This View of Life

The economics profession includes many schools of thought–some that emphasize laissez faire, others that emphasize centralized planning, with many admixtures in between. David Colander, an acute observer of economics who is sometimes described as the profession’s court jester, helps me identify the economic schools of thought that best exemplify the Third Way. This episode has an accompanying article and is the Third Episode of This View of Life's new series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship". References from the Show: 12:00- Why aren't Economists as Important as Garbagemen? by David Colander 23:30- Chaos by James Gleick --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

Socialism and Capitalism will be among the hot words thrown around during the 2020 US presidential elections. Geoffrey Hodgson, a great scholar of economics and the social sciences, helps me explain how both forms of national governance fail in their pure forms but how they can be—and even have already been– blended together into the Third Way. This episode has an accompanying article and is the Third Episode of This View of Life's new series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship".   --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

In the late 19th century, a tiny group of intellectuals who called themselves Pragmatists were to have an outsized influence on the nation and the world. They were inspired by Darwin and included well-known figures such as William James and John Dewey. Trygve Throntveit, a distinguished historian of the period, helps me tell the story of how the Pragmatists discovered the Third Way. This episode has an accompanying article and is part of This View of Life's new series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship".   --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

Meet Toby Shannan--the son of hippy parents growing up in rural Canada, high school jock, college dropout, construction worker--and Chief Support Officer of Shopify, the world's second largest online retail platform. Toby and Shopify have always had a long-term and holistic mission to be part of a thriving ecosystem into the far future.  Now he is teaming up with scientists such as Jonathan Haidt and myself to help Shopify achieve its laudable goals and provide a model for other corporations.     Announcing the latest major TVOL series, Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship   Toby's "Ideas at Work" podcast: https://ideasatworkpodcast.com   EthicalSystems.org, an organization founded on the conviction that in the long run, good ethics is good business.   Prosocial, the first change method based on evolutionary science to enhance cooperation and collaboration for groups of all types and sizes.   Evonomics article, "Evolving the New Economy: Tim O’Reilly and David Sloan Wilson"   --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

TVOL's first podcast with Michele Gelfand explored an axis of cultural variation from "tight" (strong norms, strongly enforced) to "loose" (tolerant of individual differences). In this new podcast, we explore the distinctive blend of tightness and looseness needed to adapt to the pandemic.    Related Material Michele's book: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World Institutional and Cultural Factors Predicting Infection Rates and Mortality of COVID-19. (OSF pre-print). Contributors: Michele Gelfand, Joshua Conrad Jackson, Xinyue Pan, Dana Nau, Chi Yue Chiu   --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

Evolution education is often considered solely the domain of the biology classroom, with evolutionary explanations centered largely on genetic change over generations. In this TVOL Podcast, David Sloan Wilson talks with education researchers Susan Hanisch and Dustin Eirdosh about emerging approaches in evolution education that challenge this view and embrace an interdisciplinary conceptualization of evolutionary change more suitable to understanding the human condition. By drawing on perspectives in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Cultural Evolution Science, and Contextual Behavioral Science, Hanisch and Eirdosh have advanced a collection of teaching tools and materials that can be used across subject areas in general education to help students understand the evolutionary change dynamics within our species, our communities, and ourselves. Discussing core conceptual challenges in current gene-centric evolution education provides a window into the opportunities created by focusing the human traits at the center of our everyday experience.  Bios Susan Hanisch and Dustin Eirdosh are the co-founders of the non-profit organization Global ESD (www.GlobalESD.org) and education researchers in the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Dustin and Susi work across the disciplines of education and human sciences to advance interdisciplinary teaching materials and teacher development supports to understand global sustainability issues through the lens of evolution and human behavior.  EEO Article: Can the science of Prosocial be a part of evolution education? Hanisch & Eirdosh Preprints: Conceptual clarification of evolution as an interdisciplinary science Educational potential of teaching evolution as an interdisciplinary science Causal mapping as a teaching tool for reflecting on causation in human evolution Other articles mentioned in the Podcast: Regardless of students' belief systems (creationist, theistic, non-theistic) students tend to view evolution has having negative personal and social implications.  Brem, S. K., Ranney, M., & Schindel, J. (2003). Perceived consequences of evolution: College students perceive negative personal and social impact in evolutionary theory.Science Education,87(2), 181-206. A biology teacher encourages students to "boo" other students for any reference to "need" in evolutionary explanations as opposed to helping students resolve the role of behavioral responses to need in evolutionary processes (see Hanisch & Eirdosh preprint: Causal mapping as a teaching tool for reflecting on causation in human evolution) Bravo, P., & Cofré, H. (2016). Developing biology teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge through learning study: the case of teaching human evolution. International Journal of Science Education,38(16), 2500-2527. -- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

