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PODCAST

This View of Life

This View of Life

This View of Life takes a deep dive with the best and brightest thinkers on anything and everything from an evolutionary perspective. TVOL is a product of the non-profit ProSocial World and hosted by co-founder and President David Sloan Wilson.

science social sciences

All Episodes

01:24:18

The Evolution of Place: How Environments Shape Us

This View of Life ·

2025/10/27

What if your neighborhood is quietly shaping your stress levels, immune system, and trust in others? In this episode, David Sloan Wilson talks with David McAleavey, Amy Clair, Blair Gross, and Rick O'Gorman about how environmental cues – such as order, greenery, and decay – act as signals to our brains and bodies. From the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress to the Social Baseline Theory, we explore why where you live affects how you feel, think, and connect. Tune in to see your environment

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01:04:03

Evolving Prosocial AI: A conversation with Peter...

This View of Life ·

2025/10/22

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 startup world and a lifelong student of philosophy, brings a unique lens to technology. Together, they explore how the principles of variation, selection,

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01:00:36

Forever Green: Building a cooperative innovation...

This View of Life ·

2025/09/23

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 initiative.

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01:21:21

The Science of Imagined Worlds: Evolution and Ecology...

This View of Life ·

2025/08/22

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 cooperation in reality?

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01:18:14

Shaping AI for Good: Prosocial Hybrid Intelligence...

This View of Life ·

2025/06/27

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 sustainability—and the emerging field of hybrid intelligence, where

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01:19:12

Democracy’s Deep Roots: From Hunter-Gatherers to...

This View of Life ·

2025/06/02

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 parliaments, our ancestors developed powerful, organic systems for

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01:19:48

Decolonizing Ecology: Rethinking Nature in a Broken...

This View of Life ·

2025/05/02

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 into questions at the intersection of science, history, and justice

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01:03:13

Addressing the Wicked Problem of Housing Insecurity...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

Originally published on September 9, 2024

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01:30:15

Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 direct experience living with and researching indigenous people in

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01:17:21

Hunter-Gatherer Societies, Human Origins, and Modern...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 human evolutionary biology, along with direct experience living with

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01:33:44

Barry-Wehmiller’s Bold Experiment in Prosocial...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 Leadership at Barry-Wehmiller. But BW deserves to become known far beyond

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36:53

Assessing the Complexity/Evolution Paradigm for...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 we discuss is titled Toward a New Ontological Framework for the

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51:56

Conscious Capitalism Viewed Through The Lens of a New...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 Chapman. Originally published May 10, 2024.

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01:12:04

Evolving Prosocial Cities, with Jonathan Rose

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 the last 50 years--complex systems science and generalized

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01:10:08

A Theory of Everyone as a New Paradigm with Michael...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 nature of generalized Darwinism and how it can improve our ability to

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43:05

Updating Darwin and Tocqueville on Self Interest,...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 understood." Originally published May 20, 2024.

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01:02:16

Wicked Problems and How To Solve Them with Guru Madhavan

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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. Join me as we discuss the general nature of wicked problems and how

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01:07:53

Depolarizing Economic Theory and Practice with Paul...

This View of Life ·

2025/04/01

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 Research Fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in

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35:01

Announcing a New Paradigm for Economics and Beyond...

This View of Life ·

2024/08/26

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? ‍‍ 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 systems”. These complexities and interconnectivities amplify the global

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01:01:25

Anti-Trust From a Multilevel Evolutionary Perspective...

This View of Life ·

2023/03/15

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,

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57 results

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