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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A normative society is precisely what the word means, which is a society that's law governed and governed by rules, not sheer power, not self-interest.
And I think that that's precisely what you get in all sorts of rules in social insect societies.
Most of them surround reproduction.
In humans, we have lots of different rules.
Lots of different norms because we're far more open-ended in our ability to learn different normative contents and so forth.
But I think ultimately they're playing the same functional role, which is to stabilize highly cooperative social structures where you're essentially cooperating in every avenue of life.
like foraging and food sharing and warfare and collective defense and pedagogy and industry and all of those things.
I think that when you start to think about traits in a deeply biological way where you don't tie them to very specific
uniquely human, very anthropocentric cognitive causes, then you could start to really appreciate the depths of convergence on social structures.
that helps you really get well beyond, I think, the prison of anthropocentricism, and it might cause us to go back and say, well, what is human morality?
Oh, actually, that's just what it is.
It just happens to be working with what humans got, because we can't just be operated on by natural selection through simple mutations that are gonna cause a behavior.
We need to remain flexible in many ways,
so what do we do well you know we have all sorts of complex learning environments and you know so like you know social insects you don't need to you know you could you could have a mutation that gets them to operate a single way in a certain way that's particularly altruistic in humans it's harder to do that so in some sense ants have in common with humans but are different than chimpanzees because they have law enforcement
yes and i i mean that is absolutely they do have police forces and they you know they do have what i would call an institutionalized form of norm enforcement um whereas it's it's far i'm not saying that it's in like it's absolutely ruled out in chimpanzee societies but there's not a lot of strong evidence for subordinate
enforcement of rules, which would explain why chimpanzee societies are not that cooperative.
I mean, if you read a book on human cooperation, it'll often start with something like, apart from the social insects, humans are the most cooperative animal on Earth.
And then I'm like, well, wait a minute.
Let's go back to that.
What's going on there?
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