The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Dario Maestripieri - Consilience, Interdisciplinarity, & Evolution (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_771)

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00:00:41.980 leaders who drive global economic and social progress. Visit northwood.edu. Hi everybody, this

00:00:49.740 is Gatsa. Today I've got a truly fantastic evolutionary behavioral scientist. I was going

00:00:56.920 through Dario's research, and I thought it's as if this guy's in my brain. All of the things that

00:01:03.560 interest me, he's gone out and even done a better job at doing the research. So it's a big honor to,

00:01:10.320 I'm putting my glasses on because your last name is difficult for a non-Italian, Dario

00:01:15.060 Maestrippieri. How are you doing, sir? I'm fine. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's great to be with

00:01:22.100 you. Professor of Comparative Human Development, Evolutionary Biology, and Neurobiology at the

00:01:26.960 University of Chicago. Currently, you're serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Behavioral

00:01:32.000 Sciences. Your books include Science Meets Literature, which is a literary Darwinism book,

00:01:39.860 Games Primate Play, Animal Personalities, Maternal Effects in Mammals, Macachiavellian Intelligence,

00:01:48.240 and I was one of the dumb guys who thought, how could he make such a typo in this title until I

00:01:55.080 realized that it's actually, you're talking about intelligence of macaques? You would not believe 0.96

00:01:59.640 how many people thought it was a typo. I actually, when I was entering it, I fixed it into Machiavellian.

00:02:07.100 I said, something is up. I went back and I said, okay, I'm an idiot. Primate psychology and 0.99

00:02:12.480 evolutionary theory and primate behavior. Anything else we need to add to your bio before we delve into the

00:02:17.460 stuff? No, thank you. That's plenty. Okay. So, I guess first thing, you know, whenever I have an

00:02:24.180 evolutionary, you know, scientist on my show, I like to start off with what was your evolutionary

00:02:30.740 epiphany? So, most of us who become, you know, evolutionary-minded scholars can point to the

00:02:38.300 episodic memory. This is what I first was exposed to when I said, oh my god. In my case, it was reading

00:02:43.980 first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell, reading the book by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson

00:02:50.220 called Homicide. That was it for me. What's your epiphany, Dario? So, as a child living in Italy with

00:02:58.400 my parents, I must have been like seven or eight years old, I came across a book written by Austrian

00:03:05.300 ethologist Conrad Lorenz. The book was called On Aggression, and it was about the evolution of

00:03:11.700 aggressive behavior in animal and humans. And I thought, this is so exciting and interesting.

00:03:18.140 I love these explanations. I love this approach. And so, at the age of seven or eight, I decided,

00:03:24.320 I want to become a professor. I want to do this type of research. I want to understand how evolution

00:03:28.820 has shaped the human mind and human behavior. So, that was it.

00:03:32.600 Wow. It's amazing that you said at the age of seven or eight, my epiphany with homicide was much

00:03:40.820 later. I was in my mid-20s. But when I was roughly your age at the time, I also said, I mean, I was

00:03:48.260 only interested in two things in my life, Dario, in terms of what I wanted to be. One was to be a

00:03:53.360 professor at a very young age because I was very much into books and thinking and so on. The other,

00:03:58.580 which you can appreciate as an Italian, I wanted to be a professional soccer player. There were

00:04:05.580 several obstacles that didn't allow me to achieve that goal. One was a very bad injury. Two, living

00:04:11.500 in Montreal, Canada did not make it easy in the late 70s and early 80s as a teenager to make it. But

00:04:19.580 luckily, I did end up becoming a professor so I can chat with people like you. So, you always knew

00:04:24.960 that academia and cerebral pursuits were in the cards for you. Yes, I was a curious child. I loved

00:04:32.360 reading books. And I liked using my mind. And a lot of people told me there were mysteries in life.

00:04:41.180 So, some people told me life is a mystery. Human behavior is a mystery. Religion is a mystery. And I

00:04:47.360 never liked these explanations. I never liked the idea that some things we could never understand

00:04:54.020 because they were mysterious. I thought that saying that something is a mystery is basically

00:04:59.140 an indication that we're ignorant about it. And so, to me, that was an encouragement and incentive to

00:05:07.220 try and answer these questions. It turned out that life was not that much of a mystery. Human behavior is

00:05:14.020 fascinating, but I wouldn't say it's mysterious. So, we actually have answers to a lot of questions and

00:05:20.660 science has made a lot of progress. Of all of the behavioral research that you've done,

00:05:27.300 whether it be with our primate cousins or with human beings, what is the singular phenomenon? I mean,

00:05:33.780 I'm sure there are many, but that has surprised you the most. The one that you said, holy moly,

00:05:38.260 I can't believe this is true. Look, it's a hard question to answer. I love all the papers that

00:05:46.980 I've published, all the topics that I've researched. Basically, all my papers are all my babies.

00:05:53.060 You cannot ask me, do you love this baby more than another baby? No, I love them all the same.

00:05:58.740 So, it's an endless list of fascinating questions. So, from the monkeys to the people. I mean, I can

00:06:08.660 tell you about my current interest, but even the interest that I no longer do work on, I don't regret

00:06:16.340 spending time and effort researching those topics. So, what are some of the things that are keeping you

00:06:21.300 up at night with excitement these days? So, I think one of the most striking things about human behavior

00:06:27.140 is individual differences. I mean, we all are aware that there is human nature, that we all share

00:06:34.020 some psychological and behavioral characteristics as a result of the fact that we're a member of the

00:06:38.980 species homo sapiens, but we're all different from one another. That is something I've discovered

00:06:47.140 and explored. It's an endless journey of discovery. So, when I discovered personality psychology that

00:06:55.700 happened quite late in my career, I thought that that finally helped me understand who I was.

