Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:03
thank you Shane um and uh thanks for inviting me and and you know uh thanks to Brenda and Julie and Lori and and sort of the gcsc in general
00:00:15
um uh my time today has already been a lot of fun it's really great to be here um uh and and to see all of you how many could you raise your hand if you're graduate students I just said okay uh that's wonderful um and uh you're in you're in a nice
00:00:28
place uh uh being able to being able to you you already know this of course that's why you're here but um but this kind of mixing uh that you're able to do as a result of the gcsc and what it does uh is a special thing um and I think uh
00:00:42
I hope that some of what I uh say today backs that up um so I'm here to give you what I call an evolutionary approach to sustainability science and um uh but my real hope is
00:00:57
that most of what I do today is largely redundant with what you already do and what you already know um and I think that if it is I think that that's successful but I want to make new connections uh between the
00:01:11
things you already know uh and that's that's how um I know it will be useful so um first I guess I'd like to start at sort of the place where uh almost everyone
00:01:24
starts the thing you teach undergraduates in the sustainability class the thing that I teach my undergraduates of course is we have the tragedy of the commons um It's a Wonderful paper and what I think what's so nice about uh
00:01:39
hardin's concept of the tragedy of the commons is not so much that it's Commons per se but that it's a cooperation problem that he described I think very clearly that
00:01:50
environmental degradation is often a social dilemma is often a cooperation problem and be it a Commons or not the regulatory structure or the the social
00:02:04
structure can vary uh but cooperation problems are are important however of course he said his famous line this paper is uh you know solution is mutual coercion mutually agreed upon and um and so that's uh
00:02:19
institutions right so the solution uh is institutions and of course we have other people who have said that uh very clearly and with a lot of uh uh wonderful evidence to back it up Eleanor Ostrom being at the top of that list
00:02:33
um and uh and her work on common pool resources and um uh contains this fantastic list of um uh sort of key design elements that have
00:02:46
emerged from studying small scale common pool resource communities and um and uh these are these are factors that tend to make those communities more successful in managing those resources sustainably
00:02:57
so so that's great so um so if we know the solution then aren't we done um uh and uh and just to broaden this you know there have been people who say that that these don't just apply to
00:03:11
small-scale Common pool resource institutions but these apply to social ecological systems in general um and so so aren't we done then um and uh what I'd like to propose is
00:03:25
that uh knowing perhaps knowing the answer knowing that the end point uh isn't enough to be done and we need to know how to get there um and so how do we get to the solution
00:03:37
and what I'd like to propose is that um uh Lynn Ostrom also suggested in fact you'll see this in her work a lot um something special about the way that we can get there and that is that
00:03:50
and so I want to explain uh what I mean by this um uh why an evolutionary approach and we'll get to what is an evolutionary approach as well um why an evolutionary approach to
00:04:04
sustainability science the first thing that I'm going to say and I hope that this is at least a little bit controversial although maybe it won't be um if it won't be then you're getting a really good education if it is the then
00:04:15
you're in the right place Phil and that is that there is no theory of sustainability um so you know in the last uh you know a decade or two we've seen the emergence of sustainability science
00:04:29
um which is wonderful and much overdue um has been something that's been building for many decades of course um uh but I would argue uh and I'm a sustainability scientist that it's not a science yet um and it's not a science in my mind
00:04:42
because we do not do yet the full cycle of science that is to say we don't make predictions for new systems test those predictions uh in in new conditions and then bring those back and
00:04:57
change the body of theory that allows us to make those predictions in the first place we haven't achieved that yet which is not a problem but it is something that we need to do and doing it will allow us to achieve sustainable systems
00:05:09
better so what are we missing um uh well um the way that I like to ask the question is what does this what does a theory of
00:05:25
sustainability uh need what what would it do what question would it ask uh in my mind what the question it would ask is how does sustainability happen um and there are a lot of different ways
00:05:39
of sort of uh expanding on that and and what I like to say is um how do sustainable institutions uh and behaviors and societies how do they emerge and under what conditions do they
00:05:52
persist and when you think about it that way it's sort of well of course actually you're right we don't have that theory yet um which is kind of shocking but uh I think that there's something that
00:06:04
evolutionary tools can add to this and I hope to sort of explain some of that to you today evolutionary tools are a natural fit for this kind of question because
00:06:15
they are good at looking at questions of emergence and Persistence of particular uh traits or systems in addition it offers sort of three sort of simple benefits
00:06:28
the first is that an evolutionary approach within the social sciences and I want to I want to well an evolutionary approach is is non-disciplinary in the social sciences even in the biological
00:06:40
sciences it is sort of um kind of generalized and it's integrative in in that in that sense second one is that people and we saw
00:06:53
this with Lynn Ostrom already use evolutionary thinking uh implicitly or maybe not evolutionary thinking but evolutionary terminology and Concepts implicitly we'll see how the situation evolves
00:07:07
right um uh people talk a lot in social ecological systems literature about adaptive capacity what is the Adaptive capacity right of a given system
00:07:19
climate change adaptation and and mitigation and what I'd like to propose is that if we can do a better job defining what we mean by adaptation in these cases defining the mechanisms that
00:07:32
make that adaptation precisely possible then we can do a better job of understanding those phenomena and in increasing them in the ways that that are useful and then I also will argue
00:07:45
that there is some applied value that stands to be put to use here so um I sort of plan to take you through this approach um
00:07:57
and highlight some of the major outcomes as we go but just before we do to finish sort of uh characterizing where I think um an evolutionary sort of social science fits um I think it's it's nice to talk a
00:08:09
