EFR 804: What is the Purpose of Life? What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence with Dr. Samuel Wilkinson

00:00 - Speaker 1 The following is an Operation Podcast production. Why does it seem to always come down to a religious view and then a scientific view? Are those the only two camps?

00:09 - Speaker 2 That's a good question. I've never been asked that question before. This is an attempt to bring together two topics that at least some in the scientific community had said these can't ever go together. You know, you think of evolution as a giant tree, or at least that's how it's sometimes portrayed and you have things on very different parts of the tree that develop the same things independently.

00:29 It's not just in mating and reproduction, again, also in selfishness and altruism, in aggression and cooperation, in cruelty and kindness. Right, there's this duality to our nature. Evolution has shaped us so that we have both. This is what I refer to as the duality to our nature. Evolution has shaped us so that we have both. This is what I refer to as the dual potential of human nature. I've used kind of biological terms, but if you're maybe taking it from another angle, theological, you know you would say good and evil, and when you combine that with the capacity that we have to choose free will, to me it seems like life is a test between the kind of the selfishness and the altruism within us.

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02:55 Welcome back to Everford Radio everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in with me here today. If you're new, welcome If you're returning, thank you as always. There are literally millions of podcasts out there that you can be tuning into today to learn something about entrepreneurship, relationships, health, fitness, wellness, consciousness. But you know what I like to take them all. Bundle it into here, everford Radio. You're going to walk away today learning one thing, at least one thing that you can apply to your life to help advance you forward, to take a step forward and to keep living a life ever forward. My guest today is Dr Samuel Wilkinson. He is the Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Yale Depression Research Program. Associate director of the Yale Depression Research Program. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His articles have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post and even the Wall Street Journal.

03:52 But today we are here to highlight a couple very light subject matters. I'm kidding, of course, because we're diving into purpose and how we all got here. We're talking about what evolution and human nature imply about the meaning of our existence. By integrating emerging principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, ranging from evolutionary biology to psychology, sam provides a framework of evolution that not only applies, not only that there is an overarching purpose to our existence, but what this purpose is. We address the complexities of human nature and social behavior shaped by evolutionary forces. We even reflect on how technology is altering the fabric of our connections and the integral role of social dynamics in our well-being. So if you have ever wondered how we got here and why we're here, this is the episode for you where we bridge those two worlds. And now we can't talk about evolution, we can't talk about the human race without talking about procreation.

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07:37 - Speaker 2 Yeah, a lot of this goes back to about 15 years ago. I was in medical school and for a long time in the literature about evolution there has been this sense that there's no such thing as purpose in evolution, there's no such thing as meaning, it's all just an illusion, and I didn't like that. There was this period I went through back then as a medical student where I kind of had this struggle, this you could maybe call it an existential crisis where I thought that what I was learning in medical, I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical. I was learning in medical.

08:22 You know, I was reading, I was meditating, I was you know, I'm a religious person I was praying, and then, in a way that's kind of hard to describe things just kind of came together and I decided at that point that I wanted to write a book, and so there's a little bit of a personal narrative behind that. But but this is an attempt to bring together two topics that at least some in the scientific community had said these can't ever go together you start off the work kind of talking about two main categories.

08:57 - Speaker 1 Many have compartmentalized how we view the world into these two main categories a scientific worldview and a religious one. Why does it always seem to come down to those two buckets when we look at how did we get here and why are we here? Why does it seem to always come down to a religious view and then a scientific view? Are those the only two camps?

09:17 - Speaker 2 That's a good question. I've never been asked that question before. Sometimes in one of the camps, people say a religious and or philosophical view, and part of it just has to do with the fact that certain questions seem to be, at least at this point, outside of what we can find out or learn or discover through the scientific process. Discover through the scientific process and you know, sometimes people will say, well, a lot of the questions of how those are questions that that are relevant to science and science can can help us inform, help inform us about, okay, how does this work? How does that work? But other questions of, maybe, why, why do we? You know, why is there suffering? Why is why are we here? Science seems not to be able to offer answers that, at least for a lot of people, are.

10:16 - Speaker 1 No hard answers, no like ultimatums like A plus B equals C, for sure, all the time yeah.

10:22 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so. So in some ways it's like well, science has this kind of realm and everything outside of there. Maybe religion or philosophy might, might be able to shed some light on this.

10:33 - Speaker 1 You mentioned earlier that you're a religious man and correct me if I'm wrong a Latter-day Saint, right? Yes, okay, yeah, I come from a religious background as well. Grew up Southern Baptist, you know, pretty much aligned still to Christianity I've definitely. You know, I'm wearing beads now. So I feel like I'm very much into the spiritual health aspect, you know, outside of just religion. But you remind me of? I had a guest late last year, dr Tara Swart. Okay, familiar with her I'm not, unfortunately. Okay, she's from the UK and also an MD, traditionally trained doctor, but is now talking about manifestation and spirituality. It became so much more apparent to her that there were way more things in the spiritual aspect, the non-scientifically explainable things of life. Meaning, how did we get here? Um, that kind of pulled her even more and more I'm curious to. The same thing happened to you. Were you, would you say you were more religious going into the scientific community or vice versa, or you kind of feel like you're in a blend of the two.

11:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess I would say that I'm a blend of the two. I, for the most part, I feel very at home in science. That wasn't always the case, right, and this goes back to this kind of struggle I had. I think science can be a very, very powerful tool and it has been able to help us to live better lives, to eliminate or reduce suffering. But at the same time, I think most people would argue and accept that there's still a lot of problems that we have, some of which are not, at least at the current our current understanding.

