PROSOCIAL WORLD
A mosaic medallion that graces the Jordan Hall of Science at the University of Notre Dame: “Nothing in Biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”
by david sloan wilson
Darwin’s 212th birthday is a good time to introduce Prosocial World, a new organization dedicated to achieving rapid positive multilevel cultural change.
It is instructive to trace the lineage of Prosocial World all the way back to Darwin himself. For Darwin, the transcendent power of evolutionary thinking manifested itself from day one. Those three simple ingredients—variation, selection, replication—made sense of everything around him. Identity by descent. The fossil record. Biogeography. Development. The wonderful contrivances that adapted organisms to their environments…
…and the entire human condition! Imagine what it must have been like for Darwin to scribble in his notebook in 1838, merely 29 years of age, “Metaphysics must flourish—He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” Darwin’s thoughts on the evolution of human moral systems are as insightful today as when he wrote them.
It was the transcendent power of evolutionary thinking that inspired Darwin to write “There is grandeur in this view of life…” in the final passage of On the Origin of Species. It is notable that Darwin’s theory can continue to function in this transcendent capacity when there is so much more information that requires organizing today. But the basic questions that need to be addressed and the power of evolutionary theory to organize the tsunami of information remains the same.
The Great Constriction
While Darwin included all aspects of humanity in “this view of life”, that’s not how the history of evolutionary thinking unfolded. Instead, the study of evolution became confined largely to the study of genetic evolution, as if the only way that offspring can resemble their parents is by sharing the same genes. Other variation-selection-replication processes were relegated to other academic disciplines, which developed largely in isolation from each other and sometimes in perceived opposition to evolutionary theory. The result was an archipelago of knowledge, which lacks the transcendence that Darwin’s theory provides.
While it is easy to look back upon the advances in evolutionary biology during the twentieth century as a rapid synthesis, it was slow for the people who lived it. When the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered in the first years of the twentieth century, the evolution of discrete traits was considered an alternative to Darwin’s emphasis on selection operating upon continuous variation. Decades were required for that controversy to be resolved by the first population geneticists, who showed that continuous variation could result from many Mendelian genes with small effects.3 That paved the way for what became known as the Modern Synthesis in the 1940s, which was indeed a synthesis of sorts but also pushed other variation-selection-replication processes into the shadows.
In 1963, the animal behaviourist Niko Tinbergen wisely noted that four questions need to be addressed for all products of evolution, concerning their function, history, mechanism, and development.4 These four questions are best asked in conjunction with each other, but that kind of integration required decades to unfold. It wasn’t until the 1970s, that the historically separate fields of evolution, ecology, and behaviour became fused into a single area of inquiry often identified by the acronym EEB in biology departments. This was also the decade that the term Evo-Devo was coined, signalling that the prior study of development had somehow been detached from the so-called Modern Synthesis.
In some respects, a fully rounded four-question approach is still a work in progress within the biological sciences. Too often, reductionistic research in molecular or neurobiology takes place in isolation from functional, historical, and developmental research.
Yet another indication that the Darwinian revolution is still a work in progress within the biological sciences is the term “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”, which was coined at the dawn of the twenty-first century to reflect the need to go beyond the Modern Synthesis, not by replacing it but by building upon it. Even this judiciously chosen phrase is hotly contested among evolutionary scientists,
Human Arrested Development
If the fulfilment of “Nothing makes sense except in the light of…” required decades within the biological sciences, the process of integration was even slower for the study of humanity and therefore is even more a work in progress today. Consider the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology in 1975. The thesis of Sociobiology was that a single theory grounded in evolution could explain all forms of social behaviour, from microbes to humans. It was hailed as an encyclopaedic triumph for the study of nonhuman species. At the same time, the final speculative chapter on humans created a storm of controversy.
One of the main complaints of the social scientists was that the biologists were guilty of genetic determinism and didn’t pay enough attention to culture. Yet, the social scientists hadn’t even remotely produced a coherent theory of human culture on their own, remaining an archipelago of knowledge. The study of human culture was a vast no man’s land in 1975.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s and 1980s that scientists and scholars from across the knowledge archipelago went back to basics by defining any process as Darwinian when it combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication. This was the period when terms such as “evolutionary psychology”, “evolutionary anthropology”, and “evolutionary economics” were coined, signalling the need to rethink whole disciplines from an evolutionary perspective. This was also when the study of cultural evolution began to be placed on a mathematical foundation, building upon population genetics models that had been developed fifty years earlier. Even religion, which for many people is the polar opposite of evolution, became the object of evolutionary inquiry at the turn of the twenty-first century, including my own Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society.
