“Origins of Human Cooperation” | Speaker: Professor Michael Tomasello [LSE]

“London School of Economics and Political Science

Origins of Human Cooperation

Public Lectures and Events

Origins of Human Cooperation

19 Nov 2020 | 1 Hour 4 Minutes

https://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=791f4140-9098-4b8e-8381-845f36cac1a9

Speaker: Professor Michael Tomasello

Published on: 19 Nov 2020

Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience and actions, whereas our nearest primate relatives do not.

Michael Tomasello, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, is one of the world’s leading researchers on social learning, communication and language in human children and great apes.

Sandra Jovchelovitch is a social and clinical psychologist by training and her research focuses on human development under contextual adversity, the social psychology of public spheres, community development and the socio-cultural context of knowledge. Sandra is a Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychologyical and Behavioural Science.”

Agustín Fuentes — Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being [Science salon/Skeptic]

SCIENCE SALON # 144

Agustín Fuentes — Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being

Agustín Fuentes — Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being

Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? Fuentes employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief — the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea — is central to the human way of being in the world.

The premise of the book is that believing is our ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now in order to see and feel and know something — an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth — that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that “something” so that it becomes one’s reality. The point is that beliefs and belief systems permeate human neurobiologies, bodies, and ecologies, and structure and shape our daily lives, our societies, and the world around us. We are human, therefore we believe, and this book tells us how we came to be that way.

Shermer and Fuentes also discuss:

– what it means to “believe” something (belief in evolution or the Big Bang is different from belief in progressive taxes or affirmative action),
– evolution and how beliefs are formed…and why,
– evolution of awe, wonder, aesthetic sense, beauty, art, music, dance, etc. (adaptation or exaptation/spandrel?),
– evolution of spirituality, religion, belief in immortality,
– Were Neanderthals human in the “belief” sense?
– human niche and the evolution of symbolism/language,
– evolution of theory of mind,
– how to infer symbolic meaning from archaeological artifacts,
– components of belief: augmented cognition and neurobiology, intentionality, imagination, innovation, compassion and intensive reliance on others, meaning-making,
– dog domestication and human self-domestication,
– Göbekli Tepe and the underestimation of ancient peoples’ cognitive capacities,
– the development of property, accumulation of goods, inequality, and social hierarchy,
gender role specialization,
– monogamy and polyamory, gender and sex, and continuum vs. binary thinking,
– violence and warfare,
– political and economic systems of belief, and
– love as belief.

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger, lecturer, tweeter, and an explorer for National Geographic. Fuentes received the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Video: the science of morality – Dr. Liane Young [John Templeton Foundation]

“Video: the science of morality

Video: The Science of Morality

Right and wrong, good and evil — when viewing the world, our moral judgments often feel clear-cut and consistent. Research shows, however, that we’re willing to be more forgiving and flexible with those who are socially close to us, while applying sterner judgments to those who are far away. Why do we make these exceptions? And how can we broaden our sense of morality to be more fair to people outside of our tribes? Learn more about the science of morality in this interview with Dr. Liane Young, professor of psychology at Boston College. Young is the project co-leader with Fiery Cushman of the John Templeton Foundation-supported project on “Reasoning in moral thought and action,” which examines when, how, and why reason plays a role in morality, alongside other emotional and situational influences on our moral judgments.

This is the third video in our series of interviews produced by the independent media company Freethink. Watch the first episode here, which features Dr. Uri Maoz discussing the neuroscience of free will and its implications for human freedom. Then watch the second episode and explore the latest research in the science of forgiveness with Dr. Amrisha Vaish, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and leader of a project studying the development of forgiveness supported by the John Templeton Foundation.”

“É um disparate as pessoas convencerem-se de que a inteligência vem do cérebro” – António Damásio [Diário de Notícias]

“É um disparate as pessoas convencerem-se de que a inteligência vem do cérebro”

Vinte e seis anos após O Erro de Descartes, António Damásio tem um novo livro, em que nega a frase do evangelho “no início foi o verbo”. Sobre a pandemia, alerta: “O grande problema da velocidade a que se pode criar uma vacina é ter a garantia de que não se transformará num problema ainda maior.”

https://www.dn.pt/edicao-do-dia/05-dez-2020/e-um-disparate-as-pessoas-convencerem-se-de-que-a-inteligencia-vem-do-cerebro-13104356.html

***

Sentir & Saber – A Caminho da Consciência
António Damásio
Editora Temas e Debates
292 páginas

(…)

“Aliás, é mais fácil escrever muito do que pouco, porque o trabalho de redução é extremamente difícil”, acrescenta, rematando com a experiência de um colega que dizia:”Não tenho tempo para escrever tão curto.”