Max Beilby and Mark van Vugt discuss the science of evolutionary mismatch how it can help us understand human behavior in modern novel environments such as the workplace. Mark van Vugt is a professor in Evolutionary and Organizational Psychology at VU Amsterdam and is also a research associate at the University of Oxford. His latest book is, "Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day (and What We Can Do About It)". Max Beilby is is a professional organizational psychologist as well as a member of the Human Behavior & Evolution Society and the Association for Business Psychology.   Both Mark and Max have written extensively for This View of Life Magazine and are members of TVOL's Business Action Group which is focused on understanding and improving business from an evolutionary perspective.   -- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book

In 1992, the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby predicted, "Just as one can now flip open Gray's Anatomy to any page and find an intricately detailed depiction of some part of our evolved species-typical morphology, we anticipate that in 50 or 100 years one will be able to pick up an equivalent reference work for psychology and find in it detailed information-processing descriptions of the multitude of evolved species-typical adaptations of the human mind...” Finding it unnecessary to wait until 2042 or 2092, Niruban Balachandran first proposed and published a classification table of human evolved psychological adaptations in 2011. He then teamed up with Daniel Glass in 2012 to co-found and co-publish a research paper announcing PsychTable.org, an open-science taxonomy devoted to uncovering the richness and complexity of our evolved human behavior. In addition to these two peer-reviewed research papers, Niruban and Daniel have also written a This View of Life article to accompany this podcast episode. The PsychTable team is crowdfunding $10,000 in order to hire the highly experienced web designers and developers needed to create a robust and intuitive web interface. Interested TVOL readers can help support PsychTable by donating here.   --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book  

The idea that nature, left to itself, reaches some sort of harmonious balance is still widespread in the lay public and some public policy circles. "This View of Life" leads to a different conclusion; that "niceness" can evolve, but only when special conditions are met. Otherwise, evolution results in organisms that impose suffering on each other. David explores this theme for primate societies with the pre-eminent primatologist and evolutionary behavioral ecologist, Joan Silk.  --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book    

What is Dugnad? It is a uniquely Norwegian word that identifies an important aspect of its culture of cooperation. David Sloan Wilson talks with Carsta Simon and Hilde Mobekk on their recently published article titled Dugnad: A Fact and Narrative of Norwegian Prosocial Behavior, published in Perspectives on Behavior Science and available open access for a limited time period. Carsta and Hilde's study of Dugnad emerged from the Evolution Institute's Norway Project, which examines Norway as a case study of cultural evolution leading to a high quality of life at the national scale. A book length account of the Norway project titled Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond, is published by Routledge Press and is permanently open access.  Both the article and the book illustrate a distinctive approach that involves asking four questions about any particular product of evolution, whether genetic or cultural, concerning its function, history, mechanism, and development.   Carsta Simon is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Agder in southern Norway. Hilde Mobekk is a PhD fellow in Behavior Analysis at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University. Both are trained in Behavior Analysis, which makes them especially well qualified to comment on the "mechanism" and "development" questions concerning Dugnad as an enduring product of cultural evolution.   Other Related Materials (pdfs available upon request) "Why Norwegians Don't have Their Pigs in the Forest: Illuminating Nordic 'Co-Operation" - Carsta Simon [Open Access] "The ontogenetic evolution of verbal behavior" - Carsta Simon [Open Access] "Selection as a domain-general evolutionary process" - Carsta Simon and Dag O. Hessen "Group selection in behavioral evolution", Rachlin H --- Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution   Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook   Order the This View of Life book