12:25 Science may not be able to help us with so much. So many of the social problems are problems of how do we help people to behave in better ways, and so forth. Science can inform us in that sense, but I think there is a realm of the universe that, at current moment, science doesn't really seem to have any access to, and that's also of great interest to me. I think when we go to that area, we've got to be careful because lots of people are going to have different ways they interpret it. Got to be careful because lots of people are going to have different ways they interpret it and um, and we need to respect one another's differences of opinion where you know, evidence isn't isn't so clear and, and I think coercion in terms of is is a very is a place we want to stay away from right to kind of bring it back to your work around the concept of evolution.

13:26 - Speaker 1 Couldn't the argument be made that what we deem where we deem the line of science ends and spirituality, the unexplained aspects of life, come and start? It's just a matter of humans haven't evolved quite yet, Science hasn't evolved quite yet to give us the answers. I think back to a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, things that we thought were mystical and unexplainable and maybe were lobbed into kind of that non-scientific realm 50 years later, a hundred years later, 500 years later, realm 50 years later, 100 years later, 500 years later, science did have meaning for it and reasons for it. So my question, I guess, is is all non-scientific parts of human experience and evolution just a matter of time until we catch up?

14:17 - Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great point. So what you're alluding to is what some might call so some people of religious faith. They maybe put their faith in where we don't understand. You might call this a God of the gaps. So you know, my God explains what science can't explain. If you're a person of faith, that's a little bit of shaky ground because, as you've alluded to, science often fills in those gaps later. And so if it fills in those gaps and you say, well, this is where God used to be, then you have a shrinking an entity, really, in my personal beliefs, a person-like entity that kind of understands the principles and laws by which the universe is governed and uses those principles to kind of further the divine work. So I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of existence, when there's some sense that the curtain will be unfolded and we'll kind of see things as they really are, the wizard pops out from behind the curtain, exactly.

15:39 That things can be explained, things that now are mysterious to us and wonderful to us can be explained. That, at least for me, won't necessarily take away from the wonder and the awe. In some ways it might enhance it. So just because you can't explain maybe spiritual phenomena doesn't mean that you will never be able to, and when you are able to, it doesn't necessarily make it less wonderful or less miraculous. Okay, so you know what is, you know what is wonderful or what is miraculous. I mean the process by which we, you know, life happens. You have a like reproduction, for instance, you have two cells that fuse, right? We, you know. We don't necessarily have to go into the details, but there's this process.

16:29 - Speaker 1 Ask your parents everybody. Yeah, when see when, when a man loves a woman.

16:33 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, exactly embryogenesis, where you have this, this single cell. You know, all of us our, our existence, our mortal existence started as a single cell and after just about 40 cycles of of division, of replication of that cell, you have essentially a fully formed human being. There's we, we understand some of this, but there's still a lot we don't understand about how there's this cascade of genes that turn on and off and and biochemical processes. It's a miracle, but there seems to be an order and laws and principles that kind of govern this. But even when we can maybe understand every little kind of nook and cranny of this process, it's still going to be wow, like you know, it's amazing. So again, at the end of the day, at the end of existence, when the curtain kind of opens and we can maybe see things as they really are, I think you will be able to explain even maybe spiritual phenomena that, to our current understanding, is like out of reach.

17:39 But that won't necessarily make it less wonderful or less miraculous.

17:44 - Speaker 1 Does that make sense? It does, and you know, with my background in health and fitness, I always go to these, uh, physiology and nutrition analogies, fitness analogies. It makes me think of the way that we can just eat food stuff. The way that we can put food, drink, nutrients, calories into our body, get energy, build muscle, maintain body composition, have all these things, you know, nourish a growing fetus.

18:07 Um, doesn't make it any more magical when I, in undergrad, discovered the krebs cycle yeah when I, when I looked at oh, krebs cycle, glycolysis, oh, this is how we actually break down foodstuffs, create energy, and that there's the scientific explanation in my maybe it's just me, but but I feel like the more science I understand and the more scientific explanations I get for things that beforehand were just like, oh, wow, that's incredible, like how is this happening? It, almost to your point, adds another layer and even more magical layer of wow, that's an explanation for what's happening. But where did all that come from? What's the divine or the design behind it? And for me that kind of comes into the world of well, now we're talking about consciousness and you know what is really the essence of that and the design behind that still still a big mystery there, you know, I think to say the least we're we're, I think, many, many years off from understanding this, what what someone called the hard problem of consciousness in in my field, you might call it the mind brain gap.

19:10 - Speaker 2 How, how does how do these physical things, how do these physical things like neurons and and neurotransmitters somehow spring forth to these intangible things? Like thoughts, emotions, the sense of like. How did?

19:22 - Speaker 1 the neuron get there? Yeah, you know. How did the dendrite get there? How did how did they make these connections? You know? Oh, we can explain all the electrolytes and neural connection activities and all that. But then it's like how did they get there? Who decided that they were going to talk to this? And when they come together it causes a thought or memory or emotion. Yeah, now I'm just kind of getting in my own rabbit hole, but in writing this book I'm always curious with authors, and especially someone like yourself who's had so many years in the medical field. What stood out to you the most? What was the biggest surprise when looking at the human experience, particularly human evolution? Was something really solidified for you, or did you make a discovery? What is it about the human experience that really stood out to you most?

20:02 - Speaker 2 There were a lot of kind of surprises along the way. I guess I was just surprised at at least from my take how compelling the evidence is for some of these principles. One of the things that I thought evolution implied about just the nature of the universe is how random things were right. I think most people when they think oh, the theory of evolution, it's kind of random change, right, and I think there is some level of randomness.

