This View of Life – Details, episodes & analysis

Increasingly, policymakers, investors, and advocates recognize that the neoliberal theory of economic organization – laissez faire – is a failed experiment. However, certain areas of law – particularly antitrust law are still beholden to false econometric notions about how markets operate, which influences legal interpretation, case precedent, and ongoing debates about reviving antitrust’s role in the political economy. Can Multilevel Cultural Evolution provide a new paradigm for anti-trust law, along with the rest of economics?

J. Arvid Agren's book The Gene's Eye View of Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), is a highly praised scholarly account of the concept of selfish genes, which Richard Dawkins made hugely popular in 1976. Dawkins himself calls Agren's book "the most thorough reading of the relevant literature that I have ever encountered...he gets it right." But what does this mean? In this nearly two hour conversation, I take a deep dive with Agren into the history and current status of the selfish gene concept. You might be surprised by how much we agree upon and how much the concept of selfish genes has been scaled down, compared to its original pretensions. 

In this bonus archive episode, David talks with evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban about his book, "Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind" which shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's modular design. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"—a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world.

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Other Referenced Materials:

• "Ages of Discord", Peter Turchin
• TVOL podcast on education with Peter Gray
• "Diffusion of Innovations", by Everett M. Rogers 

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During our discussion group exploring TVOL's Third Way Series, What is Positive Deviance? There's a small chance that you know all about it and a larger chance that you've never heard of it at all. That's because successful cultural change methods have a way of emerging at a particular time and place, spreading to a degree on the basis of their success, but then coming up against boundaries, beyond which they remain unknown. So it is with Positive Deviance, which has been used to prevent child malnourishment in Vietnam, female circumcision in Egypt, and even improve an American pharmaceutical company's outreach to doctors. Our guide to this effective change method is David K. Hurst, a Management educator and author of The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World among other books.  Sage Gibbons, budding evolutionist and TVOL's Marketing and Development Strategist, joins me as guest host as we explore what Positive Deviance teaches us about the Third Way and how a formal articulation of the Third Way can add value to Positive Deviance. 

Referenced Materials:

• "Of Boxes, Bubbles, and Effective Management", David K. Hurst
• "From Life Cycle to Ecocycle: A New Perspective on the Growth, Maturity, Destruction, and Renewal of Complex Systems", David K. Hurst and Brenda J. Zimmerman
• "Enquire within: cultural evolution and cognitive science", Celia Hayes
• Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior, David Sloan Wilson and Steven C. Hayes
• The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems, Richard Pascale , Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin 

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Since the Third Way series is centered on entrepreneurship, even though it also applies to all forms of positive social change, it is only fitting for the capstone episode to be a conversation with Victor Hwang. Victor developed an evolutionary and ecosystem approach to entrepreneurship in his private consulting practice and served as Vice President for Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation between 2016-2019. Few people have played a larger role or have a more comprehensive knowledge of entrepreneurship in the 21st century and the need for it to follow the Third Way.

This episode has an accompanying article and is the Third Episode of This View of Life's new series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship".

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David discusses morality from an evolutionary perspective with analytic philosopher Peter J. Richerson.

Peter is best known for his seminal work on cultural evolution with his frequent collaborator Robert Boyd. Their book, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, remains a pivotal work in the study of humanity from a full-bodied evolutionary perspective.

This is the second episode of a two-part series on morality out of the TVOL archives. Listen to the first episode with philosopher Simon Blackburn. Dive deeper with our special publication asking scientists and philosophers if there is a universal morality.

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This interview was recorded almost 10 years ago at a workshop entitled, "Evolutionary Thinking and Its Policy Implications for Modern Capitalism". We have revived it from the TVOL archives for your enjoyment and think you will find its contents as relevant as ever.

Geoffrey is a specialist in institutional and evolutionary economics, with a background in economics, philosophy and mathematics. His research has applications to the understanding of organizations, organizational change, innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Hodgson is also the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics and has published 18 academic books and over 150 academic articles, which he is the winner of the Schumpeter Prize 2014 for his book on "Conceptualizing Capitalism".

Geoffrey also participated in our series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship". You can read the in-depth written conversation or listen to his other podcast conversation inspired by the same theme.

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Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution

Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook

Order the This View of Life book

David discusses morality from an evolutionary perspective with analytic philosopher Simon Blackburn. Along the way they cover whether functionality discredits altruism, the two sides of morality (thou shall not and thou shall), and the importance of intent for moral outrage.

This is the first episode of a two-part series on morality out of the TVOL archives. Dive deeper with our special publication asking scientists and philosophers if there is a universal morality.

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Again and again—including some of the previous episodes—the Nordic countries are identified as exemplars of good governance and the Third Way. In this episode, we hear directly about the so-called Nordic model from Nina Witoszek, Senior Researcher at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment, and Atle Midttun, a professor of Norway’s largest Business School, BI. Nina and Atle have become thoroughly familiar with viewing Norway through an evolutionary lens as participants of the Evolution Institute’s Norway Project.

Nina and Atle's Sustainable Modernity (open access)

This episode has an accompanying article and is the Third Episode of This View of Life's new series, "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship".

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Become a member of the TVOL1000 and join the Darwinian revolution

Follow This View of Life on Twitter and Facebook

Order the This View of Life book