00:07:03.380 My parents, I understood my parents for the first time in my life. So, I think the personality

00:07:10.340 psychology should be taught in elementary school, at least the basics, because people go on with our

00:07:15.300 lives without understanding who they are, and they get married, and they don't understand their spouses,

00:07:19.300 their children, and so on and so forth. But I think that you need to study and understand psychology

00:07:26.260 through a step-by-step process. So, I started out studying biology, animal behavior. I don't regret

00:07:33.140 any of that. That was very foundational for my later interest in psychology. So, I would recommend

00:07:40.180 taking this more indirect approach and not just jump to the most subtle and sophisticated aspects of

00:07:50.020 human behavior, such as individual differences in personality. Right. Well, I love that you mentioned

00:07:55.700 individual differences in personality, because that's one of the topics where when you, one of the misconceptions

00:08:01.940 about evolutionary psychology, which is that we solely focus on the cataloging of human universals,

00:08:08.740 whereas I try to always remind, certainly my students, that evolutionary-minded psychologists or,

00:08:14.900 for example, behavioral ecologists, a la Conrad Lawrence, we study also cross-cultural differences

00:08:20.900 as adaptive responses, and including individual differences. And so, but you'll probably agree with

00:08:29.140 me that even our colleagues who are not evolutionary-minded will probably all think that all we do is look at

00:08:36.980 human universals, yes? Yeah, there's some misperception of what evolutionary psychology

00:08:44.020 is and what we do. And in part, I think we are responsible for that because in the early days

00:08:50.340 of evolutionary psychology, the emphasis was on human nature, on universality. I think it was necessary to

00:08:59.060 emphasize that. I think that now we have a well-established notion of human nature. I mean,

00:09:04.820 there's still the people who deny the existence of human nature, but they're just not willing to

00:09:10.740 have a conversation about it, and there's no way to make them change their mind. But those of us who

00:09:16.660 accept the concept of human nature, we also know that human nature is just a starting point, that

00:09:23.220 interactions between genes and environment are so complex, and the outcomes are so different. And

00:09:31.300 depending on who your parents are, and when you grow up, and what kind of experiences you have early

00:09:35.620 in life, and so on, there's so many potential endpoints, so many outcomes. But again, it's not

00:09:43.060 mysterious. I think the science has really shed light on this process. So I once read a book about

00:09:53.700 personality, and there was a chapter, and I discovered this chapter was about me, about people

00:09:58.740 with my particular personality profile. And I thought, wow, how interesting that for 50 years,

00:10:05.300 I didn't know somebody had written a paper about me. And now, here I am on the pages of this book.

00:10:12.500 When earlier, we're discussing, you know, what are some of the things that you find interesting,

00:10:16.580 and you said, you know, everything that I've done, I find interesting. That's a good segue to a paper

00:10:22.100 that I wanted to discuss with you that's particularly relevant in your role as editor-in-chief of a,

00:10:28.900 you know, major evolutionary behavioral sciences journal. Do you know, do you know this paper, Dario,

00:10:33.780 by the sociologist Davis, 1971? And the title of the paper is, that's interesting, exclamation point.

00:10:42.340 Have you heard of this paper? I do not know this paper. I don't. Oh, my God, Dario, I'm going to have

00:10:46.580 to send it to you by email. Please. This is a paper that I think all of your doctoral students should

00:10:51.780 read. It's a paper where the sociologist was trying to argue, is there a way for us to quantify or find

00:11:01.380 the language to talk about what constitutes interesting research, right? And you could see as an

00:11:08.020 as an editor-in-chief that, because yes, you could talk about, well, this wasn't methodologically

00:11:13.060 rigorous. You didn't cite the appropriate papers. The study didn't have internal or external ability.

00:11:19.940 There's all kinds of things that a reviewer can criticize, but seldom do reviewers say, look,

00:11:25.300 it's all gorgeous, but the topic sucks, which by the way, much of my career as a reviewer,

00:11:31.780 that was usually my criticism. Okay. So you did this incredibly elaborate study to show us

00:11:37.940 us that consumers who like a restaurant are more likely to return to the restaurant. Who the hell 0.88

00:11:44.500 could have imagined that, right? And so what he basically did is he provided 12 criteria

00:11:52.180 of what constitutes interesting research. And in all the cases, there's a surprise element, right?

00:11:59.300 I thought that variable A causes variable B. It turns out that it's the opposite. It's variable B

00:12:05.700 that causes variable A. So having said all this, is there a way that whether you as putting on the

00:12:13.300 hat of editor-in-chief or just as Dario scientists, what are the metrics that you might use that tickle

00:12:21.460 your interestingness fancy? So ultimately it's a subjective issue. So whatever we find interesting from a

00:12:30.820 research point of view is whatever, like you said, keeps us up at night in a particular time of our

00:12:39.140 lives. And I've been fascinated by very different things. So at times it was some aspect of monkey

00:12:46.980 behavior. At times it was a human personality or physical attractiveness. The issue is, you know,

00:12:54.900 something stimulates our curiosity and we want to know more about it. I am particularly interested

00:13:02.020 and intrigued in questions that many people have asked before, but it's obvious that they haven't

00:13:09.780 found an answer. So I'm interested in reviewing explanations that other scholars have provided for

00:13:18.980 phenomena. And if I feel that essentially everybody has missed the target, to me that's a strong

00:13:25.620 temptation to jump into the arena and try to contribute. And so to me, finding the answer to a

00:13:36.180 question that has not been answered before is irresistible. So finding these little holes, these

00:13:44.020 little gaps, especially if a lot of people have spent time on it. I can give you an example of

00:13:50.580 that. Please. So years ago, about 15 years ago, I read a book by a labor market economist named

00:13:59.700 Daniel Hammermesh. The book was about the so-called beauty premium in the labor market.

