The Evolution of Culture with Sam Harris and Nicholas Christakis

a CIGS/INET dinner discussion on rising above the discord to evolve our common humanity in the age of the internet.

Sam Harris: “The vanity of each generation is to think that this time is different. But this time is different.”
Nicholas: “Even’s Plato’s Republic complains about ‘kids these days.’”

Nicholas: “Our genes and culture coevolve. Culture is a force for natural selection. The domestication of milk-producing animals tilted the selection pressure for the human mutation that prolongs lactase persistence post infancy. I am sorry to tell you Sam that we are going to become more religious over time. While being secular correlates with economic success, the religious are having more kids.”

Sam: “The Internet has become a vehicle for misinformation, and silencing calls, many from the left. This is very worrisome. Free speech is the master variable for progress, our only tool for mutual error correction. To make progress, scientifically and ethically, conversation is the only algorithm we have.”

I argued that cultural/mimetic evolution has completely subsumed biological/genetic evolution as the primary vector of change. Our brains are physically identical to those of humans 2000 years ago, but much of the “intelligence” that we ascribe to humanity comes from our ongoing cultural evolution, glacial as it may seem in any one lifetime. But 2000 years ago, our lives and social contracts were nasty and brutish, and various social abominations were not yet condemned. Human communication sets the clock rate for our cultural evolution, and the Internet expands the fanout, frequency and global reach. So, we should expect our collective cultural evolution to be in a state of unprecedented change.

Sam: “In 100 years, we will be biologically the same but may be unrecognizable with all of the change at the cultural level.”

Sam: “If we outsource our epistemology to these tools, then when change the tools, we change ourselves.”

Epistemology addresses such questions as: What makes justified beliefs justified?, What does it mean to say that we know something?, and fundamentally How do we know that we know? All interesting questions in the filter bubbles of social networks.

You can listen to a long podcast with Sam and Nicolas here.

Thanks to our host, the Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society (CIGS) of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)

P.S. Jack Dorsey was among the dinner guests, wearing the same black beanie as his recent TED talk.