206. Nichola Raihani — The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2021

⏱️ 127 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin? A biologist by training, Nichola Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior — teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice — most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive and so successful.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show.
0:07.0	Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show.
0:10.0	I'm your host Michael Sherman.
0:11.0	My guest today is Nicola Rayhani. Her new book is The Social
0:16.3	Instinct, how cooperation shaped the world. Nicola Rahaney is the Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor in Evolution and
0:27.8	Behavior at University College London, where she leads the Social Evolution and Behavior Lab.
0:35.0	An Evolutionary Biologist by Training, she won the 2018 Philip Leverholm Prize in
0:40.8	Psychology for her research achievements and was elected fellow of the Royal Society of
0:46.1	Biology.
0:47.1	She's also worked in the BBC Science Development Team and appeared on several podcasts and
0:52.1	radio shows including the BBC Radio 4's
0:55.3	hacking the unconscious and thought cages. She lives in London with her family
1:00.9	where we were able to peel off two hours of a super
1:06.0	interesting conversation despite the fact that her kids are downstairs. We're all
1:10.1	doing this under COVID pandemic conditions still so we talk about that how well
1:15.0	we've done in this pandemic in terms of cooperation she's not that encouraged by
1:21.3	how the fact is we're still dealing with this now not that could have
1:27.0	encouraged by how the fact is we're still dealing with this now a year and a half later.
1:27.0	Anyway, so we talk about the origins of cooperation, how that could have possibly come
1:31.2	about in a selfish gene model
1:33.6	and show the logic behind cooperation
1:35.7	all the way back to the origins of life,
	...

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