Episode 3 - Cooperation
SuMMARY
We’ve been taught that evolution is a cruel and vicious struggle in which only the ruthless survive. But if you look a little more closely, the natural world is teeming with cooperation. Not only that, but from single celled organisms right the way through to human civilisation, the scale of cooperation has been steadily increasing. Can this shed any light on why humans find cooperation meaningful?
References
Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
Memoirs of a Revolutionist - Peter Kropotkin
Mutual Aid - Peter Kropotkin
Daniel Schmactenberger on the Future Thinkers Podcast
John Bunzl’s organisation SIMPOL
Roy Baumeister’s article in Aeon Magazine
Transcript
RC: Welcome to Conscious Evolution,
An Antidote to Meaninglessness
A podcast by Robert Cobbold.
Frank Ostaseski is the founder the first Buddhist hospice in America and has spent the last 30 years working in palliative care. His compassionate service to the dying and their families has been recognised by The Dalai Lama.
I heard him being interviewed recently, and one of the questions he was asked was: “What is the one question that people tend to think about most at the end of their lives?”
His answer: “Was I loved? And did I love well?”
In this series I’m trying to draw a roadmap for how to be happy in life. But in episode 1, when I took a look at the best psychology research I could find, I discovered that pursuing happiness for its own sake doesn’t actually work.
Instead, a whole range of positive psychologists agreed that best strategy to be happy in life, was not to pursue happiness itself, but to pursue what you find meaningful, because in doing so, happiness tends to come as a by-product.
So really, my enquiry into how to be happy has become an enquiry into how to find meaning in life. And there’s no greater authority on the subject than Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes a moment during his time in Auschwitz, when he was working in a trench, starving and close to death, when all of a sudden he found himself thinking of his wife.
Viktor Frankl: I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit pierce through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.
RC: Frankl says that the salvation of man is through love and in love. It’s easy just to dismiss claims like these as nice sounding words. But what if there was some kind of evolutionary basis for Frankl’s claim.
This episode we’re going to examine the concept of love through an evolutionary lens. Why from an evolutionary point of view is love such a powerful source of meaning in our lives, and what, if anything does this tell us about evolution as a whole?
For most people love and evolution aren’t words which sit comfortably together.
Darwinian evolution, as it’s been taught in school, is a cruel struggle for the right to survive. All pitted against all, nature red in tooth and claw, in which only the ruthless survive. It is this fierce struggle which has shaped human nature to make us competitive, selfish and greedy. Might is right. Greed is good.
It is this vicious characterisation of evolution which came to dominate the intellectual world during the 20th century, penetrating social, political and economic discourse. From there, it was only a short hop and skip to the poisonous conclusions of eugenics and social Darwinism. If someone is poor or starving, the social Darwinists argued, that’s just evolution at work. Don’t help the laggards, or you’ll slow evolution down. Instead we must let them die in order to improve the fitness of the species as a whole. After all, only the strong survive.
This is the intellectual breeding ground of the darkest hours of the 20th century. You can hear echoes of it in the cold logic of cutthroat capitalism, the remorseless cruelty of colonialism and the systematic brutality of the Holocaust.
Even today, when eugenics and social Darwinism have long been relegated to the intellectual waste-paper basket, the idea that the survival of the fittest equates to survival of the strongest and most ruthless continues to dominate evolutionary discourse.
It’s not just that such ideas are dangerous, it’s that they’re based on a totally incomplete understanding of evolution and a fatal misreading of Darwin’s own writings.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin mentions “survival of the fittest” twice. Do you know many times he mentions love? 95 times.
The word love might be a bit too flowery for most scientific journals, and it has singularly human connotations, but love has its counterpart in the natural world: cooperation.
The field of evolutionary biology is awash with studies of cooperation: dogs hunt in packs, bats share food with one another, and ants will sacrifice their lives to protect their colony from intruders. There are even well documented examples of direct cooperation between two different species, called symbiotic relationships.
So where was all of this in our Biology textbooks? How did cooperation, such an important part of the natural world, become so side-lined from the layman’s understanding of evolution?
To find out, we’re going to revisit the entire sweep of the evolutionary journey, from the emergence of life as single-celled organisms, all the way through to cutthroat capitalism, the Cold War and The Beatles. We’re going to be hearing from evolutionary theorists, political strategists, and evolutionary psychologists. We’re going to hear that cooperation is not only an important source of meaning in an individual’s life, it’s also the solution to humanity’s biggest collective problems.
