This View of Life

Artificial intelligence is evolving faster than most of us can think about it—but few of its creators understand evolution itself. Venture capitalist Peter Fenton joins evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson for a wide-ranging conversation about how evolution and artificial intelligence might shape each other. Fenton, a central figure in the AI star...

David Sloan Wilson speaks with Professor Nick Jordan and Whitney Clark, Executive Director of Friends of the Mississippi River, about their work on the Forever Green Initiative – a regional effort to scale regenerative agriculture in the Upper Midwest.

They reflect on seven years of cross-sector collaboration to develop new crops and farming systems, and how their partnership with ProSocial World has helped strengthen the initiativ...

Join David Sloan Wilson in conversation with Carlo Maley and Vaughn Aktipis-Maley as they explore how evolutionary science can inspire deeper, more internally consistent worldbuilding. Based on their recent publication Evolution and Ecology for World Builders, this episode blends fantasy storytelling with real-world biology to ask: What makes a creature believable? What makes a society work? And what can fiction teach us about coop...

AI is no longer a distant future - it's shaping our lives right now. But what if we could design it not just to be smart, but to be good? In this powerful conversation, Cornelia Walther and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson explore how we can build AI systems that truly serve people and the planet.

They dive into the concept of Prosocial AI, technology that's designed to support human connection, equity, and environmental s...

What if the roots of democracy run far deeper than ancient Greece or Enlightenment Europe, but back to our evolutionary origins as humans?

In this thought-provoking conversation, evolutionary anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman and renowned scientist David Sloan Wilson dig into how early human societies, particularly hunter-gatherers, managed to balance individual freedom with the needs of the group. Long before constitutions and par...

A conversation between Madhusudan Katti and Amitangshu Acharya

Join us for a thought-provoking virtual dialogue exploring how colonial worldviews have shaped modern ecology - and what it means to decolonize our relationship with nature in an era of social and environmental upheaval.

Building on themes from the This View of Life series "Decolonizing Science", ecologist Madhusudan Katti and writer-researcher Amitangshu Acharya delve ...

Originally published on January 8, 2025.

Hunter-gatherer societies are fascinating in their own right and--with appropriate caution--a major source of insight about our ancestral past, stretching back to our origin as a species. Remarkably, hunter-gatherer societies also have much to teach us about modern Democratic governance. Vivek Venkataraman is an idea guide to this subject, with a background in philosophy, primatology, and hu...

Hunter-gatherer societies are fascinating in their own right and--with appropriate caution--a major source of insight about our ancestral past, stretching back to our origin as a species. Remarkably, hunter-gatherer societies also have much to teach us about modern Democratic governance. Vivek Venkataraman is an idea guide to this subject, with a background in philosophy, primatology, and human evolutionary biology, along with dire...

Who is Barry-Wehmiller (BW)? Not a person, but a manufacturing corporation and star attraction of the Conscious Capitalism movement. If you are familiar with this movement, you might have read Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, by CEO Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia, co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement. Or perhaps a Harvard Business School case report titled Truly Human Leaders...

Michael Muthukrishna's new book A Theory of Everyone is the latest in a lineage of authors that include Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Not By Genes Alone) and Joseph Henrich (Secret of Our Success, WEIRDest People in the World). All of them illustrate what I call completing the Darwinian revolution in my own book This View of Life. In this podcast, Michael and I discuss the paradigmatic natur...

Conscious capitalism is well known as a business movement that goes against almost everything that is taught in business school. However, the same movement makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of a new paradigm for economics and business based on a combination of complex systems science and evolutionary science. I discuss this paradigm shift with two leaders of the Conscious Capitalism movement Raj Sisodia and Bob Chapm...

Few people know more about cities than Jonathan Rose, author of The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life.

Jonathan is a practitioner in addition to a scholar. His urban development company is at the forefront of "building wellbeing through communities of opportunity". In our conversation, we discuss how two bodies of knowledge that are new within th...

The first book-length articulation of an economic paradigm based on complex systems science and evolutionary science was Eric Beinhocker's The Origin of Wealth, published in 2006. He is currently Professor of Public Policy Practice at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government and Executive Director of INET Oxford. Eric joins me to assess progress during the last 18 years and prospects for the future. One of Eric's recent essays that ...

In 1831, two youths embarked upon voyages that would change the way that we view the world today. The first was Charles Darwin and the second was Alexis de Tocqueville. Both addressed the nature of competition, cooperation, and community in ways that are highly relevant to the social dilemmas facing us today. Join the legendary Robert Putnam and me as we update these pioneers on what Tocqueville called "self interest, rightly under...

Guru Madhavan is Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar, Senior Director of Programs, and Director of the Forum on Complex Unifiable Systems (FOCUS) at the US National Academy of Engineering. His new book is on how to solve wicked problems anywhere, but it is also rooted in a particular place--Binghamton, New York--where Guru did his graduate training at Binghamton University and where we first met and started working with each other. ...

In my writing on generalized Darwinism as a new paradigm for economics and public policy, I stress that it doesn't fall into any current ideological camp. It isn't left, right, or libertarian and draws upon the valid elements of all three. This conversation with the political economist and social philosopher Paul Dragos Aligica illustrates what I mean. Paul is KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest and Senior R...

Is it time to fundamentally rethink economics - its theoretical foundations, activities and processes; its purpose and goals? How should we reimagine and redesign our economic models to better reflect and serve human needs and wants, and the flourishing of all life on our one planet?

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It is often said that the world faces challenges that are complex and systemic. But in fact, the world is a complex, interconnected "system of syst...

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 Multile...