20:30 - Speaker 1 Is that the concept of entropy, like everything, will always go into chaos?

20:33 - Speaker 2 Well, kind of, but the assumption has always been right these molecular mutations that drive evolutionary change are random. And henceforth, you know, evolution doesn't know where it's going, and henceforth, life is a fortunate but still an accident.

20:51 - Speaker 1 There's no roadmap, it's just pure accident and so henceforth.

20:55 - Speaker 2 There's no purpose or meaning, right? It's just kind of this fluke set of circumstances and events that unfolded in a way that for us is fortunate but doesn't really have any purpose or meaning. And I think that is a kind of a view of the data that has changed and there's a lot of compelling data to suggest an alternative way to understand the process and it. Then this has to do with the, the phenomenon where different, um, you know, you think of evolution as a giant tree, or at least that's how it's sometimes, uh, uh, portrayed, and you have things on very different parts of the tree that develop the same things independently meaning. So I'll give an example um, so, birds, bats and butterflies, they all have wings and they can all fly, obviously, but scientists tell us that they're, that they each independently developed wings separate, right, and, and so it's like it's not like they're all part of the winged community, correct, correct?

22:00 right, you know, bat is a mammal bird.

22:02 A bird is? Well, it's a bird, you know. A butterfly is an insect. So they, you know, not all mammals have wings, and so they each independently and separately develop this capacity. So you're like huh, that's curious, right?

22:17 Maybe another example a shark and a dolphin. Okay, they look very, very similar, right, you would think that they're closely related, but they're really not. So the dolphin is a mammal and we're told, the dolphin's ancestors lived on land and somehow, over time, the dolphin kind of went back into the water and the appendages, the arms and legs, if you will, they kind of devolved into fins and flippers, whereas a shark is a fish. Okay, so a dolphin has a skeleton of bone, kind of like you and I, whereas a shark has a skeleton of cartilage. Okay, but they look extremely similar. You would think they were very closely related, but they're not. They each independently developed this very, very similar form. They each independently developed this very, very similar form which helps them swim well, and even some of the counter shading so many species of dolphins and sharks have this dark counter shading on top and this light shading on the bottom, and this helps them be camouflaged in the water right.

23:19 If you're looking up, you see this white and it kind of blends into the light. If you're looking down, you see dark and it blends in with the dark. So this obviously helps them either evade predators or sneak up on prey, maybe in the instance of the shark. So you know you're like huh. There's these patterns that keep occurring. Is the eye. This is maybe one of the most famous examples. You know eyes have developed independently about 40 different times the human eye.

23:44 Or just eyeballs in general, eyes in general. There's a couple different types of eye. The type of eye that we have is called a camera type eye and we have almost exactly the same structure of eye as an octopus or squid.

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25:10 - Speaker 2 But we're not that closely related and so we each independently developed basically the same identical structure. Okay, so you're like huh, what's going on here? You get this pattern over and over and over again, where there's this quote, I like it says you know, once is an instance, twice maybe a coincidence, but three times or more makes a pattern, and at this point pretty much everything has evolved more than once. So you know, I'm drawing potentially theological or religious implications from this. But even Richard Dawkins, who's probably our generation's most outspoken atheist for those of you who never heard of him he would agree that this pattern, you know, holds. In fact, he once asked a friend of his, a colleague, a biologist. He said can you think of quote good ideas that have developed only once? And his friend could only think of a handful.

26:03 - Speaker 1 That's a tough question.

26:04 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. When you think of the hundreds and even thousands, maybe 10,000s, of kind of structures, biological structures, and quote good ideas that have developed, almost all of them have have developed more than once. So you're like, was it really random? And I think the answer is, well, it was a mix of randomness and non random. So, like your eyes, your, your eye color may be a random reassortment of your parents genes, but the fact that you have eyes and that they're structured the way they are, seems to be kind of intrinsic to the self-organizing principles of biological matter.

26:45 So it's kind of a mix of. I think the ratio of nonrandomness to randomness is much greater than we. In other words, it was much more of a nonrandomness to randomness is much greater than we may. In other words, it was much more of a non-random process than people originally understood. So for me that was very satisfying to say. Okay, maybe life wasn't just an accident. Maybe it's like inherent in the principles of biology, chemistry and physics that you know life developed like it did.

27:13 - Speaker 1 You hit on such a great point that I wanted to cover. I just wrote down evolution, random chance or guided process. And. I feel like you kind of brought us there, Staying on topic right now, with the evolution aspect and this human experience. Where do you think right now 2024, humans are the least evolved? Where do you think we have the most room or where do you maybe see as the next step in evolution in the human experience?

27:38 - Speaker 2 That's a good question. It's a process, as we understand, that moves very slowly, and so for our timescales, the average age life expectancy maybe in the US is somewhere around 75 or 80 years.

27:52 - Speaker 1 We'll keep biohacking. We'll come back in 1,000 years. We'll revisit this. You know, I want a benchmark well, where are we going?

27:59 - Speaker 2 uh, that's a good question.

28:00 - Speaker 1 I mean what is even possible in in between now and 3024? What do you think is possible?

28:07 - Speaker 2 well, I don't, I don't think in in just a thousand years there's not a whole lot of biological change. Certainly there's what you would call cultural evolution, and this can happen quite rapidly, and especially as our technologies advance. You know, we've got AI, we've got the internet. We're just incredibly connected and there are benefits to that. There are also drawbacks to that. That were you know, especially in mental health. There are serious um problems with the way especially teenagers, young adults, are connecting these days and or not not connecting in person because they're, quote, connected, you know, through virtual means.