But first of all I want to take you back 150 years to pre-revolutionary Russia. For just as Social Darwinism was gaining ground in the West, in St Petersburg a Russian Prince named Peter Kropotkin was coming to the opposite conclusion.
A geographer and a zoologist by day, Kropotkin risked his freedom as a revolutionary anarchist by night, using his position in The Imperial Geographic Society as a cover for political activism with an underground group called The Circle of Tchaikovsky. Think of him as a socialist Indiana Jones but with a much bigger beard.
As well as writing and distributing revolutionary pamphlets, Kropotkin used to disguise himself as a peasant under the pseudonym Borodín and give talks to small groups of weavers.
Slowly, the police began to tighten their grip. In the middle of March 1874 the police arrested two of the members of his circle:
KROPOTKIN: …most unreliable fellows who would surely set the police at once upon the track of Borodín, the man dressed as a peasant, who spoke at the weavers’ meetings. Within a week’s time all the members of our circle, excepting Serdukóff and myself, were arrested.
RC: Kropotkin wanted to flee St. Petersburg, but he was due to present a paper about glacial formations in a week’s time, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave without first presenting the culmination of years of research.
When the day came, his findings were so well received by the Geographic Society that he was nominated to become president.
Amidst the clinking of glasses and congratulations Kropotkin slipped quietly home, destroyed all evidence of his socialist activism, packed, and left via the service entrance and ducked into a waiting cab. Before long he was overtaken by a cab bearing one of the weavers who had been arrested the week before. The weaver waved to him, and thinking that the man had been released from prison and might need help, Kropotkin ordered his cab driver to stop. Immediately a detective jumped out from beside the weaver and arrested our anarchist prince on the spot.
Kropotkin was held in prison for two years before his friends engineered a brilliant and daring escape plan, communicated to him in a coded message hidden inside the face of a watch.
Due to his deteriorating health, Kropotkin was allowed to walk under supervision for an hour every day in a courtyard which led out through a guarded gate onto the street. One of Kropotkin’s friends was assigned to distract the guard, at which moment a violinist, also a friend sitting just outside the walls of the prison, would play to signal that the coast was clear.
KROPOTKIN: Immediately the violinist — a good one, I must say — began a wildly exciting mazurka from Kontsky, as if to say, “Straight on now, — this is your time!” I moved slowly to the nearer end of the footpath, trembling at the thought that the mazurka might stop before I reached it. When I was there I turned round. The sentry had stopped five or six paces behind me; he was looking the other way. “Now or never!” I remember that thought flashing through my head. I flung off my green flannel dressing-gown and began to run.
RC: Another of Kropotkin’s friends was waiting outside the entrance with a cab harnessed to a racehorse which they’d bought specifically for the occasion. The carriage set off so quickly that they almost overturned at the first bend. They were pursued down the street by soldiers who searched for a cab, but there were none to be found. Kropotkin’s friends had hired out every one for miles around.
It strikes me as powerfully fitting that a man who spent so much of his life writing about cooperation should have so many friends who were willing to put their liberty at risk in order to help him escape from prison. Because when Kropotkin finally arrived in England, he developed all of his theories into a book called Mutual Aid, in which he details the innumerable examples of cooperation in the natural world. Mutual Aid has become a classic of the Anarchist canon.
In it, he writes:
KROPOTKIN: In the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.
RC: This is not to say that Kropotkin downplays competition in evolution. In fact he admits:
KROPOTKIN: There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
RC: That claim is the groundnote of Kropotkin’s contribution to evolutionary biology, and when it was published around the turn of the century, Mutual Aid went completely against the grain of intellectual debate at the time.
Apart from anything else, it seems to be a glaring contradiction. Is competition the best evolutionary strategy? Or cooperation? Surely it can’t be both? I suppose few people are better placed to embrace paradox than an Anarchist Prince.
It would be another 50 years before mathematicians such as John Nash, made famous by the film A Beautiful Mind, would develop game theory, the mathematical models which could either prove or refute Kropotkin’s claim.
So the question is: have Kropotkin’s theories stood the test of time? Is cooperation really a more powerful force in evolution than competition?
JOHN STEWART: When life first emerged on this planet it was basically at the scale of a millionth of a metre. So we had cooperating molecular processes that formed the first simple cells.