00:14:06.740 Yes. So this economist, Hammermesh, spent his entire career studying this phenomenon of why

00:14:15.860 attractive people make more money, they get promoted more quickly, they have all kinds of

00:14:21.940 benefits and advantages, and has accumulated an impressive body of research, a lot of data. And so he

00:14:30.100 wrote this book. I knew nothing about this topic before I read the book. The book is called

00:14:35.060 Why Beauty Pays or something like that. It was published by Princeton University Press. So I read

00:14:42.340 the whole book. The data were fascinating, very strong, but I thought even more striking was the

00:14:48.420 explanation that the author of the book gave. And so he said, the benefits that are given to

00:14:57.860 attractive people in the labor market are the result of biases against non-attractive people.

00:15:07.220 So I thought, wait a minute. So attractive people get a benefit because others have a handicap? 0.67

00:15:13.860 So I felt that this explanation was equivalent to saying half a glass is full because the other half is empty.

00:15:21.860 You're not really explaining anything. And so here it was, I thought, some people have studied this

00:15:31.940 phenomenon for years, and yet they haven't found a satisfactory explanation. And in my opinion,

00:15:38.020 that was because they didn't have the right framework. So they were looking for a sociological,

00:15:43.700 psychological, economic explanations. But to me, the key was evolution. So when you speak about

00:15:51.780 physical attractiveness, you speak about a biological phenomenon. So you have to look at evolution.

00:15:57.300 So I couldn't resist. I had to jump in and find my own way through this body of research. And so I wrote

00:16:05.700 a paper. It took me years to write it. It was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It was a target

00:16:12.180 article. I got it out of my system. So I basically read all the research. There were three separate

00:16:20.020 bodies of research, one in economics, one in social psychology, and then a more recent one in

00:16:24.580 evolutionary psychology. But essentially, there was no communication between researchers in these fields.

00:16:30.500 And essentially, there was no attempt to provide a systematic, comprehensive explanation for this

00:16:35.860 phenomenon. And so I said, I'm going to give it my best shot. And so I did it. I don't know if it was

00:16:41.140 the last word, but I felt that I was happy with the way I contributed to this field.

00:16:49.300 And so that was it. So that was interesting, but also satisfactory to me to say something that,

00:16:56.420 in my opinion, had not been said before.

00:16:58.980 Wow, great answer. So two points. Number one, that feeling that you got where you read the

00:17:04.740 literature and said, wait a minute, I can provide a much better Darwinian-based explanation basically

00:17:10.500 describes my entire career, because that's all I've done, right? So, well, how are you studying

00:17:15.940 things in the business school, personnel psychology, and economic behavior, and consumer behavior,

00:17:21.060 and entrepreneurship, and leadership? And never do you invoke the word biology? Do we exist in the

00:17:28.660 business school somewhere in an alternate universe where biology ceases to matter? And so really,

00:17:34.660 you've just described my entire career. But I want to talk about your behavior and brain sciences. So

00:17:40.260 when I talk about sort of a bucket list of things that I would, I mean, I want to do infinite number

00:17:45.940 of things. I'm excited by everything. But in terms of just pure peer-reviewed academic papers,

00:17:52.820 the place where I would love to publish a paper would be BBS. And let me just, I know you obviously

00:17:59.460 know this, but for our viewers, they may not. It's a really unique structure. I mean, there are others

00:18:04.020 that have sort of copied it, but there is one big target article, which as Dario said, it's usually a

00:18:11.540 broad, big, synthetic, consilient. We're going to talk about consilience in a second,

00:18:16.020 where you write this big piece, and then you invite all sorts of people, oftentimes from many

00:18:21.140 different perspectives, to comment. And so there might be 30, 40 commentaries, and then the target

00:18:28.180 authors will reply to that. And the entire issue is just that one piece. So if you really want to sink

00:18:34.580 your teeth into a topic, for example, Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Empathy, who is Frans

00:18:41.140 De Waal. I think you know him well. Well, go and read that paper. You're going to cover a lot about

00:18:47.060 empathy, both from a proximate and ultimate level. So prior to you writing that BBS article, did you share

00:18:55.860 my bucket list that you wanted a paper in that journal? Yes, but only if I had something original

00:19:06.420 and important to say about a topic for which there was a lot of interest. So I didn't think that

00:19:15.460 anything that I studied was necessarily worthy of being published in BBS. For this particular topic,

00:19:23.460 I thought there was enough interest. It was a topic that lent itself to interdisciplinary research.

00:19:30.580 And so I had a lot of fun connecting studies done by economists to studies done by social psychologists,

00:19:37.780 and then more recent research done by evolutionary psychologists. There was an interesting phenomenon of

00:19:44.180 lack of communication, lack of agreement on definitions, confusion between explanations of

00:19:50.580 different levels of analysis. So confusion between explanations of mechanism, explanations of

00:19:55.860 function. So it's like you walk into a room and it's a little messy and you would say, oh, this

00:20:01.940 room would be beautiful, but you need to put things away. And so that's what I try to do. Essentially,

00:20:07.060 tidy up the room and put things in order so that everybody could really understand what went on with

00:20:14.100 regard to this topic. So two things we want. You mentioned interdisciplinary, which I want to talk

00:20:18.980 about and consilience, which I also want to talk about. And when I reached out to you a couple of

00:20:24.420 months ago, it's because, I mean, you know this, but our viewers don't. I saw a call for papers in the

00:20:30.580 journal that you're currently editing, serving as editor in chief, where, you know, it was about consilience.

00:20:37.300 And I have to say that of all the books I mentioned earlier, Homicide was one of the most, well, probably

00:20:43.540 the most influential book to kind of launch my career in evolution psychology. The book by E.O.

00:20:48.660 Wilson, late nineties, Consilience, blew my mind because I said, that's exactly how my brain thinks.

