Rachell Powell

speaker

762 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 26 Jan

Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind · 26 Jan 2026 podcast

efficient form of locomotion than knuckle walking.

Not quadrupedal, but knuckle walking.

So you can get to this new adaptive peak in the right environment, but then a long time, millions of years go by right before you're making really good use of those fine motors.

And so there's so much like that, right?

And so I think, going into the nature of cumulative culture, I don't think humans are that smart.

And let me just say what I mean by that.

I don't mean to be iconoclastic, but I genuinely believe this to be true.

I do not think humans are, however you would operationalize this, I don't think humans are smarter than, say, dolphins.

I don't.

I don't believe that.

I do believe that we benefit from cumulative culture.

And that is a tremendous, tremendous difference.

And I think that that's where the focal point of contingency lies.

And that's the closest I can come to anything even approaching a Fermi paradox resolution on genuinely biological grounds.

That is the signature of contingency in macroevolution.

And you see that in lots of cases, like in the history of life, where it takes an enormous amount of time for some innovation to suddenly pop out.

And when you look down at even at very basic genetic levels, like trying to understand how innovations arise, that's what it looks like has to happen.

And so that introduces an enormous...

I can't think of a good word for it, but an enormous sort of point in which contingency arises at every level of biological organization.

It could be at the mutation level, it's genetic backgrounds interacting with other aspects of genetic backgrounds, genetic backgrounds interacting with stochastic environments, different biotic lineages interacting with each other strategically.

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