28:45 Um, I, you know what I, I, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you. There's going to be this physical change and we're going to grow a you, you know, a third arm or something like that. You know, I don't think that's going to happen. Culturally, I think we could go, you know a couple of different ways, and what I hope is that we can, um, you know, a lot of people think we're going to annihilate ourselves and a lot of people we're going to, we're going to, you know, contribute so much to changing of the climate that the earth is just going to fry, we won't even be here in a thousand years yeah, yeah, um, I I don't think that's necessarily the case, um, but, but you know, the the most urgent problems that I see that we have are social problems and problems that that have their root in the fact that we have this immense capacity to be selfish and aggressive, but we also have an immense capacity to be loving and caring and cooperative and look out for others before ourselves.

29:41 - Speaker 1 So all by just a choice really. You could choose to act out of compassion or love, or choose to act out of fear or hatred.

29:48 - Speaker 2 That's a very boiled down statement, but I would agree with that. Obviously there's some.

29:54 - Speaker 1 But it doesn't take a massive physiological change or evolutionary change for us to go. You know, I think I'm just not being an asshole anymore. You know, I think I'm going to love my neighbor, yeah, yeah.

30:03 - Speaker 2 Certainly biology and culture and where you come from they play into that right, and it is very complex. One of the things that I think is very interesting and important is to understand what sorts of situations will help people to be on their best behavior. So you know one maybe. Just example of this is a lot of people feel this intense sense of compassion and desire to do good when something really tragic happens.

30:32 - Speaker 1 Okay, so I have to make meaning out of this.

30:35 - Speaker 2 Well, or I, you know this, this poor, unfortunate soul. I got to help them, I got to reach out. So I'll give you an example of this. I live in Connecticut and it was what? 12 years ago, 11 or 12 years ago, there was this terrible shooting at a school in in Newtown, connecticut. It's called Sandy Hook. Oh, you may remember this terrible shooting at a school in Newtown.

30:54 - Speaker 1 Connecticut. It's called Sandy Hook, you may remember this.

30:57 - Speaker 2 He was probably 20 or 25, walked in and just started shooting up the elementary school. It was just terrible. I can't remember exactly how many children died, but a number of them did, and I live about 30 or 45 minutes from there and our church congregation, you know we heard about this. All this is terrible. We want to do something. We want to make like care kits or something like that, and so there was a group that got together that next Sunday and they were getting ready to try to do something. Lo and behold, we learned that all of the siblings of the children who died, basically their future college tuition, had already been paid for just by this overwhelming outpouring of support and love from across the country. Right Because people were just, their heartstrings were pulled. They said this is such a terrible thing. I want to help. I want to, you know, I want to reach out and be compassionate right.

31:49 - Speaker 1 That's amazing, I would argue. I would rather see a pool of money for their future therapy well, I mean, they probably that's a massive trauma yeah, I'm not sure they stipulated it had to be called, you know.

32:01 - Speaker 2 But a huge outpouring of still incredible.

32:04 Absolutely, yeah, yeah so you see that over and over again, where there's a tragedy, there's this, this intense surge of compassion. Now that's interesting, but you can't, really necessarily you shouldn't, I would say try to engineer tragedies so that people are on their best behavior. So I think we need to look for other ways, other kind of social contexts in which people are on their best behavior. And one of the conclusions that I've come to and I think the data behind this is just very, very compelling is that when people, and especially men I'm going to not to pick on men, but you know, a lot of the violent crime in our society is at the hands of men but when men are tied to the rearing of their children, they tend to be on their best better, better behavior. Okay, they are more they, they. They want their neighborhood to be good, they want their kids to grow up in a place that's safe, and so they're. You know, they, they. They get drawn into the community in ways that maybe they will otherwise wouldn't if they were maybe not connected.

33:15 - Speaker 1 Is this the part in your book you're talking about, kind of the why of monogamy.

33:19 - Speaker 2 Well, that's part of it. I do think monogamy is a huge kind of achievement of our race, but it is very related to that. Some people look and they'll say, well, look, you know human nature. We're not monogamous by nature and so this kind of society we do it kind of goes against it evolutionarily speaking right or biologically speaking.

33:42 That's kind of the argument behind that we're not yeah, yeah, yeah not meant to be monogamous I would say it's not that simple and that there is a a drive that we do have also to to be monogamous and and in a lot of ways, in a lot of um, kind of traits, we are pulled in different directions, right? So I I alluded to this early I.

34:03 - Speaker 3 I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this early I. I alluded to this earlier. I alluded to this earlier. I alluded to this earlier. I alluded to this earlier. I alluded to this earlier. I alluded to this earlier.

34:18 - Speaker 2 I alluded to this earlier One person with one partner, and we kind of are stuck in the middle, and people who study, they call them non-human primates. We're categorized as primates, other primates, chimpanzees and so forth. There's this pattern, this physical pattern, where you can predict, just by looking at the structural difference between men and women, males and females, rather, in these primates, whether they behave in like a monogamous way or a non-monogamous way.

34:50 - Speaker 1 How? What does that look like? Like their actual physical features?

