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

They can't actually see.

They're not visual foragers.

That's obviously laughable, right?

I mean, from a biological standpoint.

But that is kind of what goes on when you take defining human traits and specify them in a way that makes them essentially non-replicable.

And so I think, for example, going back to the issue of social norms, so I think of social norms essentially as rules of conduct that regulate behavior in social groups in order to stabilize ultra-cooperation.

And I think that you can get that through many different cognitive avenues.

And one of them

I mean, the humans are the obvious example, but the best case, I think, for social norms outside of human beings is actually not in the animals you might expect.

In my view, it's not in cetaceans like dolphins and whales.

It's not even in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.

It's actually in Social Insects where you get a robust institutionalization of rules of conduct that are enforced by subordinates against everyone in the colony.

And even chimps don't manage really to do that very well.

Chimps are still structured in highly hierarchical ways where you can get turnover of dominant individuals through alliance making and so on.

But you don't get rule of all by all.

And I think in social insects, there's a strong argument to be made that that's precisely what you get.

And that's because you can see that it's critical that when you're talking about how social norms are enforced, in order for there to be social norms, you need to see them enforced by subordinates.

This is not just dominant individuals coercing other individuals to behave.

That's pervasive in animals.

But that's not what a normative society is.

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