little bit about disciplinary silos and I've been doing that um with a handful of folks already today uh graduate students and faculty alike um uh nobody likes sort of uh random walls and of course that is something that that
00:08:22
happens um uh with um social sciences in general and uh science uh uh you know in Academia is that we have
00:08:34
epistemologies and methodologies that accumulate in our disciplines and that stops us from being able to communicate with each other um and of course that's a problem um uh but it is uh nothing short of
00:08:48
um shocking and disgraceful that in 2016 we take undergraduates and we separate them into different cohorts and we teach them different things about human behavior and then if you take those
00:09:00
those undergraduates and you bring them back into the room at the end of their college experience and you ask them to what the fundamental components of human behavior are they will disagree uh you
00:09:14
know you ask them what the fundamental components of the single most studied species in the history of the known universe is they disagree right it's one species right and yet we have all of these different social sciences um studying different parts of it and
00:09:27
all of that research is good it's just it's not the whole picture um and so uh so um I like to sort of think and of course this is um easy for me to say being an
00:09:39
evolutionary social scientist that Evolution's in the middle um but um there are different ways of characterizing what the middle is but I like to say and I didn't put it all at the traditional social sciences up there
00:09:50
but uh that there's a middle place where we can take the evolutionary history that has influenced humans as a
00:10:04
species that has evolved behavior and cognition um seriously like we do with other species that also allows us to pay attention to the way our societies and
00:10:16
cultures change and evolve and also takes those and then uses them to understand population Dynamics and so I think that is something that that lies ahead of us and that um uh
00:10:29
that that we can explore with particular benefit to understanding sustainability so okay that says 44 minutes because I started this presentation a long time ago I'm gonna have to use a different
00:10:46
timer I'm gonna go 14 minutes that was terrifying 44 minutes and I'm on slide six yeah these people must be falling asleep uh um uh so uh so here are uh from the
00:11:01
paper which I'll give you a link to at the end um uh three I think very simple uh components of of human behavior that I just want to include in in a model of human behavior that I will be touching
00:11:14
on this is not some list this is not some ex and all be-all uh list but these are components of human behavior that are that are important um and that I hope to weave into to the
00:11:28
story I'm about to tell you so what is an evolutionary approach then well the way that um I like to sort of say this is that uh there are sort of three really important
00:11:45
components to understanding how Evolution can help us think about sustainability challenges um the first is that human culture evolves the second is that
00:11:57
cooperation which is so often entailed in the challenges that we Face also itself evolves and and that groups matter and they matter in both of those two things and in very important in
00:12:10
particular ways and so and before I go any further I'd like to say that I consider myself someone who delves into the evolutionary
00:12:23
literature in the social sciences and and in biology to a certain extent in Game Theory and then tries to export those to the world of environmental social science sustainability science and what have you this is this is um so
00:12:37
this is a package of of those ideas and and insights for you so it's a long history of um the scholarship on the idea that human culture is a thing which evolves on its
00:12:50
own in a different way than uh genetic systems um and and yet interact uh with genetic systems um uh we have Alan uh Rogers here in the audience and he's one of the
00:13:04
pioneers of uh this thinking in some of the mathematical models that have been very important in that uh in that study um however when you say to most most social scientists today if you say well
00:13:17
culture evolves what they'll say is well yes that's um that's a nice metaphor um but it but it's a metaphor and let's not take that too far because there are problems with that
00:13:28
but what I will tell you today and hope to sort of show you is that it's it's not just a metaphor but that the process of cultural change
00:13:40
does include an actual process of evolution which is to say a process of equivalent to a natural selection type process and that's not really a revolution
00:13:52
uh to anyone uh this is sort of actually a quite common sense but it's important to know because the Dynamics can then be studied with a bunch of tools that have been built for the purpose and give us
00:14:04
an extra leverage so um Darwin had sort of three basic uh principles for understanding uh What uh Evolution has consisted of and the first
00:14:16
one of is that that is variation so humans have cultural traits okay so these these can be Norms uh Behavior language
00:14:28
beliefs uh Traditions Etc right style of dress and they vary right between people for all sorts of reasons secondly of course those cultural traits
00:14:42
can also be selected upon so what does that mean that means that that means that they have different outcomes and those outcomes matter right so some of these robots these individuals have built will do better than some of the other ones right
00:14:56
um so selection is when some of the cultural traits fare better right is it better to have an umbrella or not in this situation and finally also that those traits can
00:15:11
be transmitted between individuals in the genetic sense when we think about genetic Evolution that's genetic transmission right inheritance in the cultural sense it's we call it transmission
00:15:23
and it happens in lots of ways through social learning and imitation here we have someone who is uh it's a very posed photo but this person is perhaps her
00:15:36
mother and you can see that and if she is her mother then or she's inherited her biological information right her genes but in addition here she's something else is going on she's now
00:15:48
inheriting she's now strategically copying uh the behaviors of her mother which is a different it's a whole different sort of layer of transmission that's happening on top okay
00:16:01
so so then we have these three components and so what Darwin said is the components of uh if you have variation that is selected upon and then transmitted those are the requirements
00:16:12
for adaptation okay and so we can say that cultural Evolution cultural evolution is is darwinian okay uh and this is something that that uh
00:16:25
that has been uh argued about for a long time and uh there's a wonderful Rich literature to read about um and I'm going to now Breeze through uh some of the differences the point however is that
00:16:40