Fast-forwarding to the present, there is a vibrant and rapidly growing community of evolutionary thinkers who, like Darwin, include all aspects of humanity in their study of “this view of life.” Yet, this enlightened community is still a tiny, evolving fraction of the worldwide academic community and is still barely reflected in college education. When it comes to practical applications, 99% of policy experts would be dumbfounded by the statement “nothing about policy makes sense except in the light of evolution.” As with the synthesis of biological knowledge during the twentieth century, what historians will call fast looking back upon the 21st century is slow for the people who live it—and far, far too slow to solve the problems that require our immediate attention.
Multilevel Selection and the Long Shadow of Individualism
There is one class of behaviours that Darwin could not explain with his theory of natural selection—at least not at first. Prosocial behaviours, which are oriented toward the welfare of others and one’s group as a whole, are inherently vulnerable to more self-oriented behaviours. If natural selection is all about some individuals surviving and reproducing better than others, then how can helping others survive and reproduce at one’s own expense evolve?
Darwin was eventually able to answer his own question, although it took him a while, which can be seen by the changes he made in successive editions of his books.8 Prosocial behaviours can be favoured by a process of competition among groups in a multi-group population, even if they are disfavoured by competition among individuals within groups. As Ed Wilson and I summed it up in our 2007 article titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology” — “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”9
Yet, as everyone familiar with the topic knows, the idea of selection at the level of groups was rejected by most evolutionary biologists during the last half of the 20th century in favour of the view that all adaptations are for the good of individuals and their selfish genes. How do we explain this pendulum swing of opinion, from Darwin to Dawkins and back again to what Ed and I were trying to establish in 2007?
The best way to answer this question is by calling attention to a larger pendulum swing of opinion known as Individualism. This is a commitment to regarding the individual person as the fundamental unit of analysis and that all things social must be understood in terms of the motives and actions of individuals. Like all intellectual traditions, Individualism has long roots, with major figures that included Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter at the turn of the twentieth century,10 but it became so dominant during the second half of the twentieth century that many people couldn’t imagine anything else, like the proverbial water that fish can’t see. Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spoke for her times when she quipped in 1987 that there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families.
Thus, at the same time that economists were trying to explain everything in terms of rational individuals maximizing their utilities, evolutionary theorists were trying to explain everything in terms of well-adapted individuals maximizing the fitness of their genes. There was an aura of excitement about the similarity between economic and evolutionary theory, as if some great generality was being achieved, when in fact it was merely a convergence upon the intellectual tradition of Individualism.
Individualism has delivered some insights but has also proven its limitations across the board—in economics, the social sciences, evolutionary biology, and everyday life. It turns out that large-scale biological and human systems can’t be understood entirely of the motives and actions of individual organisms. Multiple levels of functional organization exist and must be recognized, especially if our purpose is to evolve higher levels of functional organization that do not currently exist. The revival of Multilevel Selection theory in evolutionary thought needs to be seen as part of a larger trend of going beyond the intellectual tradition of Individualism in all its forms.
On the Need to Catalyze Positive Cultural Evolution
I have traced the lineage of Prosocial World to its Darwinian roots to make the following major points:
1) Evolutionary theory has a transcendent quality, by which I mean its ability to integrate existing disciplinary knowledge and inform the search for new knowledge for all aspects of living systems. This transcendent quality was clear to Darwin from the beginning and is represented by his phrase “this view of life”.
2) The explanatory power of evolutionary thinking has required decades to unfold and still is not complete. It is still a work in progress within the biological sciences, even more a work in progress for the academic study of humanity, and has barely even started for real-world change efforts.
3) Widespread knowledge and application of evolutionary theory—what I call completing the Darwinian revolution in my 2019 book This View of Life, must be catalyzed to solve the problems of our age.
The concept of catalysis is familiar in chemistry and needs to become familiar in the study of the application of cultural evolution. A chemical catalyst is a substance that, when added in small amounts, increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being used up in the process. Crudely speaking, the way a catalytic molecule works is by holding other molecules in an orientation that binds them to each other, after which it is released to repeat the process.
In principle, the rate of cultural evolution can be catalyzed in the same way as a chemical reaction. The cultural catalytic agent would hold other agents in an orientation that binds them to each other, after which it is released to repeat the process.
In a sense, this is just another way of describing what we already know and takes place all around us. We already know that rates of cultural evolution are highly variable and can be very fast—such as the onset of the Internet Age, Big Data, and the gig economy. And what would the average workshop be but the bringing together of people who might not otherwise interact, in hope that they will do something together after the workshop is over?
