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

But if you go broader,

And you think about convergentist explanations, instead of saying why did this lineage differ from this other lineage, what you're asking is why did these two lineages arrive at similar endpoints?

Now, you know, you might come up with some underlying common causes that look like they have a more sort of deeper or more law-like structure to them, which is like you're saying, like, I mean, they're just, they're different questions.

And I'm not saying that one is more important, you know, than another.

But if you want to think more broadly about evolutionary patterns and process, as opposed to like human specific quirky evolution, then it is important to go broader.

So, yeah, that's a great and a very important question, which sort of, it does touch upon what I just said a second ago, which is that, like, when people ask, well, what do we learn from social insects about how morality ought to be?

It's like nothing.

I mean, do you see how they treat each other?

But, you know, then again, like, what are we going to learn from, you know, aggressive colonialists?

I mean, you know, it's not that different.

But, yeah.

But I think – but it's a really important question, and I have a book that I co-wrote with a political philosopher, Alan Buchanan, from 2018 called The Evolution of Moral Progress.

And basically that book is essentially an argument that it sort of poses this sort of question –

if we take the standard evolutionary picture about why and how human morality evolved, it looks like there are certain types of, there's certain space of moral possibility that looks like it's extremely difficult to achieve or not sustainable because of the highly kind of parochial, tribalistic,

moralities that we are the legacy of.

There's a whole story behind that, but the idea is, in order to get the kind of altruism within the groups, you need these intergroup conflicts.

You have a group-level selection process that selects for groups that are moral, but the only reason that that strategy is adaptive is in competition with other groups.

You have essentially what amounts to in-group favoritism and out-group antagonism, which is extremely universal in humans.

That's the evolutionary picture.

But then you say, look at especially post-enlightenment.

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