um the study of the evolution of culture is that culture is evolves in a very different way of course than genetic systems and um the variation genetic systems tends to be random whereas variation in cultural
00:16:53
Evolution tends often very much to be guided you know just randomly make a change in in your behavior and and start not using one finger for something um right you you make changes that make
00:17:05
sense um uh selection uh it tends to be strategic and transmission of course as I've already mentioned here a little bit is also not just directly parent to child
00:17:17
right but you can learn from anyone you can imitate anyone in fact you do you imitate your peers right so your cultural parents some of your cultural parents are in this room right your cultural parents can be younger than you some of mine certainly are
00:17:31
um uh and so you can inherit cultural information from from all over there are also a large number of different types apologies for this slide
00:17:43
processes of sort of cultural micro Evolution if you will one of them that is super unique is here Conformity another frequency
00:17:55
dependent biases so uh traditional ways I might say I might imitate people who look successful I can imitate an individual but with Conformity with culture because it's not a a physical physical transfer of
00:18:09
information between individuals I can look at the entire room and I can simply do the thing that is done most commonly that's not possible at all in a biological system so a lot of ways in
00:18:21
which it's very different and one of one of the most important ones is is here of course in a biological phylogenies and inheritance species stay
00:18:34
separate after they gain reproductive isolation then they diverge for the rest of their history there's some uh special and important sort of caveats to that but really that's the way it mostly is
00:18:47
whereas with culture because we can imitate and because we can infer the goals and intents of the people who we are imitating there are no hard and fast species
00:18:59
boundaries you can take individuals from one side of the world and put them in another part of the world and they can learn from that in fact it makes perfect sense to think that if we ever meet Aliens we'll be able to do the same thing with them we'll be able to imitate
00:19:12
them and they'll be able to update us for the same reason so so culture as an evolutionary mechanism is why we're so successful so this is a
00:19:25
terrible picture but it's a great paper where they compare the speed of cultural Evolution with that of genetic Evolution uh on equal footing and uh cultural Evolution cultural
00:19:38
change measured in this way in In Darwin's which is a very awkward uh unit but um uh is faster which is of course no surprise
00:19:51
right because that's why we're here doing what we're doing right and so if you look at the last um you know 50 000 years of human history you know we've spread
00:20:03
across the globe to all of the uh habitable environments uh on Earth and um as we have done that we've adapted to those environments and how have we adapted have we adapted biologically to
00:20:16
those environments but mostly right we've adapted culturally to these environments we've developed You Know Rich tradition Systems and Technology and Tool kits and
00:20:30
skill sets right and and traditional ecological knowledge that allows us to make use of the resources and the affordances of that environment right um and importantly an individual these
00:20:42
are this so all of it's looking at all of this here this is not uh something that an individual could create if you put an individual in this environment the individual over the course of its entire lifetime could not
00:20:55
create kayaks and um all of these complex tools and all of this sophisticated sewing and and uh you know eyeglasses just a whole bit so instead
00:21:07
individuals inherit a large amount of adaptive cultural information about their environment about how to survive in that environment from the population they live in and so so we have cultural
00:21:20
uh inheritance just in the same way in a very similar way that we have genetic inheritance and of course we see the similar thing happening in very different parts of the of the world
00:21:33
everything that I just said here is true except uh it's totally different right um different language a different environment different skills different technology different institutions all of
00:21:45
them adapted to their environment so culture is the dominant mode of human adaptation to the environment in the last 10 50 000 years and of course presently
00:21:57
and so if it is then what does that mean for uh sustainability right um of course it means a lot of things the first thing I think it means is that um
00:22:09
if this is an evolutionary process this process of evolving societies um uh that it means that there's there's no suggestion uh there's no promise that what we've do what we're doing
00:22:20
um uh is sustainable right species go extinct all the time even without a major Extinction there's a background rate of Extinction um and so and so that happens right we could become dependent
00:22:34
on on a fuel source which is an ecological trap and we have um and uh so then what is left for us is to figure
00:22:46
out what differentiates the cases that succeed from the cases that fail and and why and how do we avoid uh Easter Island
00:22:58
right how do we avoid that so how does sustainable societies arise and under what conditions do they persist so that's where I plan to take us a
00:23:11
little bit and so that is the evolution of culture now we're going to talk about the evolution of cooperation and then I hope to get to a couple of examples and um
00:23:24
move ahead so so cooperation is a wonderful construct in in Game Theory and uh one of the sort of most basic and
00:23:37
really useful tools in social sciences the prisoners dilemma raise your hand as a graduate students if you've been exposed to the prisoner's dilemma in class
00:23:49
okay good okay so handful okay raise your hand if you have not been exposed to it in class sorry ever since okay wonderful okay so um the prisoner's dilemma is very simple you have two players here a player and player B and they both have two options they can
00:24:02
either cooperate or defect and um and the the first number is the payoff to player a and the second number is the payoff to player B so um and uh so
00:24:15
what we have here is a very simple situation where two people make two uh decisions and and the outcomes uh depend on how those decisions interact importantly the
00:24:27
key component of the prisoner's dilemma I'd recommend you read up on it is very fun um is that what's best for the individual is the exact opposite of
00:24:39
what's best for the group okay so it's best for the individual to defect and get a payoff of three while the other individual is cooperating and gets nothing okay whereas what's best for the group The the sum is the sum of the two
00:24:53
