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What happens when human beings evolved for small, reciprocal tribal communities but now live inside enormous, abstract, highly complex symbolic systems?

In this conversation, we explore the PSH and its proposed evolutionary explanation for how modern institutions, incentives, and information systems may select for certain behavioral strategies—including instrumental, manipulative, and psychopathic traits.

The discussion connects evolutionary theory, behavioral game theory, neuroscience, psychology, systems thinking, institutional design, and the problem of cooperation in modern society.

Greg's Substack

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis book

Topics discussed

How diverse life experiences can lead to interdisciplinary thinking

The PSH as an evolutionary hypothesis rather than a theory of clinical psychopathy

Climate research, societal collapse, and evidence-based analysis

The evolutionary mismatch between ancestral tribal environments and modern symbolic systems

Natural selection, behavioral selection, and evolutionary game theory

Why cooperation was stable in small, repeated-interaction communities

Reciprocity, altruism, cheating, exploitation, and defection

The transition from tribal communities to cities, institutions, and abstract systems

How debt, credentials, mortgages, corporations, religions, and other institutions mediate survival

Why anonymity and abstraction can weaken reciprocity

How information becomes gated, controlled, and strategically valuable

Whether behaviors that were maladaptive in tribal settings can become adaptive in modern institutions

How successful actors can rewrite the rules of the systems they benefit from

Institutional mirroring and behavioral architecture

Psychopathy as a computational or instrumental behavioral architecture

The distinction between psychopathy as a clinical condition and psychopathy as a philosophical or evolutionary model

Neuroscience, heritability, and trait-level research on psychopathy

The target-autonomy problem

Coalition formation, social modeling, and predictability

Parasitism and manipulation at global scale

Whether modern symbolic environments can be redesigned

Moving from pessimism and doomerism toward practical optimism

People discussed

William D. Hamilton

Robert Axelrod

Robert L. Trivers

Martin A. Nowak

Christopher Boehm

Robert D. Hare

Christopher J. Patrick

James Blair

Kent Kiehl

David Graeber

Noam Chomsky

Edward S. Herman

Books and works mentioned

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work — Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media — Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Research on evolutionary game theory, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, psychopathy, and institutional behavior

Research mentioned

Hamilton, W. D. — “The Evolution of Cooperation”

Trivers, R. L. — “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism”

Nowak, M. A. — “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation”

Boehm, C. and colleagues — “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”

Rahman, T., Zorumski, C. F., and Meloy, J. R. — “ARCH: A Neuroevolutionary Framework for Behavioral Execution”

Robert D. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist–Revised

Christopher Patrick’s triarchic model of psychopathy

Key concepts

Evolutionary mismatch: The possibility that traits and strategies shaped in ancestral environments may function differently in modern environments.

Symbolic systems: Abstract systems—such as money, law, institutions, credentials, debt, corporations, and ideologies—that organize behavior and access to resources.

Behavioral architecture: A system describing how an individual processes information, evaluates risk and reward, generates strategies, and takes action.

Reciprocal altruism: Cooperation based on repeated interactions and the expectation that benefits may be returned.

Institutional mirroring: The idea that institutions may reproduce or preserve the behavioral strategies that succeed within them.

Target-autonomy problem: The difficulty of maintaining individual autonomy when behavior, information, and resources are controlled by larger systems.

Important clarification

The conversation uses “psychopathy” in more than one sense. At points, it refers to the clinical and psychological literature on psychopathy; at other points, it refers to an instrumental behavioral architecture or philosophical model. These uses should not automatically be treated as equivalent to a formal clinical diagnosis.

The PSH and related claims discussed in this episode are presented as hypotheses and interpretations connecting several fields of research. They should not be understood as established consensus across evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, or sociology.

In this short biweekly monologue, I examine how humans decide what is true—and whether modern science is the only reliable way of knowing.

Science is an extraordinary tool, but it can be misunderstood, misused, or treated as more definitive than the evidence allows. This episode explores the limits of reductionist science, the assumptions built into statistics and scientific methods, and the danger of mistaking incomplete evidence for complete knowledge.

From Einstein’s work to the knowledge systems of our ancestors, we consider alternative explanations, pre-scientific human survival, plant medicine, shamanic traditions, and the role that curiosity and speculation may have played in human evolution. The goal isn’t to reject science, but to recognize that we may need more than one tool to understand a complex world.

In this episode

• What I’m Just Sayin’ is and why it features short biweekly monologues
• How modern people determine what they know
• The limitations of reductionist science
• The difference between proof, truth, systems, evidence, and facts
• Why we often act as though we know more than we do
• The failure to recognize alternative explanations
• How statistics and assumptions shape scientific conclusions
• Why findings from the benchtop don’t always scale well to the real world
• What Einstein actually contributed to our understanding of reality
• Whether science is the only way of knowing
• How human beings survived and learned before modern science
• Why existence is only partial evidence of persistence
• How traditional knowledge may have contributed to human evolution
• Why limited evidence shouldn’t stop us from asking important questions
• How science has shaped—and sometimes skewed—our view of prehistory
• Shamans and plant medicine as examples of alternative knowledge systems
• Why we should give ourselves permission to speculate
• The importance of using every tool in the toolbox

Key takeaway

Science is one of humanity’s most valuable tools—but it may not be the only one. Understanding the world requires intellectual humility, openness to alternative explanations, and a willingness to ask meaningful questions even when the evidence is incomplete.

Dr. Andrew Schmookler's ideas arose during the counterculture movement, sparked by a spontaneous vision in Golden Gate Park. That spark evolved into The Parable of the Tribes—a body of work that has crystallized over the last 50 years.

The Core Idea: The Parable suggests that Modernity was inevitable for any organism in any universe, and that humans created a system that breaks all the rules of evolution. In this interview, Dr. Schmookler walks us through this vision and explains why this message is so urgent today.

Much like the pivotal movements of the late 60s—from the Clean Air and Water Acts to the first warnings of climate change and the fight for civil rights—Dr. Schmookler’s work remains partially understood and ahead of its time.

In this conversation, we explore:

• The origins and evolution of The Parable of the Tribes.
• The intersection of evolution, social structure, and human nature.
• A unique 80-year perspective on how much the world can change.
• A reason for true optimism regarding our future.

I am honored to share this interview and this important work. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Dr. Andrew Schmookler.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Read the first chapter of The Parable of the Tribes
• Explore Dr. Schmookler’s extensive body of work

The 10,000 Year Problem

Ten thousand years ago, humans lived differently. Before the era of kings, borders, and ownership, we were cooperative and deeply connected. We had enough.

Then, something changed.

This podcast is an inquiry into that change. Was it inevitable? What was lost? And most importantly: can we get any of it back?

I'm Chris Burcher. Through conversations with scientists, thinkers, and those doing the hard work of imagining a new way forward, I'm exploring who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. This isn't about romanticizing the past—it's about understanding it so we can survive the present.

Subscribe now to join the journey.

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