Ep 125: Understanding Evolution

**Amit Varma** (0:00)
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Gentle readers, welcome to Everything is Everything. I'm Amit, this is my good friend Ajay, and today we are going to talk biology. Just a few moments ago, Mr. Ajay Shah was telling me about a young female mosquito which got knocked up and came looking for mammalian proteins, but unfortunately collided with my jean pants. So nothing much is happening there. So let me tell you what this episode is about. In our course Life Lessons, you know, we have a couple of webinars dedicated to the great phrase from ancient Greek philosophers, know thyself. And one of the ways in which we say know thyself is understand your hardwiring, understand the way you are, understand the way evolution shaped you, and also understand the way culture shaped you, which is a separate webinar entirely. And both of us have often within this show referred to natural selection and how it shapes us as human beings, how we can mitigate or amplify some of its effects. For example, in our episode on economic fallacies, we spoke about how those fallacies are natural. They were useful adaptations that emerged in the prehistoric times when we lived in small tribes as hunter-gatherers. And that's why they are there, but they are not fit for modern times. And this is a subject for different reasons. Both of us care about deeply. It shaped the way we look at the world, it shaped the way we look at ourselves. Ajay, tell me about your journey in discovering natural selection.

**Ajay Shah** (1:51)
I was a Ph.D. student of economics. And in those years, I just started getting more and more interested in biology and evolution. I remember a turning point was an article by Paul Ewald in The Scientific American on the evolution of virulence. We're going to talk a little bit about it later today, but it just blew my mind and it was just a moment that you can't unsee. I also thought that there are some deep commonalities between the economist's way of thinking about understanding the forces through which a system evolves versus the evolutionary biologist's way of thinking. And so, I got really fascinated and I geeked out and I read books, I started reading papers and so on. And it's been with me ever since that it's just a way to look at the world. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolutionary theory as the universal acid that tears down a whole bunch of our simple preconceptions and takes us one level deeper on understanding the dynamics of what is going on in the working of the world. And I want to link to our favorite words, spontaneous order. When we say spontaneous order, oftentimes it's something mystical that we're not quite describing. It's a self-organizing system. Millions of people choose and all that. Well, some systems that evolved through spontaneous order are shaped by simple natural laws and the theory of evolution comes in.

**Amit Varma** (3:20)
There's a great book by Matt Ridley called The Evolution of Everything. And I did an episode with Matt on Just Right Book, where he describes exactly the same thing. It is the same bottom-up process of spontaneous order, no central planner, no grand designer, which is behind not just natural selection and therefore our emergence as human beings, but also languages, also society, also economies. And in a sense, that is a common link between what I consider the two great intellectual awakenings of my life. Like one of those intellectual awakenings was understanding how market works and the importance of freedom. I was fairly left-leaning in college. I would carry marks to classes and all that. And it seemed to explain everything about the world until I began to look at the world more closely. And obviously, then reading Friedman, Hayek and all the great thinkers, Bastia sort of made me appreciate the world in a different light. And similarly, my journey into natural selection actually came pretty late. I was into my adulthood by then, and I remember reading Steven Pinker's great book, The Blank Slate. And that book is a masterpiece, and it was also my window into evolutionary psychology and into natural selection as well. After that, I read everything by Richard Dawkins, everything by Daniel Dennett, everything by Robert Wright, all the thinkers who were writing about that subject at the time. So it's a subject that is deeply close to me. And although I was never a believer in God as such, nevertheless, my atheism came into a comfort zone when I understood natural selection. For the same reasons that Douglas Adams articulated so well, when speaking about natural selection, he said, The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem frankly silly beside it. I take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. And, you know, you just, you can't unsee what you see once you understand natural selection and once you truly get it. And I think it's the same thing about understanding markets and spontaneous order and the positive someness of the world.