Evolution is not just a description of how we got here.

David Sloan Wilson says it can also be a road map, a toolkit for elevating how we live together and shape our future.

He's an evolutionary biologist and an atheist who admires what religions do right in human societies.

And he's applying his knowledge to urban renewal in an American city.

He has fascinating insight into why people behave in disorderly ways when they're in a disorderly place.

But he also explains why living in a wealthy neighborhood can make you a less caring person.

And he tells us about a successful experiment in school reform that doesn't begin with curricula or student self-esteem.

It starts with what we know about environments that help human beings behave pro-socialy at their best and for the good of the whole.

It's very much for me a matter of managing the cultural evolutionary process in order to basically stack the deck in favor of pro-sociality.

How can we make it so that pro-sociality wins the Darwinian contest?

How can you get a population of 50,000 people to function adaptively? That's quite the challenge. And not many cities do it well.

Evolving a city, I'm Chris to tip it and this is on being.

I spoke with David Sloan Wilson in 2012. He is Suni Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in Upstate New York.

He first came to the attention of many with his book Darwin's Cathedral where he analyzed religions as lottable examples of human group behavior.

This inspired him to wonder how evolutionary biology might apply what it knows to real world real-time problems.

He describes where that question took him in his book called The Neighborhood Project using evolution to improve my city one block at a time.

Here's how David Sloan Wilson reflects on his formation as a human being and a scientist in those pages.

I am a scientist who began my life as the son of a novelist. My father Sloan Wilson was certainly known in his own place and time with novels such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit that were said to define his generation.

I did experience a torrent of words from my father as he tried to make sense of the world around him.

For me, science is a medium for listening and reflecting on the human condition much like religion and literature.

I would like to start. I've deciphered what I can from your writing about your upbringing.

I wonder was there any kind of religious or spiritual background to your childhood?

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