups together, Muthkrishna counters, the benefits of diversity crumble.

This seeming paradox of diversity occurs because diversity offers recombinatorial fuel for innovation, but is also, by definition, divisive. Without a common understanding, common goals, and common language, the flow of ideas in social networks is stymied, thus preventing recombination and reducing innovation. But diversity is the most powerful method of becoming more innovative.

Muthukrishna offers sound advice for resolving this paradox, proposing that, like motorists, we must abide by, and respect, a common set of norms to ensure a safe and pleasant journey.

The key to resolving the paradox of diversity is finding common ground on things we don’t share that get in the way of smooth communication. We can overcome these challenges with strategies such as optimal assimilation, translators and bridges, or division into subgroups, which retain diversity without harming communication and coordination.

Muthukrishna does not shy away from dangerous ideas or inconvenient truths. Acknowledging the treacherous terrain he traverses, Muthukrishna ventures into contentious debates on immigration, exploring what these points of friction mean for the fabric of democratic societies. Through these reflections, Muthukrishna stresses the importance of free speech, and the duty of scientists to be open and honest with the public. “Being forthright and truthful about even challenging topics is critical to trust in science. If you can’t trust scientists, you can’t trust science.”

In summary, Michael Muthukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone is more than just a psychology book; it’s a roadmap for understanding and improving our world. It challenges us to look beyond the surface, to rethink our assumptions about human uniqueness, and to embrace the complexities created, and explained, by cultural evolution. A Theory of Everyone is a clarion call for a new kind of understanding – one that may help us solve some of the biggest problems of our time.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going is published by Basic Books. Click here to buy a copy.

Image credit: The Atlantic.

Scientific Publication

We don’t need to understand how technology works for it to evolve

We modern humans live in a world surrounded by ever evolving technology. Whether it’s the combustion engine or the modern computer, these technologies are ubiquitous and have radically altered the world we live in.

What’s no so obvious is how complex the technologies of traditional societies are too. Bow and arrows and clothing are just a couple of sophisticated technologies that pre-industrial humans created, and used to venture into new, challenging environments.

How is it that we humans have managed to produce such impressive technology, when our closest living primate relatives have produced nothing of the sort?

Many believe this comes down to our superior cognitive abilities.  That is, our intelligence and our ability to reason.

However, some scientists argue that the inherent complexity of certain technologies make them very hard to understand. Instead, they argue that complex technologies result from many small improvements made over generations which are culturally transmitted– without people understanding how these technologies actually work.

To help settle the debate, Maxime Derex and his colleagues Jean-François Bonnefon, Robert Boyd and Alex Mesoudi conducted a rather ingenious experiment, involving a technology which changed the face of our planet: the wheel.

Note that at the time of writing this post, the paper is a preprint and yet to be peer-reviewed, and is therefore subject to further to scrutiny. Despite the amendments that may be made to the paper, the significance of this study should become apparent.

Spinning wheels

The experiment boiled down to getting participants to increase the speed of a wheel down a meter long, inclined track. The wheel had 4 radial spokes, and a single weight could be moved along each spoke.

Participants were organised into ‘chains’ of 5 individuals. Each participant had 5 trials  to minimize the time it took for the wheel to reach the end of the track. All participants  were provided with the last two choices and  scores of the previous participant in their chain (except those who went first). 14 chains were run, with each containing different people.

In total, 140 people took part in the study (with two versions of the experiment conducted). Each person received money for participating in the experiments. The money they received ranged from €3 to €29, depending on their performance and that of their peers.

Derex and his colleagues provide sound reasons for choosing a wheel for their experiment on causal understanding.  First, existing studies suggest Westerners generally have poor understanding of how wheels work, which means most participants didn’t know what was required of them (this is not meant to be insulting). Secondly, the speed of the wheel depends solely on the laws of physics, and not on irrelevant factors which could compromise the validity of their findings. And thirdly, the wheel systems doesn’t involve many dimensions, which made it well suited for hypothesis testing.

So what were the researchers actually evaluating? They were essentially testing whether wheel speeds would increase after several generations of trails, and if people’s understanding of the underlying physics would do too.

The wheel’s speed depends on just two variables: its moment of inertia (how mass is distributed around the axis), and its initial potential energy (the distance between the wheel centre of mass and the ground).

If the weights are located closer to the centre of the wheel, and if one of the weights at the top or to the right of wheel are further away from the axis before its descent, then the wheel will cover the track faster. Note that there’s a trade-off here between the two forces, and some experimentation is required to work out the optimal configuration.

The simplicity of the system meant the researchers could measure participants’ understanding of the wheel after they completed their trials. The research team evaluated their understanding by presenting them with a few options, and asking them to predict which wheels would cover the track faster.

Causal understanding_image 2
Illustration of the experimental set up (Derex et al, preprint)

So what did Derex and his team find having conducted the experiment?

After the 5 generations, the average wheel speed increased significantly. However, participants’ actual understanding of the physics did not.

The average wheel speed produced by the first participants on their last trial was 123.6 meters per hour, and their average understanding score was 4.60. After 5 generations, the average wheel speed increased to 145.7 meters per hour, while participants’ understanding didn’t significantly change.

With a maximum possible speed of 154 m/h, the team found remarkable improvements in just a few generations.

Stifling exploration

The authors were particularly interested in whether or not the sharing of lay theories to one and another would increase people’s understanding.

To further explore how individuals gain their understanding, Derex and his colleagues ran another version of the experiment.

The set up was largely the same, with 5 trials per participant and 14 chains. However, the difference was that participants could now also write their own theory about the wheel, and share this with the next participant in their chain.