Nevertheless, never underestimate the power of metaphorical transfer. Thinking more explicitly about cultural catalysis can help to accomplish in years what otherwise would require decades or not take place at all. And make no mistake—evolution, whether genetic or cultural, fast or slow, doesn’t make everything nice. It frequently results in outcomes that benefit me but not you, us but not them, or our short-term welfare at the expense of future generations. As we experiment with cultural catalysis, we need to make it fast and benign rather than fast and pathological for the common good.
My own efforts at cultural catalysis began with a campus-wide evolutionary studies program and real-world change efforts in my hometown of Binghamton, took a quantum jump with the Evolution Institute, and now are taking another quantum jump with Prosocial World.
Prosocial World
Prosocial is a practical method for helping groups manage their cultural evolution, becoming more internally cooperative, more adaptable to change, and better able to act as prosocial agents in between-group interactions. Our aim is to accomplish rapid positive multilevel cultural change worldwide. 18 Taking these key terms in order:
Rapid: Rates of positive cultural change can be catalyzed, similar to rates of chemical change. We aim to accomplish in years what otherwise might require decades or not at all.
Positive: Cultural change takes place whether we want it to or not, but often it results in problems rather than solutions. We aim to align the forces of cultural change with prosocial goals.
Multilevel: Positive change must be global, with the welfare of the whole earth system in mind. It must also be local, with the welfare of individuals working together in small groups in mind, since this is the most natural and fulfilling scale of human social interactions. And the local and global scales must be connected by intermediate levels of social organizations, such as institutions, businesses, and governments.
Cultural: Everyone uses this word in the vernacular, but Prosocial World treats cultural change explicitly and innately as an evolutionary process, similar in its fundamentals to the process of genetic evolution. This enables us to apply insights from the social, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences to solve the problems of our age.
A distinctive feature of Prosocial World, especially against the background of Individualism, is its emphasis on the typically small, functionally oriented group as a fundamental unit of human social organization, needed for both individual thriving and efficacious action at larger scales. Any group of people who need to work together to achieve common goals can benefit from Prosocial World’s coaching methods.
We have trained over 500 facilitators from 34 nations (and growing), have developed a training system that can be taken to scale, and are working with groups in contexts as diverse as education, health, business, regenerative agriculture, and spirituality. Prosocial World welcomes the support and participation of anyone who wishes to become involved in achieving rapid positive multilevel cultural change. We hope that you will join us on this journey to evolve our future.
This article was originally published in This View of Life Magazine.
David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life, both in his own research and as director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program that recently received NSF funding to expand into a nationwide consortium. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time and Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. .
References:
[1] A book-length account is provided in my book The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time.
[2] TVOL was cofounded with Robert Kadar, who was my graduate student at the time. Robert went on to found Evonomics.com, which has been catalytic force in changing economic thought.
[3] For a fascinating history of this period, see The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, by William Provine. It’s an easier read than the title suggests!
[4] Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift Für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410–433.
[5] Visit the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis website for more: https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com.
[6] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/wilson-naturalist.html
[7] See also Hodgson, G. M. (2004). Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals: A Contribution to the History of the Term. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17, 428–454.
[8] See Chapter 2 of Elliott Sober’s Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?, which is titled “Darwin and Group Selection”.
[9] Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. Quarterly Review of Biology, 82, 327–348.
[10] For more, see Hodgson, G. M. (2007). Meanings of methodological individualism. Journal of Economic Methodology, 14(2), 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501780701394094
[11] Wilson, D. S., O’Brien, D. T., & Sesma, A. (2009). Human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective: variation and correlations at a city-wide scale. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30(3), 190–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.12.002
[12] Wilson, D. S., Hartberg, Y., MacDonald, I., Lanman, J. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2016). The nature of religious diversity: a cultural ecosystem approach. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1–20.
[13] Hartberg, Y. M., & Wilson, D. S. (2016). Sacred text as cultural genome: an inheritance mechanism and method for studying cultural evolution. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1195766
[14] This workshop led to a major review article: Ellis, B. J., Del Giudice, M., Dishion, T. J., Figueredo, A. J., Gray, P., Griskevicius, V., … Wilson, D. S. (2012). The evolutionary basis of risky adolescent behavior: implications for science, policy, and practice. Developmental Psychology, 48(3), 598–623. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026220
[15] Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, S21–S32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010
[16] Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by Consequences. Science, 213, 501–504.
[17] Wilson, D. S., Kauffman, R. A., & Purdy, M. S. (2011). A Program for At-risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science. PLoS ONE, 6(11), e27826. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0027826
[18] Prosocial World’s business plan is available upon request by emailing me at David.Wilson@Prosocial.World.