00:20:55.540 So can you, for our viewers who don't know what consilience is, can you tell us about that and link it to

00:21:00.740 interdisciplinary? Yes. So I should premise that my interests have changed over the years

00:21:08.340 and I've become broader and broader. So essentially I started out with an interest in behavior,

00:21:14.180 psychology, and then I became more interested in theories that we use to explain behavior. And then

00:21:21.140 I became interested in ideas in general. So if you had to ask him, ask me, what is your current

00:21:27.060 field or how do you describe in a few words of your interest? I would tell you my current field of

00:21:33.780 interest and work is the history of ideas. So I'm interested in where ideas come from, how they

00:21:40.900 get modified. Sometimes as they transfer from one field into another, how different people at different

00:21:47.380 historical periods of work on these ideas, they're elaborated. Sometimes they're slightly misunderstood and

00:21:54.020 misinterpreted, but transformed. They have a life of their own. Now this field, studying ideas from a

00:22:01.380 historical point of view, is quintessentially interdisciplinary. So ideas start in some place,

00:22:08.580 they might start in science and then they might end up in art, or they might start in philosophy and then

00:22:15.540 end up in science. It's fascinating to track how ideas cross boundaries. They don't care about

00:22:21.700 boundaries. Sometimes they last centuries, millennia, and so on and so forth. So as you know, there's

00:22:30.260 currently a separation between scientific and humanistic approaches to scholarship. I think this

00:22:38.340 is unfortunate. In fact, it's one of the most frustrating things about being an academic. The

00:22:44.100 fact that there's boundaries, there's departments, there's different buildings that people inhabit and

00:22:49.540 and they don't talk to each other. There is no common language. I find this very frustrating.

00:22:55.460 Because my inclination would be essentially to be all over the place, to talk to anybody who has

00:23:01.620 anything interesting to say, to read everything, and so on and so forth. Anyway, so recently there's been

00:23:07.060 an attempt to bridge this gap, to bring together approaches and fields that were separated for too long,

00:23:14.660 such as the sciences and the humanities. So E.O. Wilson, the Harvard University entomologist,

00:23:20.820 was at the forefront of this attempt, as you mentioned, wrote this book called Consilience,

00:23:25.620 the Unity of Knowledge, in the 1990s. And it was a plea for scientists and humanists to start talking

00:23:34.020 together and to look for general theories that could be applied across disciplines. The book was

00:23:40.580 in part well received by people who essentially shared Wilson's views, but there was also a strong

00:23:48.820 negative reaction to it. Because Wilson, as we all know, had his own way of doing things. He had a very

00:23:56.100 forceful kind of take-no-prisoner approach, which in some cases has the effect of moving a field forward

00:24:05.780 to force people to think about things that they hadn't thought before, but it also makes people get

00:24:11.300 people defensive. And so there was a very strong defensive reaction by people in the humanities

00:24:16.180 who thought this was not a genuine attempt at integration. It was an attempt at

00:24:21.460 colonialism, basically. It was an attempt by scientists to colonize the humanities,

00:24:30.260 so they resisted this invasion. I think this reaction was misplaced. And so in recent years,

00:24:36.580 I've attempted to continue this effort. And I've taken a slightly different approach. So my approach has

00:24:44.500 been not only to talk about what sciences can offer the humanities, but also what humanities can offer

00:24:51.140 the sciences. Very nice. Yes. I mean, for those of you who don't know, so I think the first book that

00:24:57.300 I mentioned that you had written where you were applying, you know, a scientific lens to study

00:25:02.180 literature, I don't know how much the field has grown, but certainly about 15, 20 years ago, there were

00:25:08.340 a few people who were really getting into Darwinian literary criticism. There was Jonathan Gottschall.

00:25:13.940 There was, well, I think David Sloan Wilson did an edited book on it. Have some of the literary critics

00:25:22.100 come around to the idea of understanding these universal literary themes via an evolutionary lens,

00:25:28.020 or does it still remain a very boutique niche subdiscipline?

00:25:32.100 So I think that approach and the field and the people working in that area have moved forward.

00:25:39.860 I think that there's been the realization that using the evolutionary approach to the study of

00:25:46.740 literature is just one example of taking a broader interdisciplinary approach. So it doesn't have to be

00:25:55.220 just evolutionary biology or psychology. It can be science, it can be physics, it can be psychology,

00:26:03.220 it can also be philosophy. So I think the way to really push this approach forward is to make it broader.

00:26:13.380 So essentially, I've decided that it's better to frame this effort in terms of conciliance, so

00:26:21.780 interdisciplinarity, integration of scientific and humanistic approaches, and not focus specifically on

00:26:28.660 literary Darwinism. So the analysis of literary texts from an evolutionary perspective. I don't

00:26:35.780 deny that that's a valuable approach, but I think it's more promising to promote that approach within

00:26:42.980 a broader agenda of interdisciplinarity.

00:26:46.020 So if I were to restate what you said, what you're saying is, okay, the evolutionary framework could be

00:26:53.940 one means by which we achieve conciliance, but there are other frameworks that we could equally apply

00:27:00.900 in the pursuit of conciliance. Does that sound right?

00:27:03.220 Correct. Correct.

00:27:04.740 Okay. I would bring philosophy into the picture, history of science, comparative psychology.

00:27:13.860 There's no reason why the only scientific discipline to be

00:27:16.820 brought into the picture should be evolutionary psychology. So I think also from a practical

00:27:24.580 point of view, people would get less defensive, and that would be more open-minded and more accepting

00:27:30.500 of this new approach.

00:27:32.340 Beautiful. So two things I want to say, I want to say something about interdisciplinarity in a second,

00:27:36.100 but before that, when you started your response and talking about how you, you know, where do ideas

00:27:42.180 originate? How do they get modified? And so on. I'm presuming that you're familiar with the field

00:27:46.740 of evolutionary epistemology, which is, I mean, it applies a Darwinian lens to the evolution of

00:27:54.340 knowledge. And then a subfield of that, which I think you'd be familiar with. If not, I need to send

00:28:01.460 you that as a link as well. Do you know the work of Dean Simington looking at a Darwinian perspective

00:28:08.740 on creativity, of which ideas would be one form? Are you familiar with that work?

00:28:13.300 Yes. I actually teach a course in which we read some of Simington's papers.

