Intergroup conflict is required
Wednesday 28 January 2026Rachell Powell in conversation with Sean Carroll¹
Given the standard evolutionary account of why and how human morality evolved, it appears that there are certain types of moral systems—or certain spaces of moral possibility—that are extremely difficult to achieve or are not sustainable, due to the highly parochial, tribalistic moralities that we have inherited.
There is a whole story behind that, but the idea is that, in order to produce altruism within groups, intergroup conflict is required. As a result, a form of group-level selection favors groups that are moral, but this strategy is adaptive only because of competition with other groups. What emerges, in effect, is in-group favoritism and out-group antagonism, which are extremely universal in humans. This is the evolutionary picture.
... some people would want to say, well, we ultimately won't be able to sustain [more normative ways] of being, which you might say, oh, this what's happening at this moment in the world is kind of evidence of.
But I personally think you got to see the bigger arc and the bigger trajectory. I think it's a little too fine-grained to make that conclusion. But I think the sort of upshot is that humans have a capacity for normativity. This is going back to your question about normativity, for understanding, for thinking about what's right and what ought to be. That's not... That's kind of open-ended. And under certain kinds of circumstances, humans are able to step back, critique the kind of norms that they're following and make consistency judgments and other things that allow them to interrogate and improve our moral systems.
I think that what is critical for humans to be able to do that is the creation of certain kinds of social conditions that do not replicate the cues and triggers from the early ancestral environment to which we respond with out-group antagonism. This is a large and complex process. It requires the creation of surpluses, education, and many other supporting factors.
It is also very easy to reverse this progress and regress rapidly when there are actual or perceived conditions of scarcity, intergroup competition, or predation of one group by another. Whether these conditions are real does not matter, because culturally they can be invoked polemically: people can be led to believe they exist, and that alone can trigger highly exclusivist, strongly xenophobic, out-group attitudes.
... we might know the playbook of a demagogue, but that doesn't mean we're going to be able to successfully battle it.
... maybe we'll get to a point in human history where we reach a level of stability that we're a lot more comfortable with. But right now, it is quite precarious. We honestly don't... I would not have said this like 15 years ago, but I really don't know where we're going to be 30 years from now. I really don't.
Notes
1. I’ve smoothed out the text a bit here and there. Emphasis mine.
Visible link: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/26/342-rachell-powell-on-evolutionary-convergence-morality-and-mind/
bad motives
Thursday 1 January 2026“A Big Misunderstanding”, David Pinsof link
- “What if the primary cause of humanity’s problems is not bad beliefs, but bad motives?”
While reflecting on these questions, you may reach an unpleasant conclusion: there’s nothing you can do. The world doesn’t want to be saved.
Sure, you can tell the politicians they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, a politician’s job is to win the support of biased voters. Sure, you can tell the voters they’re “biased,” but at the end of the day, the voters have basically no incentive to be unbiased, and strong incentive to parrot their tribe’s propaganda. Sure, you can tell the press about these terrible misunderstandings, but the press will only write about them if it increases their market share of the attention economy. Sure, you can tell the consumers to stop paying attention to attention-grabbing bullshit, but therein lies the problem: they won’t pay attention to you.