#85: The Evolution Of A Renegade – David Sloan Wilson

Show notes

Selected links

• Follow David: Website | Twitter
• The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
• River Out Of Eden, by Richard Dawkins
• The Descent Of Man, by Charles Darwin
• Animal Dispersion In Relation To Social Behavior, by Vero Wynne-Edwards
• Adaptation And Natural Selection, by George C Williams
• ‘Reintroducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences’, 1994 paper by David Sloan Wilson & Eliot Sober
• The Meaning Of Human Existence, by E O Wilson
• ‘Gender and Politics Among Anthropologists in the Units of Selection Debate’, 2014 survey by Yaworsky, Horowitz & Kickham
• The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson
• Sociobiology, by E O Wilson
• Governing The Commons, by Elinor Ostrom
• Animal Species And Evolution, by Ernst Mayr
• Simpson’s paradox
• ‘The False Allure of Group Selection’, Steven Pinker’s Edge.org article
• ‘Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition’, 2005 article by Mike Tomasello et al
• Dave’s conversation with Jonathan Birch
• Darwin’s Cathedral, by David Sloan Wilson
• This View of Life, by David Sloan Wilson
• ‘Human prosociality from an evolutionary perspective: variation and correlations at a city-wide scale’, 2009 paper by David Sloan Wilson et al
• ‘Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Risk and Effort’, 2015 paper by James Coan & David Sbarra
• Prosocial.world

Topics discussed

• Does Dave actually enjoy his father’s books? 15:21
• How did Dave’s father’s fame affect Dave as a child? 17:50
• Dave’s relationship with his mother. 21:17
• Is Dave an atheist? 23:10
• The benefits of boarding school. 23:53
• Where did Dave first encounter the theory of evolution by natural selection? 29:16
• The three ingredients for natural selection. 32:32
• Are natural selection and evolution synonymous? 33:33
• Life-changing books Dave read while at college. 38:30
• What Dave learned from studying zooplankton. 39:36
• A crash course in group selection. 42:46
• Why did group selection fall out of favour? 1:03:16
• Dave’s crusade to revive group selection. 1:19:23
• What is altruism? 1:27:14
• How does selfish gene theory explain altruism? 1:34:05
• How does Dave define groups? 1:50:57
• The averaging fallacy. 1:55:10
• Are groups “replicators” or “vehicles”? 1:57:50
• Is “shared intentionality” evidence for group selection? 2:03:24
• What accounts for Richard Dawkins’ outsized influence? 2:09:18
• What is religion? 2:13:48
• Why do religions exist? 2:14:57
• Richard Dawkins’ and Bret Weinstein’s different takes on the evolution of religion. 2:19:48
• How did the Jewish community survive persecution by developing a belief in the afterlife? 2:37:38
• Dave’s shift to reforming communities in the real world. 2:42:20
• Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles, and how public policy can benefit from evolutionary thinking. 2:52:57
• Social Baseline Theory. 2:56:40