they both cooperate of course what happens is if you're both cooperating and then I'm going to say well I defect and if I defect then we're over here and if you know that I'm defecting then there's no way that you want a zero so
00:25:05
you're going to defect and we're both going to end up down here and that means we're all in the tragedy of the commons okay that's what the tragedy of the commons is it's a social dilemma like the prisoner's dilemma
00:25:17
there are other types of strategic interactions that we can think about that are very relevant as well this is a coordination game and in a coordination game such as the Stag hunt here they have these great names in Game Theory
00:25:29
um uh in the Stag hunt what's best for the individual is also what's best for the group so coordinating uh
00:25:42
is something that everyone wants to do and all we have to do is figure out how to do it and then get it done and then everyone does better and the group does better so these two things these are two fundamental types of social situation
00:25:54
that of course you've experienced hundreds of times in your lives they exist all over the place and um uh and they're very useful to think about and of course it's much much harder to solve uh prisoners dilemmas to solve social
00:26:06
dilemmas than it is to solve uh coordination problems however we solve both humans solve both because we come across them all the time and after we solve a
00:26:19
hard prisoner's dilemma one of the things we do is we often turned into a coordination problem and then we can wrap it up nicely and be done with it uh how does how does how do we do that though how do we solve a coordination
00:26:32
how do we solve cooperation problems um there are a number of sort of well-known mechanisms in particular if kin selection is one of them I'm not
00:26:45
going to bother to explain this reciprocity though is a way to do this when uh we can reciprocate then it's easy to cooperate whether we're doing it
00:26:56
individually or whether we're doing it sort of across the whole group um sorry reciprocity can solve cooperation problems and so can uh what's called
00:27:09
group selection here that is to say when groups compete so I'm going to explain that in more detail the fundamental outcome though of all of this work is that the key thing you need
00:27:22
to have cooperation succeed and persist is continued affiliation between those who are cooperating if you have a bunch of people who are cooperating but they're surrounded by a
00:27:35
sea of people who are non-cooperators they will eventually spend all their resources cooperating with the other ones and expire or what have you right so the key is making sure that
00:27:46
Cooperators get back part of what they have given in so now here's how this works so let's have a population of of individuals some
00:27:58
of whom are cooperative leads to more uh selfish individuals right this should be this should be pretty obvious however what's important of
00:28:32
course is what reproduces a successful group is what spreads uh then uh selection between groups what does that select for well it selects for successful groups filled
00:28:54
with Cooperative individuals so when groups compete individuals within groups individuals in the successful groups are Cooperative right of course this is no surprise because we
00:29:07
live in a a country where Sports is very common and we're very used to individuals being individualistic at the cost to the group we live with this every day but group selection of this short of
00:29:22
this sort has happened on both our genetic inheritance and our cultural inheritance um and so uh human genetics are likely
00:29:33
to have been uh dramatically influenced by events like this um and this has led to a number of things one of one of course is it's led to us wanting to avoid war although we don't
00:29:47
do that all the time of course because we're good at it because we're selected to be good at it we're selected to beat the other team right so how do we do that we cooperate with
00:29:59
each other and so in general a whole package of human behaviors termed pro-sociality is a way to think about how individuals support a
00:30:12
larger social system that they're a part of so uh so it's reasonable to think therefore that we have a bunch of biologically
00:30:24
inherited psychological mechanisms or adaptations that support this group functional Behavior um and this allows us to do things like
00:30:37
solve these Collective action problems and solve these uh cooperation problems when we come across them of course there are problems of different different difficulties however and um we can't solve them all
00:30:50
so uh what what are some of these things um uh if you talk to folks who have studied this more than I have they will say things like uh human protestality includes our sort of docility
00:31:04
we have specialized means of communication which is to say language we are a Cooperative breeders we are conformist we have sort of reputation that we care about
00:31:16
we display social markers we display social identity um uh and so for the remainder of this talk I want to take this background uh that that sort of humans are evolved for
00:31:28
group life uh as a given and move on because I'm not here to talk about genetic Evolution I'm here to talk about cultural Evolution and uh so let's finish this off then because in reality we don't just have individuals competing
00:31:42
or groups competing in reality we have both individuals and groups competing at the same time so the question is then how does that work what we call that and just in terms of framework is a
00:31:55
multi-level selection so we have individual selection competition between individuals group selection competition between groups and multi-level selection when both is happening at the same time when both happen at the same time
00:32:06
the outcome depends on the balance of both effects so is selection at the level of the group stronger or a selection at the level of the individual stronger that will determine how many
00:32:19
Cooperative individuals we have or how many selfish individuals we have okay this is all in a social dilemma okay so now Pop Quiz
00:32:32
um for uh those who have been paying attention um will this uh same Dynamic happen do the levels of individual and group selection conflict in a coordination
00:32:46
game remember coordination game is different no in a coordination game the what's best for the individual is also best for the group
00:33:00
and so uh the selection will favor the same thing hero favor coordination here and favor for coordination here and so therefore a favorite in general right and so social dilemmas are particularly
00:33:12
defined by this level of selection conflict okay and I propose to you that many of the hardest sustainability challenges that we Face are defined by
00:33:24
that level of selection Conflict by that social dilemma okay so um there there are some very neat ways to think about this though um and uh one of them is that we have
00:33:39
these group favor group functional traits and these could be cooperative traits for instance and we can think about and when and people have and in fact Alan Rogers has thought about what