34:54 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it's pretty simple actually. So, let's say you discover a new species that is a primate, two new species, okay, and one is species A and the other is species B. Okay, this is drawn on the work from a Stanford professor, robert Sapolsky. But so species A, let's say the males and the females are pretty much identical in size and appearance, ok, an outward appearance, so they look identical. Species B the males are much larger than the females. Ok, and in addition, they have their faces look different, they have these elaborate facial coloration or trappings, and so just from those kind of differences what we call the academic term is sexual dimorphism, meaning differences in characteristics, physical characteristics between males and females you can predict what kind of mating strategies and patterns that they will have. Okay, so the species A, where the males and females are essentially identical, size and so forth, they have a long-term pair bonding or what we call monogamy. Okay, species B a very few proportion of males do almost all the mating and you know, basically you have what would essentially be a harem.

36:15 So you have, you know, uh, an alpha male that you know is able to uh, get a harem of females and mate with all of them going for the procreation game, yeah, yeah yeah, exactly okay, and um, uh, you know you have very, very small proportion of the males doing almost all the reproducing okay, whereas in in the, the other species a, where they're more or less the males and females are the same size, almost all of the males have a few offspring okay, and so they are more kind of in, in invested in their children, and species b, where you have the very large males, the male, the king male, the alpha male, has essentially no what we call parental investing in in the children.

36:59 So he doesn't really kind of, he doesn't really take care of the kids.

37:03 - Speaker 1 He's like I did my job. Yeah yeah, procreated mom, take care of it. Exactly, exactly.

37:07 - Speaker 2 Right. And so you look at humans and you say well, are we like species A or are we like species?

37:13 - Speaker 1 yeah, I have to ask this. This question is burning in my mind. Can we look at males and go? Based on how you look, certain physical features predict you're going to be monogamous or non-monogamous. Well, I would say it's a choice I would.

37:27 - Speaker 2 I would say that every male is going to be pulled in different directions. So so, going back to this this, you know species a and species b. You say which? Which ones do humans fit in? Are we like species a or like species b? And we're kind of in the middle, right. I mean males, men and women.

37:43 They, they do have differences. Men are, on average, about maybe 20, 30, 20, 25 percent larger than than than females, than you know. There are some differences in the. You know, men readily grow facial hair. There are some other kind of subtle differences as well, but the difference isn't quite as big as maybe the species B, where you have this male that's like twice the size of the female and the face looks totally different. So we are literally somewhere in between. Okay, and so you're saying can I look? Can I look at a human male and predict, is this person gonna be monogamous, promiscuous? I would say that each male and to some degree females as well, but to a lesser degree, each male has, kind of is pulled in different directions. Okay, and so there is some truth when, when people say, oh, we're not, we're not naturally, you know, it's not in our nature to be monogamous. I say well, which nature are you talking about?

38:42 - Speaker 1 because it's not yeah, is that biology? Is it spirituality? Is it consciousness? You know, we you say we're kind of somewhere in the middle. Yeah, what's the defining factor that is keeping us in the middle?

38:52 - Speaker 2 well, culture is a big one, okay, um, you know. So what, what culture you live in obviously has a big uh influence on kind of the behaviors that you will learn and follow and so forth. But but even from a biological sense, if you strip it down to just biology, that's kind of impossible to do. But if, if you could, I think what you would see is there's this kind of duality, there's this tension, and it runs down the line. It's not just in mating and reproduction, although it is there too, but again, also in selfishness and altruism, in aggression and cooperation, in cruelty and kindness.

39:30 Right, there's this duality to our nature, that in this, really to me it was an unexpected way Evolution has shaped us so that we have both okay, and you know this is what I refer to as the dual potential of human nature, okay, in, you know I've used kind of biological terms, but if you're maybe taking it from another angle, theological, you know you would say good and evil, okay, right, some people don't like those terms, but you know others resonate with them to choose right, free will. To me it seems like life is a test, right, between the kind of the selfishness and altruism within this. There's this, you know, when I was young I used to watch cartoons and there's this kind of cliche uh motif of of a man walking down the street and he has an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other right whispering in his ears and I think do it, don't, do it.

40:37 - Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly, don't do it.

40:39 - Speaker 2 I think that's maybe truer to reality than we might recognize, and, and this is one of the reasons that life is so hard, right, it's because we're literally, we're biologically it's like in our DNA to be pulled in more than one direction. Okay, and, and so this is what I think, this is one of the purposes of life, that life is is essentially a test of character, okay, and I think this is a truth that that a lot of the major world religions have kind of honed in on. Even before, you know, there was a theory of evolution and so forth. So so to me, in this area, I see a kind of a coming together where a lot of people perceive this conflict between science and faith. I see in this way they can be reinforcing.

41:27 - Speaker 1 I agree so wholeheartedly. And again I'll reiterate, the more that I have come to understand about one, the more I kind of tend to lean towards the other. It goes for the more that I figure out magical, mystical, heart centered, emotional, spiritual things. It makes me appreciate the actual existence of life and how amazing the scientific process of life and just us existing on this spinning giant rock, a thousand miles an hour, going in infinite directions at all times into nothingness, is like that's fucking wild. But then the more I kind of lean into like the science of everything and just like, oh, there has to be this unexplicable design, meaning design behind it all. We can't have one without the other.

42:14 But getting into kind of the meaning of life, to kind of your last point, there I have some quotes and references about the meaning of life from to your point, some different cultures, communities, even religions, and I'd be curious just to kind of get your hot take on it. Sure, yeah. So my first one actually is from the Baha'i faith and this is personal to me, my wife and all of her family they're Iranian, american person of the Baha'i faith. Um, I believe it's a beautiful religion. Technically it's one of the newer religions you can say it's been around only air quote a few hundred years, um, but it's a very widely accepting one. But the Baha'i faith says the quote the supreme cause for creating the world and all that is therein is for man to know God. How does that land on you?

