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
Why?
What's going on with the social insects?
But it's as if they're not relevant because they're so evolutionarily distant from us.
Their life ways are so alien in many ways.
Their life cycles.
It's very hard to wrap our mind around them.
They operate on time scales that we can barely process.
Um, and so like we're, you know, it's easy, it's much easier for us to think about chimpanzees, you know, societies then, and it would be about, but you know, despite it's, it's actually, it's not despite these radical differences in their life ways and their life cycles and their development and their, um, their cognition.
It's not despite that, but it's actually because of that, that we can start to clean, um,
really big lessons about social evolution and where humans fit into this bigger social evolution picture.
No, you're right.
The objection is something like, look, if you're going to ... I'm thinking of the World War II variable, but there's going to be the contemporary FSB version in Ukraine, but I'm thinking of the NKVD barrier troops, forcing Soviet infantry to keep moving forward, and they'll shoot them if they try to turn ...
Like, you know, social insects don't need an insect equivalent of the NKVD for the most part because, right, they can just be, you know, in defense of the motherland, right?
You know, they can evolve these relatively stable mutations that then generate certain kinds of behavior.
But the reality is that, and first of all, I want to say that I don't really care about
how these functions emerge in development.
Genetics and environment and culture are just all resources that then shape, bias certain outcomes in ontogeny.
There's nothing special about – I mean, well, there's debates about this, but I'm not sure that there's anything special about genes in that regard.
They're just yet another important resource that could be used to shape an ontogenetic outcome, which could then affect evolution.
And humans are subject to that exact same thing.
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