(…)

Se lhe perguntar qual é o legado de um trabalho de décadas, este livro é a resposta?

Existem vários aspetos no meu trabalho: o científico e o de pensamento, portanto dizer que este livro é o legado seria um exagero. É, muito especificamente, uma maneira de tratar assuntos que me apaixonam – problemas científicos e filosóficos – e uma tentativa de os expor sob uma forma mais clara. Por boa sorte, enquanto fui construindo o livro também tive a oportunidade de descobrir que algumas das soluções que tenho apresentado para certos problemas são, de facto, soluções novas e sob certos aspetos – digo eu e vários dos meus colegas – muito convincentes. Então, posso dizer que é ao mesmo tempo uma tentativa de pôr a claro e de uma forma mais direta temas importantes do meu trabalho e deixar claro que existem questões em bom caminho de serem resolvidas. Muito especificamente, no que respeita à consciência e aos sentimentos.

(…)

Aliás, com o tremendo sucesso do que hoje se chama a neurociência, a preocupação dominante tem sido o cérebro, propriamente dito. Questiono se o cérebro é capaz de resolver todos os problemas que existem em torno do que é a mente humana. Para perceber o que é a mente, necessita-se de entender o que se passa com o cérebro, mas, muito antes disso, compreender o que se passa com o corpo, vivo e inteligente. Diria que esta é a resposta completa à pergunta.

(…)

Pode parecer paradoxal, porque quando se pensa na inteligência artificial o que vem à ideia é que são criaturas absolutamente invulneráveis, feitas de aço e de plástico em vez da nossa pobre carne humana. À primeira vista pode parecer uma asneira introduzir vulnerabilidade numa coisa que é robusta, no entanto, só a introduzindo teremos a possibilidade de fazer qualquer coisa de mais rico em matéria das reações que esse “organismo” poderá tomar.

(…)

O que quero é mostrar, tanto quanto for possível, que as respostas que hoje estamos a dar podem ser diferentes mas o mesmo não se passa com as perguntas. Desde que temos mentes conscientes – uma mente consciente é a que tem sentimentos e se estes não existirem, provavelmente, não haveria consciência -, é importante termos a ideia de como o corpo está a funcionar e essa é a porta de entrada para as grandes perguntas humanas, aquelas que são as de sempre e desde que uma pessoa se lembra de que a vida tinha uma problemática extremamente complexa. Mas só desde que existem sistemas nervosos é que foi possível transformar essa problemática em consciente. É um quase paradoxo que, ao pensarmos no tempo da vida humana no planeta, apenas no último quarto desses quatro biliões de anos se deu a entrada dentro do sistema nervoso e que só nos últimos 200 milhões de anos é que, quando muito, há qualquer coisa que venha a parecer-se com aquilo que é o nosso sistema nervoso. A conclusão é que grande parte do tempo dos seres vivos sobre o nosso planeta tem sido vivida de uma forma inconsciente.

O que quer dizer?

Que havia vida complexa e evolução, mas ninguém sabia que existia. É espantoso pensar que isto só começou a ser conhecido no momento em que começámos a ter consciência do que estava a acontecer no nosso corpo e com a nossa vida. Depois, à medida que os sistemas nervosos evoluíram, conseguiu-se ter um conhecimento através da observação e das ciências do que é a vida em seres vivos como nós. É uma história muito complexa, mas uma vez que chegámos à idade da consciência e da razão, foi possível fazer as perguntas e as pessoas puderam olhar umas para as outras, olhar para a história delas próprias, e então fazer essas interrogações e questionar o sentido da existência.

Alerta para o facto de uma teoria que ignore o sistema nervoso para justificar a mente e a consciência estar condenada ao fracasso, mas, diz, uma teoria que dependa exclusivamente do sistema nervoso está também condenada a falhar. Enquanto cientista, como é viver num equilíbrio investigatório?