43:03 - Speaker 2 I think it resonates with me One of the one of the in this book that I wrote, I tried to stay away from some of the theology and lean a lot on the science, in part because it's hard to answer what is God right, I do think—.

43:21 - Speaker 1 How much time you got yeah.

43:25 - Speaker 2 I do think that is another important purpose to life is to figure out and to wrestle with what is God? How can I know God? And and there's, you know, there's not a scientific consensus on this. A lot of scientists think there's no God and this is, you know, just a made up. You know wishful thinking that we should abandon, but but I do have a deep conviction that there is, you know, a higher power and known by different names, and that, yes, you know, part of the reason why we're here is to do our best to search out, even though we kind of can't see a lot. Search out what that means. And you know what does that imply about how we should treat other people. So, yeah, no, I like that treat other people.

44:17 - Speaker 1 So, yeah, no, I, I, I like that Next up coming from the gospel of Matthew, from uh, I don't know the um version here uh, niv King James, whatever from the Bible, matthew 10, chapter 10, verse 39 says if you cling to your life, you will lose it, but if you give up your life for me will find it I like that verse a lot and um, if we can go a little bit uh on the side here.

44:41 - Speaker 2 So the study of happiness okay, and and well-being it's. There's a lot we can dig into, but it's pretty clear that the most important factor for happiness and well-being is your relationships.

44:57 - Speaker 1 Quality of our relationships. The happiness project right, the good life project from Harvard.

45:01 - Speaker 2 Yep, yep, robert Waldinger. He was on the show last year. Oh, wonderful, yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously, you know, really important, not only that project, I mean, that's a very, very impressive project, especially in how long it's been going.

45:14 - Speaker 1 You know, 80 some years I think 85 years now the longest longitudinal human study on all-cause mortality, chronic illness, disease, happiness yeah, and that's one of the main findings, but lots of other studies as well, that the key to happiness and well-being is your relationships with other people.

45:31 - Speaker 2 And, um, you know, there I think a lot of people would agree that we're in the midst of a mental health crisis, right, depression, anxiety and that sort of thing, and there's a lot of potential reasons for this, but one of them is just we have our culture in the West has increasingly been focused on personal fulfillment and individual kind of status, and there is something to be said for that. And there, you know, there is a measure of well-being that comes from attaining a goal or an achievement and so forth, but to the effect that you focus so much on that that your personal relationships crumble. Then that is, I think, what that verse means that you find you're looking for your life and you lose it because we all want to be happy, but we have these what I would call cognitive illusions. We're not very good, it turns out. We're not very good at predicting what is going to make us happy.

46:41 - Speaker 1 How often does our happiness change? We latch on to something, this person, this relationship, this job, this workout, and then two, three, five years, 10, 20 years later, you don't want anything to do with it, you moved on.

46:54 - Speaker 2 Yeah Well, yeah, life is fickle and that's part of it. Another aspect is that we think we tend to overestimate how much happiness we're going to get from an achievement. Okay, so a couple of months ago I was in this training for young professors at Yale and it was a small group, maybe 15 people. At the very end of this two day training, they asked you know what? What are your kind of life goals? And a couple of people started to open up after this initial period where everyone's a little bit like they don't want to.

47:27 - Speaker 1 It's kind of no one wants to go first, right, yeah, yeah.

47:29 - Speaker 2 So you know what one person said, that she wanted to win the Nobel Prize, which is, like, probably the most coveted if I can use that word achievement in science. And it just got me thinking why is it that we want to do this? And for a lot of us, we think, you know, if I won the Nobel Prize, I win the lottery, whatever. I'm going to finally be happy, but it's, that's. There's a trap.

47:52 - Speaker 1 If, then, if, then that's what we think well it like say you won.

47:56 - Speaker 2 I don't know what the you know, what, what?

47:59 - Speaker 1 what the coveted prize is is for, like podcasters say, you win like, oh, I know, oh, I know exactly what it would be for me. It would be like, instead of everyone going, I heard on joe rogan or I heard on huberman lab it would go. I heard on everford radio. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard on everford.

48:13 - Speaker 2 We're working, it would go, I heard on Everford radio.

48:14 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, I heard on Everford. We're working on it. We're working on it.

48:16 - Speaker 2 So, say you get there though. Yeah. Is that going to really meaningfully affect your happiness?

48:20 - Speaker 1 Maybe for the first couple of weeks or months. It'd be cool to hear, but would it change my day to day work or my meaning? No, no.

48:29 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it another, really interesting. An interesting study, an influential study from the 1970s that drove this home had this provocative title of it's called Accident Victims and Lottery Winners. And so what they did is they assessed, they examined two very different groups of people. One group had won the lottery and the other group had suffered terrible accidents to where they were paraplegic, they lost the use of multiple limbs. And you know, if I ask you which group would you rather be in? It's kind of a no brainer, right. But when they asked them you know how much reward you get from these daily tasks and so forth the groups weren't really that different and by and large, the accident victims they reported they were more happy than not. And so this just illustrates this principle that, one, we're not very good at predicting what's going to make us happy. Two, there's this psychological concept called hedonic adaptation. Hedonic means pleasure or enjoyment.

49:39 - Speaker 1 Yeah, this was in the lust and love section of the book. I believe Close to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

49:47 - Speaker 2 Which is essentially hedonic. Adaptation means essentially that you are going to adapt, for better and for worse. Your happiness set point is kind of going to go back to where it was before after a lot of events. Okay, uh, so you win the lottery, you feel good for a month or two, whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then they're two whatever, but then, however, they're to whatever, but then they're to whatever, but then they're to whatever, but then, however is relationships, is that, you know, warm and intimate and caring relationships really do modify your happiness set point?