00:28:18.180 Oh, my goodness. Yes.

00:28:19.380 Oh, beautiful. Well, what do you, I mean, do you support it? Do you disagree with it? Do you like it?

00:28:25.380 Do you find it useful?

00:28:26.100 Yeah. I mean, there's different approaches to creativity. I think we should be familiar with all of them.

00:28:30.340 My emphasis, as I discussed that topic with my students, is that there's basic similarities

00:28:38.820 between creativity in the sciences and creativity in the humanities, creativity in arts. It would be

00:28:44.820 a mistake to think that creative minds, say, in the arts are qualitatively different than creative minds

00:28:53.780 in the sciences. So I think that there's the need for a general theory of creativity and how it manifests

00:29:00.180 itself in different disciplines. And I think evolutionary epistemology is very well positioned

00:29:04.820 to provide that theory. So I think it's a very valuable approach.

00:29:08.660 Beautiful. I'm going to come back to interdisciplinary in a second, but you mentioned creativity

00:29:13.300 in your response to my question about creativity. One of the things that I talk about in my latest

00:29:18.740 book, my previous book on happiness. So I, at one point I'm talking about, you know,

00:29:23.380 what are the two decisions that you're most, that you make in your life that are most likely to impart

00:29:29.220 great happiness or great misery if you make the wrong choice. And I argue one is, of course,

00:29:34.100 your choice of spouse. And two, I was about to say that till you read my mind.

00:29:40.100 And two is your choice of profession. And I argue, and given the little that I know of you,

00:29:46.980 but I see how creative you are and how curious you are, I think you probably agree with the

00:29:50.820 statement, that I argue that all other things equal. If the profession that you choose is one

00:29:57.460 that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse, you're well on your way to climbing

00:30:03.300 occupational happiness. So, but now that doesn't mean you, it's only through being an academic

00:30:08.340 creator, right? You could be a chef, you could be an architect, you could be a standup comic.

00:30:13.860 Each of those professions are creating in a completely different medium, in a completely

00:30:19.060 different domain. But until I came along, that plate, that dish didn't exist. Until I came along,

00:30:25.140 that bridge didn't exist. Until I came along, that book didn't exist. And immersing myself in the

00:30:31.140 creative process is the most direct way to achieve purpose and meaning. What do you think of that theory?

00:30:36.980 Look, I've made a number of bad decisions in my life, decisions that turned out to be wrong,

00:30:42.500 but not about my career. The decision that I made about my career to become a professor,

00:30:47.380 to do research, that was a good one. I was born to do this. I'm happy. I've enjoyed every day of my life.

00:30:57.780 When I retire, essentially my life will not change one bit, because I will continue doing the same

00:31:03.700 things. I will continue to think, to read, and to write. Essentially, I've been ready to retire for

00:31:09.380 decades. If I had been told that, you know, you will retire at 40, I'd say, fine, I will have more

00:31:14.260 time to do what I want to do, to work. If I was told, okay, we're going to lock you up in a library,

00:31:20.660 and all you can do is read books and write, I'd say, fine, I would be happy.

00:31:25.940 Oh my God, that's exactly how I feel. By the way, you can't see, but around me, I'm in my home study,

00:31:32.340 I'm surrounded by a million books in my personal library. And one of the greatest sources of angst

00:31:37.100 in my life, Dario, is, am I going to have life be long enough that I actually read all the books in

00:31:45.380 my study? Because I can't bear the thought that all of the knowledge in the books that I've yet to

00:31:51.420 read are not in my brain. I'm sure. I think you will. You will. And some books don't need to be

00:31:58.540 read from cover to cover. But I think at some point in the next 30 years of your life, you will pick up

00:32:05.740 every book from your shelves, and you will read at least a few pages. Thank you, Dr. That means a lot

00:32:11.520 to me. Okay, interdisciplinarity. I'm going to link the pursuit of interdisciplinarity, or rather,

00:32:17.820 the obstacle of pursuing it, to when, I think you mentioned Conrad Lawrence originally, yes?

00:32:23.920 Yes, yes.

00:32:24.820 So Conrad Lawrence, as you know, but some of our viewers may not know, talked about territoriality

00:32:30.600 as sort of ethological principle. So I don't know if you know where I'm going with this.

00:32:35.120 So interdisciplinarity is something that every university president says that we are all about

00:32:41.480 interdisciplinarity. But then when it comes to you implementing interdisciplinarity, everyone becomes

00:32:47.320 a Lawrence territorial being and says, no, no, no, no, I don't want these bastards in the other 0.98

00:32:54.480 building to come into my territory, right? And now I know this firsthand. Well, first, because my career 0.99

00:32:59.900 has been driven by interdisciplinarity. But I tried to implement Dario. Do you know the EVOS program

00:33:06.420 that David Sloan Wilson had set up at SUNY Binghamton? Are you familiar with that?

00:33:10.880 No, I don't.

00:33:11.880 But you've heard of, you know who David Sloan Wilson is?

00:33:14.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know him. So David Sloan Wilson had set up the EVOS program, which

00:33:18.400 is, I think, evolutionary studies program, which was a minor that any students could take

00:33:23.960 at the university, because you basically could study politics from an evolutionary perspective

00:33:28.960 or medicine or engineering, right? And so it was exactly, it was the quintessential

00:33:33.000 interdisciplinary program. And the first one that I'm aware of was the one that he had set

00:33:38.000 up at SUNY Binghamton. So he had come to visit my university, I think, back in 2009. And I had told

00:33:44.100 him, you know what, I'm going, I, at the time, I had a shared professorship in evolutionary behavioral

00:33:48.720 sciences. I said, I'm going to set up the first Canadian-based EVOS program in Canada. And so I went

00:33:55.920 to all of the deans in all of the faculties, and they all turned into Lawrence territorial events

00:34:02.560 guy. No, no, no. So I said, well, how is it that from this side of your mouth, you talk

00:34:07.120 about interdisciplinary, but from this side, you do the exact opposite. Is this something

00:34:11.920 that you have faced in your career? Of course. So I was drawn to academia,

00:34:18.580 because the thought of engaging in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, I thought there could

00:34:25.600 be nothing more important and more exciting than that. You know, devote myself to studying,

00:34:32.260 learning, and figuring things out, you know. And I thought academia would be a community

00:34:36.460 of same-minded scholars who are just in this business to pursue knowledge and truth. So

00:34:42.400 how can we not get along with each other? How can we not love each other? So I did not

00:34:48.300 realize that the pursuit of knowledge and truth happens to be a human activity. So anything

00:34:54.040 that we do, we bring human nature to it. So we bring... The frailties of human nature.