Sem dúvida que essa é uma das ideias principais deste livro – como já era no anterior,
A Estranha Ordem das Coisas -, a de que a vida começa antes do cérebro. Neste momento é muito comum que estejamos constantemente a ser bombardeados com novos factos e ideias sobre o cérebro, daí que as pessoas acabem por se convencer de que aquilo que é a sua inteligência vem do cérebro. Isso é um disparate e é completamente errado dizer que a inteligência vem do cérebro. A nossa inteligência é complementada pelo cérebro! Porque a nossa inteligência começou há biliões de anos com a própria vida e tem vindo a desenvolver-se com processos que antecedem o aparecimento dos sistemas nervosos. Em inglês, tenho no livro uma frase que é assim: “Brains are an after thought of nature”, traduzindo: “Os cérebros são o último pensamento da natureza.” O que quer dizer que a natureza pode funcionar perfeitamente sem cérebros, contudo o que os cérebros lhe trouxeram foi um melhor funcionamento. Portanto, a razão por que temos cérebros – e mente e consciência e raciocínio – é porque nos ajuda a viver melhor. Ajuda a vida e permite a vida com a grande complexidade como é a dos seres humanos. Não esquecer que, antes de existir essa grande complexidade, já havia vida, inteligência e funcionamento.

Daí que dê como título ao primeiro capítulo “No início não foi o verbo”, contrariando a abertura do Evangelho de João?

Claro, só podia ser assim. A frase clássica é bíblica e tem que ver com a maneira como os seres humanos de há alguns milhares de anos descrevem a sua própria situação. Evidentemente, eles confrontavam-se com a sua realidade e a palavra, como forma de descrever fenómenos diversos, era o modo principal. Hoje, sabemos que temos milhões de anos de evolução, que começaram e mantiveram-se com a inteligência – mas não havia nem cérebro, nem mente, nem capacidade verbal; portanto, é muito importante afirmar que no início não foi o verbo. Trata-se de uma leitura perfeitamente aceitável, mas devemos entendê-la como uma leitura parcial, que é a sua realidade.

(…)

Choca o leitor, e vamos à página 3, quando compara o ser humano aos seres unicelulares ; que nos diferenciamos por ter uma inteligência baseada no raciocínio e na criatividade mas somos iguais no aspeto de uma competência não explícita como acontece com as bactérias. Somos assim tão iguais?

Somos iguais e não somos. Nessa característica somos, mas depois existem todas as outras que vieram juntar-se a essa e que nos dão uma capacidade extraordinária. Não podemos fazer a comparação entre o ser humano e uma bactéria, pois um tem inteligência, capacidade de criação e uma autonomia completamente diferentes, mas ao mesmo tempo devemos reconhecer que a humilde bactéria tem vida, tem de a regular e confronta-se com o problema de se alimentar, de se defender do excesso de frio ou de calor… Uma vez que há vida, existe uma complexidade e uma novidade extraordinárias e é isso que se encontra na bactéria e em nós. Não é que os seres humanos devam ficar ofendidos por serem comparados a uma bactéria, é um pouco ao contrário, pois devemos reconhecer que aquilo que a bactéria tem é um aspeto fundamental para o que nós somos e deve ser respeitada se não quisermos que dê cabo de nós. Seria bom que pudéssemos fazer isso com os vírus, o que não é neste momento de todo possível como se vê com a pandemia com que nos confrontamos.”

“Is the Earth an organism?” – By W. Ford Doolittle [Aeon]

“Is the Earth an organism?

The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree

W Ford Doolittle
is professor in biochemistry and molecular biology at Dalhousie University in Canada.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics

Many of us, scientists included, harbour contradictory intuitions about Mother Nature. We can see that ecosystems often have an inherent ability to self-stabilise, and know that we wouldn’t be here if the planet hadn’t maintained conditions suitable for life for the 4 billion years since its first appearance. One reaction is to claim that some Earth-wide equilibrium, though fragile, does exist, and reflects the fact that species have evolved to cooperate with one another. Another is to say that the first response is nonsense: organisms are ‘selfish’, and evolution isn’t cooperative but rather a brutish Darwinian competition that selects individual organisms based on their ability to survive and reproduce. The primordial balancing act performed by our biosphere, if it exists at all, is more or less a lucky accident.

The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting that the biosphere is an ‘active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis’. Sometimes they went pretty far with this line of reasoning: Lovelock even ventured that algal mats have evolved so as to control global temperature, while Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be a ‘partly finished project for an evaporation lagoon’, whose purpose was to control oceanic salinity.