00:33:50
are the conditions under which group functional traits emerge or cooperative traits emerge and um here is one uh a very nice formulation uh which Alan developed in 1990 I
00:34:04
believe and we have sort of three conditions here um and for those of you who are uh in biology um uh or population genetics or conservation biology will uh recognize
00:34:16
FST and I won't bother to explain it um but the idea here is that uh when group benefit the benefit of the behavior to the group is higher or the cost to the individual is lower or the
00:34:28
difference between groups in terms of this trait is higher it's more likely to evolve okay The Cooperative trade is more likely to well this is kind of common sense when you think about it but it's very important
00:34:41
and it can be used okay um and at the level of uh culture we have a number of ways in which this happens
00:34:52
okay so uh groups do come and go right um and they come and go in at lots of different ways and in lots of different sorts of Human Social organization um sometimes you know and so so uh the
00:35:07
selection of cultural groups cultural group selection can happen when groups you know go extinct at different rates depending on how well they coordinate with each other or cooperate or how
00:35:20
successful they are can actually matter right because the successful ones might proliferate more when groups themselves imitate so other
00:35:31
groups differentially right so if IBM has the awesome business model and everyone imitates IBM then everyone becomes like IBM and whatever that business model was or whatever those traits are spread similarly here
00:35:45
we can look at differential migration of individuals between groups because they can bring with them those traits or they can also adopt those traits when they arrive so again none of none of this is really
00:36:00
surprising right we see it every day Cooperative Sports teams that are Cooperative beat teams that are poorly organized
00:36:11
teams that have a bunch of Divas uh fail uh in comparison to a team that has a well-organized offense in defense right and that share the ball right um teams that have well-organized
00:36:24
strategies uh also wins so this is a way so the the selection of cultural groups cultural group selection is a way uh for us to understand the emergence of
00:36:37
Institutions okay um and features that enhance it include things that tend oops that tend to make differences between groups stronger
00:36:50
and I'm going to keep going because I don't want to waste too much time here so what are the implications of this just sort of summarize this section humans sport biological adaptations that
00:37:04
make us very effective in groups dramatically effective so effective that we've taken over the planet okay this includes cooperating and that's important for sustainability
00:37:18
second the levels of selection conflict a social dilemma the prisoner's dilemma gives us a tool because we've known about social dilemmas for a long time we've known
00:37:31
about sort of selection for a long time but we can use the idea that the level of selection matters and if we can understand what the level of selection is then we can use that as a tool when we are trying to understand
00:37:45
uh social dilemmas that are problems in sustainability and of course as we've seen with Warfare with sports with capitalist competition with all sorts of things with
00:37:58
competition between departments in a university um uh Etc group competition tends to accelerate uh cooperation of individuals within the group again everybody knows this at a basic
00:38:12
level and therefore the uh competition can enhance institutional Evolution so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just try to apply that little tool that I gave you to two
00:38:24
examples um and and then I'll sort of give you a little bit of a summary of some current work that's going on and uh and then hopefully we'll have some time for some questions I call this thing cultural multi-level
00:38:39
selection framework for sustainability analysis is a lot of words this is just one way of doing it and there are a lot of wonderful things that we can learn from the study The evolutionary study of human behavior that we can use in in
00:38:51
sustainability this is just one packaging of a few of them so as an example though um this is an example of a village that I studied in in South India in Tamil Nadu called manavanur and they have two
00:39:05
really important natural resource systems that they use the first one is this beautiful terraced uh irrigation system that goes all over the place and requires an unbelievably complex irrigation Network
00:39:17
made out of um you know mud and dirt surrounding this Village and and that takes a whole lot of uh coordination and it also takes a good amount of cooperation second of course you see these little
00:39:31
piles of of sticks near their houses these are our winter fuel wood and that's collected from a forest nearby so that Forest is actually shared by a
00:39:43
number of villages whereas the stream uh for the water that goes into these Terrace Fields is just within the village so as a result we can we can look at
00:39:55
this and we can use a multi-level evolutionary framework to understand what's likely to happen here so uh if we start by thinking about the
00:40:08
Dilemma that's posed by using that Forest okay using that shared Forest The Dilemma is at the level of the village okay that is to say it's I'm sorry it's between Villages multiple Villages share
00:40:21
that forest and so if my Village decides well we're going to conserve that for us it doesn't matter because the other Villages haven't decided that and we're going to lose the forest anyway
00:40:33
so which is to say that when the Dilemma is at the level of the village and selection is at the level of individuals so what does that mean that means that
00:40:45
if it is a stronger so if individuals are making the choice based on how it influences them right in which in this case I can tell you very most certainly they are
00:40:58
then is this going to be are we going to be conserving the forest what is your prediction here no because instead we will be selecting for people who harvest the forest because harvesting is good for
00:41:12
individuals but the problem needs to be solved at the Village level and so therefore selection is going to favor non-cooperation in that example however in the example of the irrigation system
00:41:24
it's different right here in the irrigation system selection uh is at the level of the village I would argue which is to say that when a village does a good job
00:41:36
organizing uh its irrigation system and cooperating to do the rather large amount of work it takes to maintain it and operate it the village does well as a whole and
00:41:51
oh my goodness uh for okay yep yep right The Dilemma is between individuals within that Village okay
00:42:04
well no you go clean the canal no I'm not going to clean the canal you clean the canal no I don't want to build a new Divergent diversion ditch well if they can figure that out if they can solve the social dilemma and solve the