50:34 So I know this is I went on a crazy kind of tangent, but this verse you quoted from Matthew, you know that I know it essentially as he that seeketh his life shall lose it Right, and that if you do, if you are seeking your life in terms of individual status and accomplishment, and achievement to the detriment of personal relationships. That is a recipe for being lonely and miserable. A recipe for being lonely and miserable. And you know, there's this balance. Not that not that we shouldn't be striving to to improve ourselves and so forth, but but there's a, there's a balance that you have to maintain.

51:12 - Speaker 1 Amen, amen, absolutely. I have, um, I have several more, but I do have, uh, before I get to my clip, I'm going to, we're going to do clips now. Everybody, I have a clip that I think a lot of people speaking of will appreciate, from joe rogan. Okay, um, but I do want to ask a couple more. I'm trying to just be as inclusive as possible, because I do pull a lot of meaning out of my life, and how I become more creative and how I find better questions is by looking at a lot of different walks of life faith, sex beliefs, um and so, and so I look at Buddhism now. Okay, buddhism claims that life has meaning only if it is understood as a mere stepping stone to an enlightenment in which the self escapes from worldly concerns. I feel like we're running pretty parallel to the Matthew quote, but this is just another point, that there are so many similarities in meaning for life across so many religions and belief systems. So with this buddhism quote from the matthew quote, are we kind of landing on the same thing?

52:13 - Speaker 2 I think, a similar conclusion. Where you know worldly things money, status, possessions, those sorts of things they're necessary to live some baseline level of them. But if you attach yourself to them that's, I think, what this quote from Buddhism is kind of warning against that's not where you want to be going, and that's not where you're going to find meaning and fulfillment.

52:43 - Speaker 1 Now everyone's favorite Canadian, jordan Peterson. All right, the purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

52:58 - Speaker 2 That's interesting yeah.

52:59 - Speaker 1 What's your take on that Interesting?

53:01 - Speaker 2 Yeah, what's your take on that? Well, so much of. When you ask people, you know what do they find meaning? It has to do with being a part of something that is bigger than yourself. When, when people really buy into that, whether it's, you know, like you were in the military, being part of a team in the military. You know you probably went through lots of crazy and difficult things right In the military A few but but you went through it and you were able to kind of get through it, hopefully not focusing on, you know, the time you spent sweating and toiling. You know.

53:47 - Speaker 1 Cutting the grass with scissors. That's a real thing, everybody, it's a real thing.

53:52 - Speaker 2 But you were able to go through that and you had this sense of I'm assuming here.

54:00 - Speaker 1 Camaraderie.

54:00 - Speaker 2 Yeah, but camaraderie belonging.

54:03 - Speaker 1 I would not have survived without the men and women to the left and right of me. Correct, correct.

54:06 - Speaker 2 Correct Right and you were able to get through that suffering because of that, because you attach your meaning to being a part of this, this group and this team that was larger than you. You were serving a greater purpose. So, yeah, I. I think that makes sense.

54:21 - Speaker 1 All right, now let's roll that beautiful bean footage for Mr Joe Rogan. Okay, this is actually a clip from he was a guest on the Lex Friedman podcast. Lex is a really, really interesting guy, has another huge podcast out of Austin Texas. He has a. Really I appreciate a lot of his approaches to conversations and thoughts and he's a very deep guy, and so to have these two guys sit down together to talk about the meaning of life I was very intrigued by. So this is Lex Friedman asking Joe Rogan the meaning of life, and if you guys you got to check out the video for this one, I'm going to pull up on the screen, but you'll be able to hear it in the audio as well.

55:01 - Speaker 2 Last question I'm going to pull up on the screen, but you'll be able to hear it in the audio as well.

55:06 - Speaker 4 Last question I sometimes ask this just for to. What is it to challenge? To make people roll their eyes, to make legitimate scientists roll their eyes? What is the meaning of life?

55:18 - Speaker 1 Are you familiar with Lex?

55:19 - Speaker 4 I do not think there is any meaning. I think there's many, many meanings of life. I think there's a way to navigate life that's enjoyable. I think it requires many things. It requires, first of all, it requires love. You have to have loved ones, you have to have family, you have to have friends, you have to have people that care about you and you have to care about them. I think that is primary. Then it also requires interests. There has to be things that stimulate you. Now, it could be just a subsistence lifestyle.

55:49 There's many people that believe and practice this lifestyle of just living off the land and hunting and fishing and living in the woods, and they seem incredibly happy, and there's something to be said for that. That is an interest, right, there's something and there's there's something to be said for that. That is an interest, right, there's something and there's a there's a direct connection between their actions and their sustenance. They get their food that way, they're connected to nature and it's very satisfying for them. If you don't have that, I think you need something that is interesting to you, something that you're passionate about, and there's far too many people that get sucked into living a life where you're just doing a job. You're just showing up and putting in your time and then going home, but you don't have a passion for what you're doing, and I think that is that's a recipe for a boring and very unfulfilling life.

56:40 You mentioned love. If you could get a track we talked about the demons and the violence in there somewhere what's the role of love in your own life? It's very important, man, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so interested in helping people. I'm very interested in people feeling good. I like them to feel good. I want to help them. I like doing things that make them feel like, oh, you care about me. Like, yeah, I care about you. I really do. Like I want people to feel good, I want my family to feel good, I want my friends to feel good. I want guests to feel good about the podcast experience good about the podcast experience.