RC: That’s John Stewart, a member of the Evolution, Cognition and Complexity Research Group at the Free University of Brussels. He argues that without cooperation, there would be no life at all.
JOHN STEWART: So that was the first major evolutionary transition. The emergence of life. And it's a fundamentally cooperative activity. Then we had the formation of cooperatives of these first simple cells they formed the complex eukaryote cell the kind of cells we find in the body of multicellular organisms such as ourselves. Then we find the emergence of cooperatives of those complex cells to form multicellular organisms such as animals, trees, plants and ourselves. So we're fundamentally cooperatives. If a human being looks down into their body they see that they're a galaxy of over a trillion cells, that those cells in turn are the descendants of communities of simple cells and that those simple cells are the product of cooperatives of molecular processes.
RC: What a beautiful notion: we are galaxies of cooperation.
Suddenly we begin to see a very different picture of what evolution is all about. From the moment it emerged, as John says, life has been an inherently cooperative activity. Without the cooperation of molecular processes there would be no life. And without the cooperation of single celled organisms there can be no multicellular organisms and so on, all the way up to and including humans. We might even call cooperation a trajectory of evolution.
So was all that stuff about competition, selfishness and nature red in tooth and claw simply wrong? Well, not quite.
CARTER PHIPPS: It’s a partial truth, that’s what I’d prefer to say…
RC: That’s Carter Phipps, author of the book Evolutionaries.
CARTER PHIPPS: That perception of evolutionary theory as just revealing the deeply competitive nature of the human self, that's only part of the picture. You know this deeply cooperative element of the human condition is also a huge part of evolution. Evolution is not just about who can compete the best, but who can cooperate the best. And so sometimes people have this idea that if we give in to this Darwinian conception of what it means to be human, we're gonna lose our humanity, you know we're gonna lose that part of us that cares for each other that part of us, it's going to reduce us as humans. And I think the more we understand about the science of evolution the less that's true.
RC: It’s hardly surprising that people are wary of Darwinian conceptions of human nature, when for so long Darwin’s name has been dragged through the mud, and used as a justification for the worst expressions of human selfishness, greed and cruelty. Darwin would have been horrified to know that his ideas have been so misappropriated. Because when evolution is understood properly, ideas like social Darwinism are shown to be as wrong factually as they are morally.
CARTER PHIPPS: Those deep co-operative dynamics are so critical to being human as well, you know those tribal dynamics, the nature of our cooperative selves you know is also critical. It's not just the individual that competes the best and survives. It's the group that works together the best also competes the best. So group dynamics, collective dynamics, collective care for the other, the embrace of that cooperative, those cooperative dynamics, is just as much a part of human nature as is the competitive dynamics.
RC: Carter is touching on an idea known as multi-level selection theory. The idea that there is evolutionary pressure at different levels of organisation from the cell, to the individual, to the group. An individual might compete best by being selfish. But a tribe comprised of selfish people is going to fare very poorly when competing with another tribe who all work very well together.
To quote the famous evolutionary biologist, David Sloan Wilson: “selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”
And of course, groups which can cooperate with other groups and combine together to form still larger groups, have an even greater advantage. This fact has driven the emergence of ever larger cooperative groups from the first simple cell to multicellular organisms to groups of multicellular organisms like shoals of fish and beehives and finally humans.
Here’s evolutionary theorist John Stewart again.
JOHN STEWART: That process of major evolutionary transitions continues in human evolution which started off with family groups, then extended families form bands, cooperatives of bands formed tribes, cooperatives of tribes formed the first agricultural communities and chieftainships and then cooperatives of those from city states. We now have nation states and we're on the verge of the emergence of another great evolutionary transition which is the emergence of a cooperative global society and that global society will repeat what's happened at every other level.
RC: It’s important to make clear that this tendency for evolution to produce ever larger cooperatives isn’t all plain sailing. History is littered with bumps, setbacks, evolutionary dead ends, mass extinctions, civil wars, Brexit and all the rest of it. But these backwards steps are the exception, not the rule, and when they run their course the tendency towards larger scales of cooperation reasserts itself and continues on its upwards trajectory.
It’s equally important to emphasise that the tendency towards cooperation isn’t achieved out of goodwill or because it’s the morally right thing to do or anything fluffy. Tribes come together to form larger tribes simply because it’s in their interests to do so. And nothing is more likely to bring two tribes together than the threat of an even larger tribe on the other side of the mountain. If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s the father of cooperation.