The notion that the Earth itself is a living system captured the imagination of New Age enthusiasts, who deified Gaia as the Earth Goddess. But it has received rough treatment at the hands of evolutionary biologists like me, and is generally scorned by most scientific Darwinists. Most of them are still negative about Gaia: viewing many Earthly features as biological products might well have been extraordinarily fruitful, generating much good science, but Earth is nothing like an evolved organism. Algal mats and coral reefs are just not ‘adaptations’ that enhance Earth’s ‘fitness’ in the same way that eyes and wings contribute to the fitness of birds. Darwinian natural selection doesn’t work that way.

I’ve got a confession though: I’ve warmed to Gaia over the years. I was an early and vociferous objector to Lovelock and Margulis’s theory, but these days I’ve begun to suspect that they might have had a point. So I’ve spent the past five years trying to ‘Darwinise Gaia’ – to see widespread cooperation as a result of competition occurring at some higher (even planetary) level. I can see a few paths by which a Darwinian might accept the idea that the planet as a whole could boast evolved, biosphere-level adaptations, selected by nature for their stability-promoting functions.

This is not exactly a recanting of views, but it’s certainly a marked departure from how I thought 40 years ago. Darwinising Gaia seems important not just to me personally, but because it would offer a satisfyingly deep theoretical basis for efforts to maintain a habitable planet – and a way to reflect on contemporary environmental crises beyond applying a simple label such as ‘Gaia’s revenge’, with its anthropocentric and theistic implications.

(…)

Back in 1979, when Lovelock’s first popular book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, came out, the wider field of evolutionary biology was becoming a very reductionist discipline. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had been published three years earlier, and it promoted a hardcore gene-centrism insisting that we look at genes as the fundamental units of selection – that is, the thing upon which natural selection operates. His claim was that genes were the reproducing entities par excellence, because they are the only things that always replicate and produce enduring lineages. Replication here means making fairly exact one-to-one copies, as genes (and asexual organisms such as bacteria) do. Reproduction, though, is a more inclusive and forgiving term – it’s what we humans and other sexual species do, when we make offspring that resemble both parents, but each only imperfectly. Still, this sloppy process exhibits heritable variation in fitness, and so supports evolution by natural selection.

In recent decades, many theorists have come to understand that there can be reproducing or even replicating entities evolving by natural selection at several levels of the biological hierarchy – not just in the domains of replicating genes and bacteria, or even sexual creatures such as ourselves. They have come to embrace something called multilevel selection theory: the idea that life can be represented as a hierarchy of entities nested together in larger entities, like Russian dolls. As the philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘genes, cells, social groups and species can all, in principle, enter into change of this kind’.

(…)

But I want something more than this – a mechanism by which selection at the level of the biosphere would be likely to produce stability. Such a mechanism – a Darwinian way of making beneficial ‘accidents’ into the equivalent of heritable variations that could evolve via natural selection – will be possible, I think. The work is far from complete, and much needs to be aligned or contrasted with emerging work in evolutionary theory. But I’d hope that Darwin, were he alive today, wouldn’t balk at the non-traditional steps I’m about to take.

First, we’d need to accept differential persistence – mere survival – as a legitimate form or mechanism of natural selection.

(…)

Put another way, what selection really accomplishes is an increase in the ratio of selected entities to total entities in a population. And, actually, this can be achieved in two ways. First is differential reproduction discussed above, generally taken to be the be-all-and-end-all of evolution. Selected entities, by out-reproducing their competitors, ultimately become the only entities in a population (what biologists call achieving fixation). In effect, the top number in the ratio increases. But the phenomenon of differential persistence, in which selected entities achieve fixation through the death, extinction or disappearance of their competitors, could also work, and has been unfairly neglected.

(…)

Let’s transpose this argument to Gaia. Gaia (the biological part of it, at least) is nothing more than the single clade of all living things descended from life’s last universal common ancestor (LUCA)…

(…)

Beyond differential persistence, there’s a second way that we might Darwinise Gaia. One element in this approach is multilevel selection theory sketched above, now illustrated in the figure below. This figure shows the four levels at which natural selection is effective, plus two more. It embraces the idea that natural selection can operate at different levels, sometimes even several at once, as long as there is reproduction among entities at that level. Dawkins’s own thought-experiment in The Selfish Gene offers an appropriate anchoring example, in which he shows how genes can be individually selfish but still get along to add up to a unified, competitive organism, also ‘selfish’.