57:22 You know I I am I'm a big believer in as much as I can to spread positive energy and joy and happiness and and relay all the good advice that I've ever gotten, all the things that I've learned, and if they can benefit people, then I find that those things benefit people that actually improve the quality of their life or improve their success or improve their relationships, or I'm very happy to do that.

57:45 That means a lot to me. The the way we interact with each other is so important. It's one of the reasons why, like when someone gets canceled or you get publicly shamed, it's so devastating because there's all these people that negative, all this negative energy coming your way and you feel it as much as as I. Like to pretend that you're immune to that kind of stuff, and some people do like to pretend that you feel it. There's a tangible force when people are upset at you, and that's the same with loved ones or family or anytime someone's upset at you, whether it's a giant group of people or there's a small amount of people that has an impact on you and your psyche and your physical being.

58:26 So the more you can spread love and the more love comes back to you. You also create this butterfly effect right, because where other people start recognizing, like, oh you know, when he's nice to me, I feel better and then I'm gonna be nicer to people. But when I'm nicer to people, they feel better and I feel better and it spreads outward going to be nicer to people. And when I'm nicer to people, they feel better and I feel better and it spreads outward. And that's one thing that I've done through this podcast, I think, is I've imparted my personal philosophy in kindness and generosity to other people.

58:54 - Speaker 1 So, after watching this clip from Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman, I think it's safe to say that Joe really believes the meaning of life is to feel good and to help others feel good. Is that the meaning of life?

59:08 - Speaker 2 well, I I cued in on another part where he said that it has to do with love and love, of course, and I think I think that is key.

59:17 So you know, when you ask people large surveys in the us and other countries, what is it that makes life most meaningful? You ask people large surveys in the U? S and other countries what is it that makes life most meaningful? You ask them open-ended questions and and then you have to categorize the responses. They mostly fall into a category of family and children and, and you know, relationships.

59:39 The second most important thing, which is like half as important, is work. Okay, so he mentioned you know work. You know if you can have a job that you're actually passionate about. A lot of people don't have that luxury right. A lot of people they just got to make ends meet. But if you had to choose between, like, a great family life and a crummy job, or a crummy family life and a great job, choose the first because that you know. It's pretty clear from the data that even if you you don't love your job, it's a means to an end, which is, you know, having enough to live. If you, if you have good relationships, especially with your family, that is, uh, that seems to be the biggest factor in in and well-being.

01:00:22 - Speaker 1 Which is a pretty wild concept for me. Endurance, resilience, come up out of that. The wild concept is how much more endurance we can have, how much more resiliency we can have to a crummy job or profession that we maybe hate is a strong word, but don't absolutely love and get excited to go to. But, man, when you talk to people me when the endurance and resiliency have to be to, but, man, when you talk to people me when the endurance and resiliency have to be there, day after day, year after year, with family, close relationships, people that more or less aren't really going anywhere, that really gnaws at you. And so having the latter is way more powerful and way more meaningful and way more bearable. There's a power of choice, really, to a certain degree, you can't choose your family. You can choose to not talk to them, you can choose to not see them and you can choose to build a new family with your partner, your spouse, your friends, your community. But with the job and profession, more or less, we always have way more choice. I think that's an interesting, influential component to endurance and human resiliency.

01:01:27 Yeah, interesting, which brings me to the last question being resilient, developing physical, mental resiliency, is what we're all about here at Everford radio to help us move forward in life. Everford, I say, say yeah. What do those two words mean to you? If I were to ask you how do you live a life ever forward, dr wilkinson? What does that? What does that look like? What does that feel like?

01:01:51 - Speaker 2 that to me, that that I get the strong sense that it means progress and you're going to keep working at yourself, at your job, whatever it is, you're not going to give up your you know, I, I believe really in a, in a universe where kind of individual progress not not in a bad way we were talking earlier about you know, if you focus too much on individual, then that's not a good thing, but, but you know, one of the purposes of life, as I see it, is to overcome your weaknesses and accentuate your strengths, and that to me, means progress, which is what I think of when you say, when I think of ever forward.

01:02:32 - Speaker 1 There's never a right or wrong answer, I say. But I want to piggyback real quick off of what you said about overcoming your weaknesses. Did I get it right For me? I immediately think of my mindset when I think overcoming weaknesses is more accepting of my circumstances and if I choose to go, I'm not going to look at this as a weakness and something that I need to just figure out. I'm going to go, I'm going to accept my circumstances. I feel like then I don't have any weaknesses and if I can learn to accept things that are going well, things that are strengths, things that are weaknesses, it all kind of blends in to be the same and then I learn to develop a healthier relationship to no matter what my circumstances are, and I no longer have that I'm weak in this area, I'm strong in that area. I just have more total package kind of endurance and resilience. I think yeah, yeah, no.

01:03:23 - Speaker 2 I think that makes a lot of sense.

01:03:25 - Speaker 1 Well, we're going to have all of your information in the new book link down in the show notes, the video notes for everybody. But where can they go now to learn more about humans, evolution, the meaning of life, just casual light reading across the board?

01:03:39 - Speaker 2 I do have a book website. It's Samuel T Wilkinson dot com. Remember the Samuel T Wilkinson dot com. That gives a little bit of an overlay of some of these ideas.

01:03:51 - Speaker 1 I really enjoyed the way that you laid it out. Thank you. The format there's a lot of science in there that we can dive into, but there's a lot of digestible information that I think is going to make sense for people of all walks of life, of belief systems. I really enjoyed it, Thank you.

01:04:13 - Speaker 2 Thanks for having me on. Chase, my pleasure.