How Evolution Shaped Our Societies - Professor Nicholas Christakis - #085

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Howdy, friends. This episode of the Modern Wisdom Podcast is brought to you by audible.com. Now, those of you who've been listening to us for a while will know that we are massive fans of Audible. It's a great way to consume extra content when you'd usually be sat twiddling your thumbs in an airport or in traffic. You can sign up to Audible for free for 30 days. You will get one free audiobook of your choice from the world's largest selection of audiobooks, and you can cancel anytime within the 30 days. And if you do, you still get to keep the book. So my advice is if you do not have an Audible subscription, follow the link in the show notes below and try it out. I promise that you will not regret it. And even if you do, you can get a book for free from Amazon. So sweet. Onto today's guest, Professor Nicholas Christakis from Yale University had one of my favorite episodes of Joe Rogan's podcast so far this year. And I was super excited to get him on Modern Wisdom. We're talking about the evolutionary basis for society, why we're not lying to each other or killing each other on sight all the time, how come evolution appears to have biased towards us living in groups instead of on our own, how we can tell each other's faces apart and why we even have different looking faces at all, amongst an awful lot of other interesting stuff. It's super cool to be talking about evolution from this societal angle, as opposed to the individual ones. I really enjoyed today's episode and I hope that you do too. Please welcome Professor Nicholas Christakis.
I'm joined by Yale professor, author, and incredibly wise human, Nicholas Christakis. Professor Christakis, welcome to the show.

**Nicholas Christakis** (1:59)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
I'm very excited to sit down with you. I really enjoyed you on Joe Rogan about six weeks ago, fell in love with the content that you guys put out, and I've been looking forward to speaking with you ever since. So what are we gonna learn about today?

**Nicholas Christakis** (2:15)
Well, I think the topic that I've been thinking about lately is human nature, and the part of human nature that interests me is not so much that part that we express within ourselves. So for example, you could be spiritual within yourself, or you could be risk-averse within yourself, or you could have wanderlust within yourself. These are qualities that human beings the world over might or might not express and that have been shaped by our evolution and by natural selection. The parts that I'm interested in are the parts of our human nature that we express between ourselves. For example, do we love each other? Do we befriend each other? Do we cooperate with each other? Do we teach each other things? These are things that we also are naturally inclined to do, and those are parts of our nature that we express between ourselves. The reason I think these are important is that for too long in my view, scientists and people on the street, the citizenry have been overly concerned with what I would regard to be the dark side of our nature, our propensity to violence and tribalism and lying and selfishness. But the bright side I think has been denied the attention it deserves, because equally we are prone to all those things I mentioned, to love and kindness and friendship and so forth. In fact, I would argue that those forces were necessarily more powerful than the evil forces.

**Chris Williamson** (3:43)
If they weren't, we wouldn't have made it very far.

**Nicholas Christakis** (3:45)
Yeah, well, that well, yes, but more to the point, we wouldn't be living socially. If every time I came near you, you killed me, or gave me false, useless information, or took advantage of me in some way, I would be better off living as a solitary animal.
So it must be the case that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs, otherwise we wouldn't be living socially. And so that's what I've been interested or thinking about lately. How and why, how and why did our evolution not just shape the structure and function of our bodies, you know, how our kidneys work, our pancreas works, not just our muscles work, not just shape the structure and function of our minds, you know, how we think, how we cope with adversity, how we, you know, how we, our personalities, for example, but how as well as the structure and function of our societies, how did we come to live socially the way we do? Is it the case that the way we live, the societies we make, the world over, actually have been guided by our long evolutionary past? And the answer is yes.