(…)

 So to Darwinise Gaia we also need what’s called the replicator/interactor framework, developed by the philosopher David Hull. Hull characterised the actors in natural selection as follows:

replicator: an entity that passes on its structure directly in replication.

interactor: an entity that directly interacts as a cohesive whole with its environment in such a way that replication is differential …

selection: a process in which the differential extinction and proliferation of interactors cause the differential perpetuation of the replicators that produced them.

Taking this back to Gaia, what we’d need to do is sometimes substitute ‘reproducer’ for ‘replicator’, and also ‘persistence’ for ‘reproduction’ on occasion.

(…)

The replicator/interactor idea can in fact be used to explain a range of fascinating biological phenomena. Humans and their gut microbiota are now often said to be holobionts, multispecies entities that interact as ‘cohesive wholes’ with their environment. This interaction is now claimed to have nutritional, developmental, immunological and even psychiatric dimensions. So, to the extent that well-nourished, fully developed and healthy individual humans are likely to survive longer and leave more progeny, these human-bacteria holobionts will ‘go extinct’ less often and ‘proliferate’ (if only by recurrence) more prolifically. In so doing, they will serve to ‘perpetuate’ the lower-level reproducers and replicators (individual Homo sapiens and many millions of bacterial individuals of the thousands of species in a healthy gut) that make up a holobiont. Beneficial strains or species of bacteria are thus differentially perpetuated through the success of a human-microbial holobiont, interacting with its environment.

(…)

There’s a third and final step that I’d hope Charles Darwin might be willing to take, when assessing whether or not the Earth is an evolving entity: a theory known as ‘It’s the song, not the singers’ (ITSNTS), as recently elaborated with the philosopher Andrew Inkpen. Songs such as ‘Happy Birthday’ recur (are re-produced, with a hyphen) because people sing them. The singers aren’t the same, but the song arguably is (or at least it exhibits only incremental, ‘evolutionary’ change). It’s perpetuated (‘persists’) only through periodic performances. Meme theory encourages us to believe that songs that are more singable, and ‘mutations’ of existing songs that make them so, could evolve by natural selection.

(…)

For some dispersed metabolic processes, such as the global nitrogen cycle, these species need not be in the same place or function at the same time, or even be related to each other. The existence of these processes encourages the evolution of (‘recruits’) species that are capable of making a living by performing individual steps: because there’s a song, there are singers.

(…)

Songs don’t themselves reproduce, but they are re-produced and do evolve. The current nitrogen cycle is not that of the Archaean Earth, but it can be seen as its continuation, insofar as earlier cycles stimulated the evolution of species that then evolved to perform later versions.

(…)

A problem here might lie in the implication that processes or patterns of interaction, which are arguably not material things, can cause the evolution of species, which are.
(…)

Beyond the benefit to science, ‘Darwinising Gaia’ would also have some political benefits. It might encourage us to look at nature as a coherent whole, with an evolutionary trajectory that we can foster or deflect as we choose. After all, we are already doing that, whether we realise it or not. Certainly, it would be a relief to heal the rift between traditional Darwinian thinking and believers in the possibility of Gaia, though there’s still much work to do to cement and validate the theory. And we’ll never really know what Darwin might have accepted as ‘Darwinian’, had he lived another 138 years. I’m just hoping that he’d applaud these efforts to render Gaia acceptable within a selectionist framework, and that he wouldn’t think we’d stretched his grand theory past the breaking point.”

“Is free will an illusion?” By Uri Maoz [Big Think; John Templeton Foundation]

“Is free will an illusion?

Philosophers have been asking the question for hundreds of years. Now neuroscientists are joining the quest to find out.

DR. URI MAOZ
Dr. Uri Maoz is an assistant professor of computational neuroscience at Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. His research lies at the intersection of volition, decision-making, and moral choice. Dr. Maoz also directs Neurophilosophy of Free Will, an international project comprising 17 neuroscientists and philosophers, who aim to understand how the brain enables conscious control of human decisions and actions.

02 December, 2020

The debate over whether or not humans have free will is centuries old and ongoing. While studies have confirmed that our brains perform many tasks without conscious effort, there remains the question of how much we control and when it matters.
According to Dr. Uri Maoz, it comes down to what your definition of free will is and to learning more about how we make decisions versus when it is ok for our brain to subconsciously control our actions and movements.
“If we understand the interplay between conscious and unconscious,” says Maoz, “it might help us realize what we can control and what we can’t.”