One of the most insightful people I’ve come across on this topic is philosopher Daniel Schmactenberger. He’s been doing the rounds on podcasts recently and grabbing people’s attention with his incisive explanations of existential risk and civilisation design.
Here he is on the Future Thinkers Podcast.
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: Think about early tribes as competitive teams, almost like a sports team where they have to work really well together and be very coherent with each other to be able to compete with other teams and military conflicts when they occur, and compete with the other teams for scarce resources in the shared environment, the shared commons. Say they weren’t military, right. They’re just doing their own thing, there’s plenty of abundance, but then if any of them realize that they can do this military thing, go kill another tribe, take their stuff and get the river front that they had, or get whatever kinds of things they had acquired and developed that actually worked for them. It worked better. Now, everyone else has to build defensive militaries, at least, otherwise they lose by default.
And so, one of the things to get in the history of win/lose game theory is that one, it worked. You could actually go kill the other people, take their stuff and make stuff better for you and, you know, your people. And two, if you didn’t play win/lose game theory and someone else did, you lost by default. Which is why most of the more peaceable, less militaristic cultures got wiped out. So then we say, you know, “One of the tribes is just bigger and stronger than us, we’re not going to be able to compete with them. But if two or three of us smaller tribes band together we can.” But then, of course, the other side has to complete. So, they band together. So, now we move from tribes to villages, right. And then we can move up to kingdoms and to nation states and to global economic trading blocks.
I mean, think about those evolutions of what we think of as, like, civilization structures as evolutions of competitive teams within a win/lose game theoretic structure that have more and more power to be able to out compete the other one. And that’s both have more people that can be coherent with each other against the other one, right. So, then, we’re as a nation, we’re a team competing against the other one. We have a shared military industrial complex paid for by taxes, whatever. Or, as a religion or a race. So, we can have some overlapping teams.
RC: Keep in mind what Daniel is saying about “win-lose game theoretic structures” because in a minute we’re going to see how those dynamics are becoming unsustainable, and that in order to move beyond them we’re going to require a new kind of evolution.
What I hope becomes clear from what Carter and Daniel are saying is that cooperation and competition actually work together like yin and yang.
CARTER PHIPPS: As I often say, some of the best expressions for example of human creativity are not just when we're cooperating and not just we're competing it's when we're doing both. I mean I always use the Beatles as my favorite example you know, it's like without the competition between Paul and John would the Beatles have been the Beatles? I mean really that competitive dynamic was absolutely critical but they couldn't have done it without a cooperative dynamic as well, it's the dynamic tension between them that made them who they were, that made them this beautiful expression of creativity. So sometimes it's when we have both working actively, when we have this competitive dynamic and a cooperative dynamic. Those are some of the best expressions of human creativity that we find.
RC: I think what Carter is saying is true whether we’re talking about breakthroughs in science, art or technology. Often it goes too far and competition becomes unsustainable and unhealthy, but we shouldn’t throw out the baby out with the bathwater. There is such a thing as healthy competition, and it drives many of humanity’s greatest achievements.
One man who’s spent almost 30 years thinking about competition and cooperation is businessman John Bunzl. He founded a fascinating organisation called SIMPOL, which aims to provide a pathway out of destructive competition between nations and towards global cooperation.
JOHN BUNZL: I think competition and cooperation are like dance partners, but competition is the more, sort of leads the dance for most of the time, is more obvious to us. So for example if you asked a group of kids who were just playing an impromptu game of football and you stop them, and say “Are you competing or are you cooperating?” They'll say: “Well we're competing!”. But if you ask them, “Well hang on a minute before you started to play your games what did you do?” “Oh well you know, we decided you know we picked teams and we decided where the goals would be. And you know basically, where the edge of the pitch was and so forth.” “So you know you cooperated in fact, quite a bit before you could compete healthily.”
RC: This is the same whether we’re talking about two teams competing, two nations or two organisms. On the surface it may look like competition. But this competition is only made possible by the galaxy of cooperation going on within us and around us.
Even the most vaunted form of competition today, free market capitalism, takes place against a backdrop of cooperation. Companies may fight for material dominance, but they’ve already agreed rules such as private property, the rule of law, trading regulations etc. But we tend to overlook all of that
JOHN BUNZL: So you know I think cooperation tends to be, not the silent partner, but it's the less obvious partner. And I think it only really comes to the fore when competition becomes so cutthroat and unsustainable that everybody realizes suddenly that cooperation is the only answer otherwise we're all dead.