00:42:16
coordination problem embedded in building this irrigation system uh then their Village will do well right and so if Villages are competing on some level perhaps for economic output perhaps for
00:42:28
new immigrants what have you or perhaps other Villages are imitating each other um then then cooperation May spread within that Village and it may be solved
00:42:42
and it could actually even spread to other villages so um so as a result we uh would sort of predict that selection between Villages
00:42:54
here is going to favor cooperation in this irrigation system and I can tell you in that particular Village there's a lot of things that people don't cooperate on um but irrigation is one of them
00:43:06
okay another example here and then I'd like to to wrap up and show you some of the work that that myself and others are doing in this um is from Bhutan uh where uh my
00:43:18
colleague Jeremy Brooks has studied conservation behavior um uh and uh Bhutan is a is a really interesting example and some of you may know of it because of its um gross national happiness uh index
00:43:31
um uh you know it's sort of famous for people like us right um and uh I have friends who've been there you can't go you can't actually go in it but you can go to a lookout that's over here and you get to just wow
00:43:42
um so uh the story with the Bhutan so how did that come to be right so and the story that we use uh to explain this is uh related I'm not going to use the same Graphics but you'll be able to see the
00:43:55
same logic so um uh in the last uh let's say 150 years Bhutan has even lessened that Bhutan has
00:44:06
watched as its peer Nations go basically extinct right as pure Nations other Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms get gobbled up by India and China you know so Tibet and Nepal uh and sikim
00:44:20
um you know Nepal gets overrun and gets taken by India and Tibet gets taken by China and so um Bhutan faces a very real existential threat from its two giant neighbors right so what is it going to do right so
00:44:33
this is selection at the level of the nation right nations are getting taken out right it's scared right um what does it do so to begin with I'm going to rewind the clock first of all
00:44:46
there's a high level of ethnic diversity in Bhutan um uh traditionally especially there are four major ethnic groups but then there are also a lot of smaller ones and um
00:44:57
and so and Bhutan wasn't unified until oh goodness I'd have to ask Jeremy um okay well if someone knows the date Bhutan was unified that would be great but it was unified under a Theocratic ruler
00:45:12
um and um what we argue is that after that unification as the um as the peer
00:45:24
Nations uh started to um uh disappear uh the king of Bhutan and it's interesting that there was a king in terms of the analysis uh decided to
00:45:39
try to save what he could of Bhutan by focusing on the cultural and environmental Heritage of the country and so there was an official
00:45:51
kind of dress an official language it was zonka the environment the environment was sort of praised and connected to the Buddhist
00:46:01
way of life the Eightfold Path and um and so this religious and cultural identity also influenced uh policy at the national
00:46:15
level and environmental policy and interestingly so this unification happened uh I would argue in part because of this existential threat at the level of the nation that allowed
00:46:27
these diverse ethnic groups to come together now granted they didn't necessarily come together sort of peacefully and of course there also are downsides to nationalism including uh uh
00:46:38
you know the poor treatment of ethnic nepales in the area but um another interesting prediction arises from this the structure of Bhutan has
00:46:51
recently changed it's now no longer a kingdom as you may know it's a democracy the king handed it over and said let's make this democracy so it was a pretty impressive thing to do but
00:47:05
as a result the country is not politically unified anymore uh and so what would we predict happens then because it's not politically unified we have different people expressing
00:47:18
different groups expressing different concepts of what the country needs to do what the country's priority should be right what the country's policy should be and what should be prioritized so what should be prioritized some say
00:47:31
Economic Development some say cultural and religious Heritage so as a result my understanding is that currently the gross national happiness index is going to be um
00:47:44
if it hasn't been sort of phased out it's going to be de-prioritized and you know economic development is gaining more attraction which is something that we would expect
00:47:58
when we're thinking of cooperation within and between groups okay but it's not something that I personally would have seen if I hadn't been okay so what are the kinds of research questions we can ask with this framework
00:48:10
we can ask um you know when does cultural selection at the group level accelerate the emergence of behaviors and institutions of sustainable
00:48:21
Resource Management we can ask you know when do we find evidence of this kind of pattern right and what sort of systems and what sort of levels the national level at the municipal level and and
00:48:34
um importantly we can also say what kind of uh interventions can we design the answer for the interventions is in the paper um so uh and there are more examples
00:48:45
that are fun in fun places like Fiji uh in the paper um so uh take a look at the paper the the interventions are also are also there and I'm excited to to have people think about them and so I'll give you
00:48:59
now just a sort of brief overview of some of the work that we're doing uh uh on this and and then have some some time for questions so um there's a theoretical working group
00:49:11
that um I'm happy to be a part of uh lead along with Carolina safrazinska and Marco Johnson and um uh where we're building a bunch of different models that look at different
00:49:23
um cultural uh different sort of evolutionary processes that happen in human culture and connecting them to different sort of sustainability challenges this is everything from doing something like looking at the way social
00:49:36
identity you know whether you're green uh uh influences uh product diffusion in a Marketplace to looking at multiple multi-level selection and the emergence
00:49:48
of Marine fishing quotas in Fisheries all at this sort of theoretical level um an important tool that we use in this is something called the price equation which we use to distinguish uh
00:50:03
statistically the components of evolution between individual level and group level selection so we can ask the question when we have enough data or we can ask the question and theoretically of course we always have enough data
00:50:16
um how much selection is happening at the level of the group and how much a selection is happening at the level of the individual it's very useful uh these are this is my agent-based model for those who I've spoken to
00:50:32