00:35:00.980 Absolutely. And so whether you're doing science or art history or economics, you are a human being

00:35:10.480 with all your flaws, all your biases, all your, you know, your peculiarities. And we have to accept

00:35:18.200 that. So yes, even in academia, especially in academia, people are jealous of each other's work.

00:35:26.140 They invest personally into what they write, what they produce. I've been shocked that in the past,

00:35:36.140 some colleagues of mine that I dare to criticize in print. So very professionally, I wrote papers

00:35:45.660 expressing the opinion that some positions that other people had taken were inaccurate. Oh, and I

00:35:52.220 explained very professionally, very nicely why. And these people took it personally. I was shocked that,

00:35:59.420 because I thought that this is the way science works. You know, the battle of ideas, not the battle of

00:36:04.780 people. I had no interest in battling people. I was just interested in confronting ideas. And to my

00:36:11.500 surprise, some people stopped talking to me. Some people view me as an enemy for the rest of their

00:36:17.580 life. It was very unfortunate. But that's the way it works. But I'm optimistic about the future. So I think

00:36:27.180 if you make the first move, and you reach out and offer something that others can use, it has to

00:36:37.260 start from us. So you cannot expect that, you know, art historians or what will come to you and say,

00:36:43.980 okay, what can I learn from you from your approach, you have to go to them and tell them, listen, you have

00:36:49.100 to pay attention to what I do. And this is why. This is why what we do has something to offer to you.

00:36:56.300 But it has to start from us. And so I think not everybody will listen, but I'm optimistic.

00:37:02.460 I also think that we need to educate students. So that's where it starts. So I teach a course,

00:37:09.420 essentially, to open students' minds, to enlighten them about the importance of engaging with people

00:37:17.020 from across the fence, so to speak. So if we catch them early, I think there's a good chance that if

00:37:23.020 they become professors, they will have an open mind. Well, I think University of Chicago is uniquely

00:37:30.060 positioned as sort of an interdisciplinary place, right? So there's the, I think, is it the Mind

00:37:35.100 Institute? And, you know, so there seem to be, I don't know how it seeped through the walls of

00:37:41.260 University of Chicago, but it seems to do better on interdisciplinarity than other top schools. Is

00:37:48.140 that a fair assessment? I don't know. I don't know how you would quantify that, you know,

00:37:54.460 compare different universities in terms of how well they do on interdisciplinarity. So

00:38:03.740 one thing that is unique or at least special about the University of Chicago is the degree of freedom

00:38:10.300 that we professors have in terms of pursuing our research interests or teaching the classes that

00:38:19.660 that we like. So I've never been told you should do research on this topic or teach a course on that

00:38:26.140 topic. My interests have changed many times. I was basically hired to do something and then ended up

00:38:34.380 doing something completely different and there was not a peep, not a complaint. So that's amazing,

00:38:41.580 knowing that there is essentially unlimited freedom to explore topics. As long as, of course, if you're

00:38:48.620 productive and you are effective as a teacher and you essentially play the game by the rules, which is

00:38:55.100 you get funding, you write papers, books, you teach good courses. As long as you meet these

00:39:01.180 some basic expectations, you can do anything you want. That is priceless. So I'm very lucky to be

00:39:08.220 at an institution that allows me to do this. No, that's, and to some extent, I would share what you

00:39:14.780 just said about University of Chicago with my own university. It has many flaws. It tends to be rather

00:39:21.340 super woke as universities go and it's difficult for someone like me to survive in such an environment. But in

00:39:28.220 terms of having given me complete and utter freedom to pursue anything that I wanted,

00:39:33.660 they certainly have done that and they deserve all the kudos for having done that. Quick question,

00:39:38.300 not to kind of denigrate academia, but you know, we're two academics. I think we're almost the same

00:39:45.420 age. So we've been at this game for a while. One of the things that has disappointed me and my

00:39:50.380 colleagues. And I wonder if you share the sentiment. I mean, we are in a world of ideas where we are

00:39:57.500 paid to play in the intellectual landscape. Yet, I have found that many of my colleagues,

00:40:04.620 while they are professional academics, are actually not intellectuals. Meaning that I had this romantic

00:40:14.140 idea that every Friday night, I would be inviting all these brilliant academics and my children would

00:40:22.380 grow up listening to the art historian and the neuroradiologist and the primatologist at my house.

00:40:29.180 And I found out that most academics are actually unbelievably non-intellectual. They are careerists.

00:40:35.660 They play a game. And that has turned me off, often from attending conferences where I'm coming,

00:40:42.780 I think in speaking to you for very little, we seem to have a similar curiosity for life, where I'm

00:40:49.020 trying to, I'm a kid trying to play. And they're, they're very much professional posers and ethology

00:40:56.300 and so on. Has that disappointed you as well? No. So I agree with you that not, not every professor

00:41:03.740 is an intellectual. But that doesn't mean necessarily that they're not

00:41:09.500 genuine in their interest or what they do, that they pose, that they're just interested in their

00:41:13.740 career. I think there's different facets to scholarship and academia. For example, if we just

00:41:20.940 talk about science, one way to look at science is essentially is an activity whose goal is to

00:41:29.100 to pose questions and to provide answers to those, to these questions, right? So,

00:41:34.700 and the questions can be anything. So anything that has not been investigated before, anything

00:41:39.580 that looks interesting, as you know, there's basic science, you know, what's funded by the U.S.