RC: Whether it’s two companies competing to dominate the market, or two nations competing for geopolitical power, when competition is pushed to its extremes and combined with the vast technological power we have at our disposal, competition goes from being a healthy part of evolutionary life, to a threat to life itself.
And that’s what people started to realise during the Cold War. Our technological power has reached a point where, if we continue to play competitive “win-lose games” as Daniel Schmactenberger describes them, everyone loses.
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: Once you get to the point where all of the teams are stepping up simultaneously, that’s the kind of evolutionary driver, they’re stepping up in their power. Once you get to the point that you have exponential technological power on multiple teams, where the amount of power that it would take to actually win, would require destroying the playing field which becomes inevitable, right?
Inevitably power will keep increasing until it’s actually bigger than the playing field can tolerate. And then winning pretty much means losing, because there is nothing left to win, right? So, right now we’re at a place where the superpowers of the world cannot win a war against each other.
RC: And so the old dynamic of competing with an out-group, while it may have been the key to evolutionary success so far, and the driver of the emergence of ever larger cooperative groups, suddenly becomes self-terminating.
Winning a war with swords and spears is one thing. With machine guns its quite another. But winning a war against another nuclear power? That’s hardly different from losing a war.
And nuclear war is not the only threat to our civilisation created by competition between nations.
Here’s evolutionary theorist John Stewart again.
JOHN STEWART: It's absolutely abundantly clear in the world we live in today that there are problems that result from the absence of cooperation between nation states, that result from the absence of a global system and that can only be dealt with effectively from a global level. The immigration problems are clearly such an issue. The immigration problems that Europe is experiencing result from wars that they can't influence or control. In Australia the current government perceives that it has immigration problems. Again, the source of those immigration problems are outside the control of the Australian Government or any other single government for that matter. Similarly, global warming can't be solved at the level of nation states and that's because it's in the interests of nation states to free ride. So it's the interests of nation states is to sign up to an agreement like the Paris Accord but actually not meet its targets and hope that other countries will put themselves at an economic disadvantage by meeting their targets. And so enabling progress to be made on global warming without the individual nation state having to contribute to the costs of it. So it's the lack of coordination and cooperation between nation states that threatens us with global warming and threatens us with the possibility of nuclear war, immigration problems and so on.
RC: The same lack of cooperation between nations explains why big companies don’t pay enough tax. Nations compete to have the lowest corporation tax so that they can attract big businesses. But this race to the bottom means that big companies are given such huge tax breaks that they end up paying hardly any tax at all.
There is one possible solution to these problems however. And that is global governance.
JOHN STEWART: Effective global governance is essential if humanity is to survive this century. In the absence of a system of global governance which ensures the emergence of a cooperative planetary entity then global warming is highly likely to end human civilization in the next 70 or 80 years. Additionally, where we still have the nuclear threat overhanging us and it's probably more of a threat than it was during the 60s and 70s when humans tended to be very conscious of the nuclear threat. It's reasonably likely that nuclear war will break out and will end human civilization. Global governance is the only thing that can keep that under control.
RC: Suddenly Frankl’s claim that the salvation of humanity is in love isn’t sounding so woolly.
But there’s a problem: we need cooperation at the global level in order to survive. And historically the formation of larger cooperative groups has always been driven by competition with an out-group.
But when you’re trying to form a cooperative group which involves everyone on the planet, there is no out-group for us to compete against. Short of an alien invasion, global governance isn’t going to happen in an automatic bottom-up kind of way, because there is no out group to push the emergence of global cooperation.
Or if you prefer Daniel Schmactenberger’s language, the win-lose game theoretical mechanisms which drove cooperation in the past won’t continue to work in the future. They become self-terminating.
So if the solution to the problem of global cooperation can’t be found in the strategies of the past we’re going to have to find the impulse by looking to the future. If we can’t rely on the push of competition, we’re going to have to find it in the pull of something else.
I’m going to circle back to the idea of global governance in the final episode, and in particular I’m going focus on how it links to our personal quest to find meaning in life.
For now, it’s enough to be aware that cooperation isn’t just an outdated feature of our evolutionary past, it’s also crucial if we’re to have any kind of evolutionary future.
I wonder if this can help explain why cooperation is so meaningful.
SARAH HILL: When we think about helping other people it does come at a cost to oneself and if you take sort of the really narrow view it seems sort of evolutionarily paradoxical.