somebody about agent-based modeling this is really fun and we did uh we we distinguish uh between um group level selection and individual level selection um one of the things that we see with this group with this uh complex
00:50:44
simulation that I can't explain uh in any sort of uh decent um uh way now is that when I enable the possibility for there to be groups that form on their own uh group selection uh
00:50:58
increases group selection is the is the force that drives the drives the adoption of sustainable consumption it's not individual selection individual
00:51:09
selection does not uh Drive sustainable consumption for the obvious reasons right um and it's never good for an individual to restrain themselves they can always just take more at the cost of the group
00:51:22
so then we have a number of sort of empirical projects the empirical projects now and this is a different group led by Jeremy Brooks at Ohio State um and myself and um and the uh what we do here is to
00:51:37
try to build out research designs um we have one paper looking at sort of uh how we and this is this is not what the paper looks like because this is sort of like a list of everything we want all of the data in the world and
00:51:50
then we can test it um but how do you build a realistic research designs to test some of these questions this is a hard question uh but we're making some progress with it and
00:52:02
we have a number of case study projects one that I've written with an anthropologist Sam Haynes About Blueberries in Maine a project I'm working on with Jim Atcheson about Lobster territorial Lobster management
00:52:15
it's one of those classic cases that looks uh to be very ripe for a multi-level selection explanation and some related things again Bhutan uh the diffusion of sustainable viticulture
00:52:28
practices in the California wine industry um and another one that I'm excited about which is reinterpreting uh Stephen lansing's uh for those of you who know this is a wonderful case in Bali about
00:52:41
the emergence of sustainable irrigation practices and I think it may be a process of a cultural group selection happening and so we're going to be taking a look at that we're looking at trying to develop
00:52:53
statistical ways to test for things this is along with Adrian Bell a test for empirical signatures of group structure so if you have a population of individuals that is adopting some trait and this is your sustainability trait
00:53:06
and are they adopting it or not well um you know if they're just a bunch of individuals the adoption curve might look like this whereas if they're adopting it in groups the adoption curve might look different right and if they're adopting it in groups that signals something it signals
00:53:20
that groups are important and it might be a Cooperative trade or it might be some kind of trait that requires group level adoption for it to really work right a coordinating trade so this is a really important way to distinguish here
00:53:31
and to find out what the role of groups are um and uh uh so in my local food research I'm uh two little bits here one is the first
00:53:46
one is that I have an undergraduate honors student that I was so very glad to capture as a master's student is absolutely terrific who did an experimental economics uh uh game an
00:53:59
economic experiment at a local food co-op and a grocery store in the same town they're about a mile apart mostly the same people shop at both of them although obviously
00:54:12
there's some differences I just measured cooperation using a simple game economic experiment called The Dictator game and their differences and the question is are people
00:54:24
cooperating more in the food co-op because there is a different organizational environment or is it because Cooperative people sort of have assorted themselves to go there we don't know I imagine of course in
00:54:37
reality it's a bit of both um and so but that's amazing um and and these are tools and methods that we can use to measure it another one uh particularly on the applied side
00:54:49
uh uh David Sloan Wilson at the at SUNY Binghamton um has developed this uh web-based system which I'll be using with some of my participating groups in the local
00:55:02
food work this is a tool that is used to facilitate groups learning uh some of the research some of Austin principles about how to manage effective groups
00:55:17
so that they can just achieve whatever it is that they are looking to achieve this could be religious groups this could be local food buying clubs this could be you name it sports teams this could be it's anything for how do we make our group work more effectively
00:55:29
together and so it's an Outreach tool in a sense it's a self-help tool so that's interesting and we're going to be testing it networking is also important we do some
00:55:40
of that um uh so in summary culture and societies really do evolve and and that's important
00:55:52
uh and it's the main mode that we have used to adapt to the environment in the last 50 000 years um and that's a really significant thing for sustainability
00:56:06
um we but and this is a silver lining we come pre-adapted with uh capacities to make groups function and here we have people who are making groups function right now right
00:56:19
um who are making it happen we're good at this and in addition another Silver Lining competition between groups can be used to enhance
00:56:33
Cooperative Behavior within groups and of course there are downsides to all of that too and part of the downside as we see with things like climate change is that sometimes we're not competing with any
00:56:46
other group there's no other planet that we're competing with to see who has the best atmosphere right um and and and and and if we were then you know then maybe we'd all get together and say let's beat those
00:56:59
martians we can get a better atmosphere than that we do already have a better atmosphere and that's the problem we feel no reason uh to compete um so uh anyway uh but the point is here
00:57:12
that uh it's hard and um and it takes it it takes a lot of work and that's why we're trying to sort of uh reach out to anyone who's interested in in doing these things
00:57:26
um and uh sort of build groups who who see ways that they can apply some of these tools in their work or see things that they can contribute to this um and so so I do think I do I'm serious about this you know we need your help
00:57:39
because I'm serious about the sustainability problem uh and um and that's there we go that's it thank you very much I left negative one minute for questions please
00:58:07
and then and then over there um yes sure yes yes sure does your research consider that right
00:58:48
uh so so um you know the projects that I'm working on don't um but but there is a lot of really good uh research and thinking about that no
00:59:00
it's a really good research in economics about corruption and how corruption Works uh and uh when it's maintained I don't think everything that's done uh everything uh we're not done with that
00:59:13