00:41:44.460 National Science Foundation. You don't have to justify the implications for society. It just has to be

00:41:49.820 an interesting research question. And that's fine. That's one way in which science works. However,

00:41:55.740 science also works to solve problems. So science was developed and has been used and will continue to

00:42:04.940 be used to solve problems. So many scientists are trained not to engage in big questions, pursue abstract

00:42:15.820 problems that seem interesting, but essentially they're trained to become problem solvers. Okay,

00:42:22.460 so they taught some skills and essentially much of their work will be to apply those skills to solve

00:42:29.740 a problem. So they're more like on the technical side of things. And I don't mean to talk down on

00:42:35.900 people who have more technical expertise. It's just another facet of the issue. So I'm more of a thinker.

00:42:45.420 I'm more of a generalist. I'm not a specialist. I like synthesis more than analysis. And generally

00:42:53.420 speaking, I'm not very good with my hands. So, you know, if there's a problem in the bathroom,

00:42:59.260 I call the plumber. I do not try to fix it myself. You know, I call my wife. Okay, there you go. So

00:43:06.300 you made a good choice maybe with your spouse. But I have a lot of respect for people who have

00:43:15.020 knowledge, but also this knowledge is translated into skills and know basically how to

00:43:21.580 fix problems or to improve society. And this is not just done in the sciences. I know that

00:43:27.500 there's some of this activity, essential problem solving also in the humanities, in every field. And

00:43:34.780 that's okay. I think it's a matter of preferences. Like you, I would prefer to go to a dinner party

00:43:42.220 where everybody's an intellectual. But sometimes I talk to scientists who just want to talk about

00:43:50.300 the latest procedure that they developed in some sophisticated experiment that they've done. So they

00:43:59.660 just want to describe technical activities. And they like that. And there's no way to get them to

00:44:06.780 talk about something abstract or some, for example, I, in a previous life, I used to see myself as a

00:44:14.300 biologist. But because I had a certain idea of biology, the study of life, no biologist this day

00:44:20.540 will tell you that they study life. Biology is a different thing, which is fine. So in the US and North

00:44:27.660 America, biology is mostly problem solving. So you get trained to acquire some skills that will then

00:44:35.100 be applied to solve problems. And that's fine. So basically, E.O. Wilson would not have passed

00:44:40.700 that measure of what a biologist is today in the United States. Absolutely. E.O. Wilson would never

00:44:46.620 get a job in a biology department. Exactly. And neither would I. And neither would I.

00:44:51.500 Right. But, uh, so what I want to ask you next is, so, I mean, you, you accept,

00:44:57.180 you're kindly accepted to come on this program. It's a, it's a way to communicate science to the

00:45:01.820 masses. I think most professors still remain very hesitant to get out of their very narrow

00:45:11.260 mediums of communication. I publish papers and peer reviewed papers. That's it. Oh, in some fields,

00:45:17.900 you may be allowed to publish books, but in many fields, that doesn't count as anything. Well,

00:45:22.700 oh, on the origin of species, that's a book. It's not a peer reviewed paper. It must be garbage. We

00:45:29.020 don't want to hear it. You're not going to get tenure. So in your case, do you, I mean, certainly

00:45:34.620 you've written books that are meant for broader public. So you have that bent. Do you, do you feel

00:45:41.180 that in the future, there'll be greater reward mechanisms set up for people to do exactly what

00:45:47.900 we're doing here as part of the hats you wear as a professor? I think there are already, I think

00:45:53.180 there are more opportunities to do this than there were before, and there are more rewards. And, uh,

00:45:58.300 and so there are many people who have invested significantly and successfully into essentially

00:46:04.460 outreach. So doing podcasts, doing interviews, have a significant presence online. So there's two

00:46:11.180 issues here. One is an issue of values. So some people like you, I'm sure, and I, to some extent,

00:46:17.500 believe that it's very valuable to share, uh, the results of your work, to share your research,

00:46:24.300 your knowledge, your wisdom with others. So our job is not simply to stay in the ivory tower,

00:46:30.460 solve the problems, learn stuff, and then teach. And that's it. So, uh, some, some of us think that,

00:46:36.620 uh, part of our job is also to share our knowledge, um, our intuitions, our insight with the general

00:46:42.620 public. Uh, others maybe don't have this, uh, this value as high on the priority list. The other issue

00:46:49.660 is an issue of temperament. Uh, some people temperamentally are more inclined to engage with,

00:46:56.220 with the public to, to speak in front of an audience or to, uh, to, to speak on video.

00:47:02.940 Others are not. So, so some of us are, are a little shy, a little introverted. Um, uh, we get

00:47:09.500 uncomfortable when we are asked to speak publicly about our work and that's fine. Again, we're human

00:47:15.820 beings. We have our personality preferences. I don't think that people, everybody necessarily should be

00:47:22.620 forced out of their comfort zone. So I think there's plenty of room for, for both types,

00:47:27.180 those that find it easy and rewarding and enjoyable to speak with the public and those who

00:47:32.780 find it a little stressful and that's fine.

00:47:35.980 What a diplomatic answer that I can see why you are editor in chief of a journal, because that's

00:47:41.180 how it has nothing to do with that. So, uh, what are some things that you, yeah, you know,

00:47:47.260 we're coming to the, I'm trying to look at the time and be mindful of your time. Uh,

00:47:51.020 what are some projects that you're currently working on? It could be, I'm setting up a new

00:47:55.740 podcast. I'm setting up a new Institute. Here's the next book I'm working on that you might want to

00:48:00.460 take this opportunity to share with us. Take it away, Dario. So I've got a couple of book projects,

00:48:06.780 but, uh, uh, they're kind of standby for the moment because they're very ambitious and, uh,

00:48:14.060 each would take, I think maybe 10 years to be completed. So, so one is about, um, uh, applying an

00:48:22.300 evolutionary approach to issues of, of knowledge and truth. So, so the question is from an evolutionary

00:48:29.100 point of view, it's not always advantageous, uh, to be knowledgeable. Sometimes it's more

00:48:34.300 advantageous to be ignorant and even truth is not, uh, from a biological evolutionary point of view,

00:48:41.580 absolute value. Sometimes, uh, uh, believing something that is false might be more beneficial.