All participants were provided with the previous participant’s theory, except those who were starting.

What did they find? The average wheel speed increased at a similar rate to the first experiment, and the participants’ understanding also barely changed across the generations (see the graph below).

Counter-intuitively, the authors also found that the sharing of theories had a negative  effect on participant’s actual understanding of the underlying physics.

Causal understanding_Graph
Participants produced faster wheels across generations, but their understanding of the system did not (Derex et al, preprint)

Although little differences were observed between the experimental conditions overall,  further digging found “striking” differences in participant’s exploration and independent learning.

The researchers found that if a participant had received a theory about either inertia or potential energy, then their configurations would be constrained to one of these forces. In other words, inheriting an inertia theory increased their understanding of this dynamic, but reduced participant’s understanding of energy (and vice versa).

The main explanation presented is that receiving a theory mostly constrained participants’ focus, and blinded them to the dynamics beyond the theory they received.

Derex and his colleagues argue that these results support the theory that small improvements occur over generations via cultural transmission, in the absence of people’s actual understanding of the technology.

As stated by the authors:

These results indicate that highly optimized technologies do not necessarily result from evolved reasoning abilities but instead can emerge from the blind accumulation of many small improvements made across generations linked by cultural transmission, and demand a focus on the cultural dynamics underlying technological change as well as individual cognition.

Implications

With  the paper yet to be peer reviewed, it does seem a bit premature drawing lessons from the study at this stage. However, a wealth of research demonstrates the role of cultural evolution in driving technological advancement, which means we can have some confidence in the research findings.

The authors also note that these experiment were conducted on ‘WEIRD’ people. That is,  those who are Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. Further experiments would need to be conducted cross-culturally to confirm whether or not this finding is universal.

These points aside, one key take away I took from these experiments are the roles groups and demographics play in fostering technological advancements, rather than the contributions of individuals.

In business and society more broadly, a widespread belief is that the most significant innovations come from geniuses and their novel ideas. However, such experimental findings from the field of cultural evolution reveal how overly simplistic these beliefs are; these beliefs ignore the wider environmental factors and culturally acquired knowledge that facilitate novel insights in the first place.

Another potential lesson concerns exploration and independent learning. If it is the case that receiving incomplete theories can compromise people’s understanding of technology, then this has implications for research and development professionals (or anyone fostering innovation for that matter). Working around this effect and encouraging independent learning may lead to insights which may have otherwise been missed.

Ultimately, such findings illustrate the importance of experimentation in driving technological advancements. Whether one is trying to improve a process or create new products, continuous small-scale experimentation may lead to new technologies being developed- although you may not understand how they actually work.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business

Note: Derex et al’s paper has since been published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour (1st April 2019)

Magazine publication

This View of Business: How Evolutionary Thinking Can Transform the Workplace

David Sloan Wilson, Mark van Vugt and I have just published a special edition of This View of Life magazine, exploring business from an evolutionary perspective.

Here’s our introduction to the series:

This View of Life magazine helps to demonstrate the value of an evolutionary perspective for many areas of society, including healthcare, sustainability, and education. Surprisingly, a domain that has yet to embrace evolutionary thinking is that of business and management.

True, metaphors and phrases such as “survival of the fittest”, “creative destruction”, and “firm selection” have been tossed  around for decades, suggesting that evolutionary forces are at work in the business world. However, these analogies don’t even begin to appreciate the complexity of business social environments or the forces of genetic and cultural evolution that shape the behaviors of all people, in and out of the workplace. Rethinking business and management from an evolutionary perspective can have profound implications at all scales, from the wellbeing of individual employees, to the performance of firms, to the creation of a sustainable global economy.

To catalyze this process, we’ve initiated a series of articles and interviews titled: “This View of Business: How Evolutionary Thinking Can Transform the Workplace”. To inaugurate the series, we posed the following question to a number of evolutionary thought leaders: “What is the single greatest insight that an evolutionary perspective offers to business?” Their answers give a taste of what will be explored in greater detail in the rest of the series.

We hope that this effort will go a long way toward catalyzing reforms in business education and management development. We believe that evolutionary approaches should have a prominent role in the curriculum of Business Schools as well as in allied fields such as in Management and Organizational Sciences. Likewise, we think evolutionary insights will be valuable to business leaders and other professionals, providing a toolkit for navigating the world of business.

In our introduction, we ended with a note on the status of women in the business and management professions. We made a strong effort to include female commentators in our inaugural article but failed: First, because women are sadly in the minority among those who are thinking about business from an evolutionary perspective; and second, because those we asked were too busy—perhaps fulfilling other requests similar to ours! Luckily, in our case we will be able to correct the imbalance in future articles and interviews in the series and to address gender issues in the workplace from an evolutionary perspective.

Click here to download a free copy of This View of Business: How Evolutionary Thinking Can Transform the Workplace.

Although not exhaustive, here are some topics we’re subsequently exploring in This View of Life’s Business Action Group:

Female leadership

In the aftermath of the notorious Google Memo, gender in the workplace has become engulfed in the culture wars. However, what does the scientific research actually say about sex and gender differences, and does evolutionary psychology challenge our notions of gender equality and fairness?

Diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion has become a top priority for business leaders. However, what exactly do we mean by these terms, and how effective and reliable are initiatives such as unconscious bias training and the measurement of implicit bias?

Non-hierarchical organisational structures

With the growing prominence of the tech industry and the rise of start-ups, fundamental questions of how to manage groups are raised. Is the appeal of non-hierarchical organisation and dispersed leadership just a fad, or does this reflect something deeper about human nature and social organisation that is neglected in the traditional corporation?

If you’re interested in becoming a member of the Business Action Group, click here.