though um and more needs to be done but you're right you know it's true and part of the problem is when we solve Cooperative dilemmas and then we create institutions around them then they're no longer Cooperative dilemmas and the interesting
00:59:25
thing I find in the in the local food world is that people are excited it feels good to cooperate and when they do they feel like they're part of a community right they gain value from that sort of directly and then when it
00:59:38
becomes an institution so so you build it out right and eventually it becomes so big you need rules right and you need boundaries and you need people to you need role specialization you need tasks and you need schedules and then it's not
00:59:51
this sort of friendly Cooperative community that we once had right it's something else it's an institution right and you don't need cooperation for it because we have punishment and we're going to kick you out if you don't do it it's it's not a
01:00:02
Cooperative system anymore it's a it's a system right it's an institution and so but that's a natural process right that happens again and again and again all the time we start something we start by cooperating and then we build an institution to solve it the institution
01:00:15
solves it and now it's not that thing anymore um and so but that whole process is part of the sort of larger part you know this is how institutions evolve institutions emerge and you know they survive and
01:00:28
they persist and sometimes they die um and so uh and sometimes they die when they don't have ways to control corruption um for instance that doesn't mean that all corrupt societies die
01:00:42
though somebody else back here somewhere yeah foreign that's right that's a good question perhaps you'd like to work on that I mean that's the answer so so you know
01:01:59
I'm just trying to bring sort of some of the key insights from you know these literatures evolution of cooperation the evolution of culture to the sustainability world and there are countless ways that this plugs in with lots of really good research that's
01:02:12
already been done in economics in political science in geography and sociology you know in all of the social sciences not to mention the fact that of course evolutionary things are very well understood in the biological and
01:02:25
biophysical world as well so um you know so most of it hasn't been done so we need someone to do it yeah anything else Sarah and you need to be able to Define an
01:02:45
environment or a resource that they're interacting with with it seems to me hard in the modern Global world very so um question mark my colleague Adrian
01:02:58
Bell uh would say in the ideal world if you had the data what you would do is now he's trying to take off so that that's him right there uh uh I would say that
01:03:10
if in in the right situations where you have you have the data you allow the data to tell you what the groups are rather than saying well there are these groups I'm just going to draw these boundaries
01:03:23
but of course sometimes that's what you have to do sometimes you say well we just have municipalities and we're just gonna say the people in the municipalities and that's it and and then that makes perfectly good sense in a lot of cases yeah but I agree it gets really messy
01:03:35
and and there are groups that overlaps groups yes but in fact this is just the one that happens to be like that all of the rest of the villages in this region are like complicated sharing of systems and streams and yeah
01:03:51
right and so we don't have a simple way to deal with that um and of course the groups that matter change over time right so so maybe Villages you know sort of fade away and irrigation you know networks become the
01:04:05
thing that really matters and where where even marital disputes get solved uh in the future and so you don't know when when a certain sort of institutional instructor is going to fade away and so we don't I don't have any sort of sense about how to how to
01:04:18
know how to do that but so so we're starting at the basic level of just sort of saying well if we can identify groups and particularly if we can identify groups of groups right then we have two or three levels then we can think okay
01:04:30
is is this a social dilemma you know what is the sustainability trait that's under uh that's of interest and where is the strongest level of selection where does it where does the rubber really meet the road
01:04:44
are individuals making the decision in order to survive or in order to you know put their kids in the right school or in order to get the job they want or are groups making the decision and
01:04:57
that's yeah background I'm an engineer raised by biology oh cool I think very simplified understanding of genetics but you mentioned the issue on the
01:05:19
variation side so we know that it's random and versus non-random and social situations but it seems to me that the inheritance would be the bigger issue because inheritance in a biological situation is
01:05:31
completely non-optional and that's right voice over it that's right right where completely optional and we do get the advantage of being able to look and see if that works for them before we adopt it right
01:05:58
hurdles you run into like a completely different problem and something that you actually have decision oh yeah yeah yeah well um it is a completely different process
01:06:12
um you know it's still darwinian in that there is still variation the variation is still transmitted within the population uh between individuals right albeit by a different route and and that that variation matters right and and and
01:06:24
selection occurs so so darwinian in in that sense right that's all Darwin said it's variation selection inheritance check check check there's a lot of other things that matter right and so so the Strategic imitation is a huge deal
01:06:39
um the fact that we can that we can imitate um successful people only is a huge deal so is it different yes it makes it way faster for instance um yeah it's a very different process
01:06:51
like you say um but just you know on that um we of course all you know genetic Evolution and cultural Evolution um or genes and culture of course co-volve too right and so um we're at
01:07:04
the stage now where uh it's likely that if it hasn't happened already and in some lab that we don't know about perhaps in China or elsewhere it will happen the next you know 10 or 20 years that you know we're going to be having uh genetically modified humans
01:07:17
um we already have genetically modified plants uh what is genetic genetic modification uh you know it's when you take a gene from here and you put it in this plant over there well what is that um it's it's
01:07:30
um how do you do that thing where you'd go here we go what is that it's this right so it's taking what used to be a biological system which is to say the
01:07:46
environment right and it's making it a cultural system so so we have you know we have potatoes with fish genes in them or is that what it is no it's Tomatoes or fish genes right so they don't freeze
01:07:58
that's now a cultural product it has evolved culturally right um so yeah it's um very different
End of transcript