00:48:48.380 So I think there is a way to, to, uh, apply, uh, an evolutionary and an economic cost benefit analysis

00:48:56.140 to issues of knowledge and ignorance and, and, and, and truth and falsehood to see in what situations,

00:49:02.700 uh, uh, uh, it is, uh, advantageous and beneficial, uh, to embrace knowledge and truth.

00:49:09.820 And, uh, uh, in what situations instead it's better not to know or to believe something that is not true.

00:49:16.140 So that's one project. Another project is, um, is related to those interests that I was describing

00:49:21.900 earlier about the history of ideas and interdisciplinary scholarship. So there's a particularly literary

00:49:27.580 genre called the novel of ideas. So this was a, a genre that was popular, especially at the end of

00:49:34.380 the 19th century, especially in Europe. But essentially these were novels written by

00:49:39.900 intellectuals who were very interested in scientific or philosophical questions.

00:49:44.700 They just happened to be writing fiction. And so they wrote novels to explore

00:49:49.260 scientific or philosophical ideas. I find that fascinating. When I first came across some of

00:49:54.380 these novels, I thought, ah, this is what I really, uh, want to, um, concentrate on.

00:50:01.260 So use art, essentially literature, to explore, uh, scientific or philosophical ideas. So the project,

00:50:08.060 the book project is essentially a history of the novel of ideas. So when this literary genre first

00:50:14.540 appeared, how it changed over time, uh, uh, the different versions of that, that existed and why

00:50:20.380 it's not so popular anymore. Again, this is a lifetime project. Nobody has done it. So again,

00:50:25.420 there is the need for something like this, but it's very ambitious. Luckily, I have a coauthor

00:50:30.060 who's far more knowledgeable on this than I am. So what would be an exemplar of that literary genre?

00:50:35.980 Uh, so, well, you know, Thomas Mann, the German novelist, uh, uh, his famous novel, The Magic

00:50:43.500 Mountain is essentially a novel of ideas, uh, about, you know, uh, enlightenment and, and, and, uh,

00:50:51.740 Marxism and the crisis of, uh, Western Europe and Western civilization. So big ideas like that,

00:50:57.980 but also Franz Kafka wrote novels of ideas. Um, uh, one of the, uh, best examples of novels of idea

00:51:07.500 is actually a poorly known book written by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World. Uh, he used

00:51:15.900 to be one of the most visible intellectuals in Europe and also in North America, and then he was

00:51:21.740 kind of a little forgotten. And now people remember him just for Brave New World or because he wrote a

00:51:27.420 book about psychedelics, I think. But he actually wrote a, uh, a very, uh, well-written and very

00:51:33.820 powerful, serious novel of idea called, uh, uh, Point Powerpoint. No, sorry, it's Point Counterpoint,

00:51:40.940 Point Counterpoint. So there is a musical theme to it because, um, uh, it's a sort of a musical expression.

00:51:48.460 So, so, so this is a book about ideas, uh, about different, uh, world views, different philosophical

00:51:55.180 or scientific, uh, or scientific, uh, views. Um, uh, there are four main characters in the book

00:52:01.260 and each represents a different view of the world and they engage in these, um, very serious conversations.

00:52:07.180 And, um, the whole theme is actually, um, framed as a, as a symphony. So, so, so these four protagonists

00:52:17.420 and, and their ideas essentially, uh, are meant to represent, um, uh, the first violinist in an

00:52:25.740 orchestra. So, so the main violin players. And then there is, uh, uh, other musicians who don't get as

00:52:32.540 much, uh, uh, stage time. They don't play as much. And all the different exchanges, the conversations,

00:52:38.860 the ideas are meant to represent the musical, uh, um, exchanges. Beautiful. If you haven't read it,

00:52:46.460 you must read it. Point counterpoint. Correct. Uh, would George, or, uh, I know we're coming to

00:52:53.420 another thing, but the way you were describing this literary genre, what triggered in my head was,

00:52:59.020 would George Orwell and Ayn Rand be manifestations of that literary genre? Um, yes and no. Uh, so, so there is no,

00:53:11.100 uh, universal definition of what a novel of ideas is, uh, so anything potentially can fit into that. The way I use this expression,

00:53:22.700 I mainly refer to novels that were inspired by either philosophical or scientific ideas. But, but one can,

00:53:30.220 can talk about ideas about politics, about society, uh, even science fiction can be used as a vehicle for, for, for ideas.

00:53:37.100 So anyway, uh, these novels are not so common anymore. Uh, the, the, maybe one of the, the most recent, um,

00:53:44.220 examples of these novels of ideas was, um, a book that became very popular in the 1970s and 80s called

00:53:50.860 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. That is a novel of ideas. So you can read it just as a

00:53:59.020 interesting story, a love story, but there's a lot of philosophical. I think it was turned into a film,

00:54:05.180 wasn't it? There was also a film. Yes. Um, the film mostly focused on the actions and not so much on

00:54:12.460 the ideas, but, uh, the book is actually a very serious and ambitious intellectual effort.

00:54:18.860 Wonderful. Uh, Dario, uh, I was expecting to have a great conversation. You've exceeded my expectation.

00:54:26.140 Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. It really was. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline.

00:54:31.340 Thank you so much for coming on and hopefully we'll have you. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

00:54:35.260 Thank you. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 18, 2024

Dr. Dario Maestripieri - Consilience, Interdisciplinarity, & Evolution (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_771)

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