RC: That’s evolutionary psychologist Sarah Hill who we heard from in the previous episode.
SARAH HILL: But when you think about you know human beings and how we spent most of our evolutionary history living in these groups where we were highly interdependent with other people and our survival was very much dependent on forming these close relationships with other people, it actually makes perfect sense that our brain is wired in a way that leads us to get warm and fuzzies when we help other people. You know our own survival, you know the survival of our ancestors was historically very much dependent on our relationships with not only our relatives but also our non-relatives. And you see this now even in contemporary hunter-gatherer groups that their biggest source of insurance, their insurance policy in terms of survival is forming these close relationships with other people and part of that has led to the evolution of a brain that feels you know really good when it helps other people because of course when we do things to help other people, when it comes at a low cost to ourselves, that means that we're setting ourselves up in a way that's going to increase our likelihood of being helped by other people when we most need it.
RC: If you listened to the episode 1, you’ll remember the thought experiment involving two cavemen who found a gooseberry bush. We reasoned that a caveman who had wiring in his or her brain which gave them a hit of dopamine when they ate sugar would eat more of the gooseberries and so would be more likely to survive and reproduce. And so after many generations, the entire species is hardwired to enjoy sugar, and get a short term hit of pleasure when they eat it.
That hit of pleasure used to be our guide to all those sorts of behaviours which promoted our survival and reproductive success, like eating sugar. In a nutshell:
SARAH HILL: Happiness is doing things that historically have promoted survival and reproductive success. It's your brain's way of rewarding you for doing that.
RC: The key word there is “HISTORICALLY”, because as Sarah went on to point out, in our radically altered modern context where sugar is readily available, the short term hit of pleasure we get is no longer a reliable guide to our survival or reproductive success. It’s more like a reliable guide to diabetes. In technical language, our love of sugar has become maladaptive.
Now contrast this short term hit of pleasure with the feeling that you get when you help out a stranger. That “warm fuzzy feeling” – as Sarah puts it - feels subjectively very different from the hit of pleasure you get from eating sweets, right? Think about it – think about the last time you worked well in a team or helped a friend out or did something nice. That kind of feeling is actually quite far removed from the hit of pleasure you get from eating sweets. It feels more…meaningful.
If that’s the difference between the two in terms of how they feel subjectively, then what explains this difference in evolutionary terms?
I believe the key is time. Remember positive psychologist Roy Baumeister from the previous episode? In an article for the online publication Aeon, he wrote:
“Meaning and happiness are apparently experienced quite differently in time. Happiness is about the present; meaning is about the future.”
That’s why eating sugar isn’t meaningful – it’s an outdated maladaptive evolutionary behaviour, and its only reward is pleasure experienced in the present.
Cooperation on the other hand is meaningful, because it’s an evolutionary behaviour which is still very much adaptive, and the reward for cooperation is to be found in the future.
I believe that meaningfulness is evolution’s way of telling us that we’re doing something which is conducive to our evolutionary future.
In next two episodes we’re going to test this theory against our other two pillars of a meaningful life: creativity and transcendence.
KEN ROBINSON: Creativity as we define it, is the process of having original ideas that have value. It’s an evolutionary process.
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality.
RC: Can we say that creativity and transcendence are evolutionary trajectories in the same way that cooperation is? Is our active participation in these trajectories necessary if we’re to have an evolutionary future? And can this shed any light on why we find them so meaningful?
Listen to the next episode to find out.
Conscious Evolution is a podcast by Robert Cobbold.
Editing was done by Thomas Glasser, and Sound Design by Mark Pittam.
Peter Kroptokin was played by Andrei Zayats, and Viktor Frankl was played by actual Holocaust Survivor Werner Reich. You can hear more about his story by looking up his TED talk – how the magic of kindness helped me survive the holocaust.
I’d also like to give a special thank you to John Stewart, Carter Phipps, John Bunzl and Sarah Hill for speaking to me, and to Robbie MacInnes and Ant Adeane for all their support and guidance in the art of podcasts.
But in particular I’d like to say thank you to Afro Celt Sound System for letting me use their extraordinary music for the soundtrack, including the track that you’re listening to right now which is called Mojave from their album Anatomic, you can listen to that on Spotify.
To listen the other episodes and to find out more about the philosophy of Conscious Evolution, go to Conscious Evolution.co.uk