《生命视角：完成达尔文的革命》笔记

Notes on the Perspective of Life: accomplishing Darwin’s Revolution

In fact, the theory of evolution is a very low threshold, but also very easy for people to make mistakes. Many popular science writers, including some scientists, often misread and misuse the theory of evolution, and many topics of evolution are still being debated in academic circles. The author of this book, David Wilson, is recognized as a master, and we can learn some of the most authentic evolutionary thinking from him.

This book is not about the theory of evolution itself, but about how to apply evolutionary thinking to the socio-economic field. In the face of a socio-economic phenomenon, evolutionary thinking can help you analyze how it came from, where it will evolve, and what policies you can use to influence it.

This is a very advanced way of thinking. In today’s chapter, we first comb through several tools of evolutionary thinking.

What is the essential difference between evolutionary thinking and ordinary physical thinking?

In the picture below is a typical snowflake.

Why is snowflake like this? You probably already know that the reason why snowflakes have regular hexagonal rotational symmetry is determined by the crystal structure of water molecules; you also know that snowflakes are formed by a small particle of dust in the air, and then countless water molecules grow on it. And everything you say about snowflakes is essentially physical knowledge. It is the laws of physics that require snowflakes to look like this, for no other reason.

So let’s look at this thing in the picture below.

It is a relatively coarse metal mesh with a handle, almost as big as the palm of a human hand, and the grid is a protruding hemispherical. Excuse me, what is this? Why is it like this?

Every time Wilson talks about this in a lecture, people can’t guess it at first. Some say they are used to play ball, some say they are used to collect something, and some say they are used to protect some part of the body.

Actually, this is an avocado slicer.

No matter how you guess, you must have noticed one thing: this thing is fundamentally different from snowflakes. Snowflakes are formed naturally, and avocado cutters are designed for what purpose. This thing cannot be explained by the laws of physics alone.

Before Darwin published his theory of evolution, the question of what is natural and what is designed has long perplexed people. Newton was so great that he thought that everything in the universe was designed by God, and the laws of physics just made the design more convenient.

But now evolutionary thinking has solved the problem.

I must insert a word here, strictly speaking, there is a difference between man-made objects and things that grow out of animals. The former is the product of intelligent design and the latter is purely the product of evolution, but we will not make this distinction here for the time being. In the face of snowflakes, they can be said to be “functional”.

Explain these four questions clearly and you will understand what this thing is all about. We will mention these four questions again and again later.

We know that the color of animals in the desert is similar to that of sand, a bit like khaki. Different animals, such as beetles and lizards, have completely different mechanisms for forming khaki. But as long as you have evolutionary thinking, even if you do not understand the physical mechanism of tawny formation, you can still predict that animals in the desert will be khaki. This is the power of evolutionary thinking!

But evolutionary thinking should not be abused. A common mistake people make is to think that everything in an organism has some kind of evolutionary function. For example, you may often hear the question: why do people have long hair? Why do people have ten fingers? Why is the blood red?

Next, let’s give an example to see how powerful evolution is.

Why study Escherichia coli? The biggest advantage of this thing is that it propagates very fast and can reproduce every 20 minutes at the earliest. If you have studied E. coli for more than ten years, you have gone through the history of human evolution. Even better, you can freeze an E. coli, no matter how many years after thawing, it is still alive! In this way, you can keep a living specimen of the ancestor of E. coli and compare it with its descendants.

E. coli allows us to see with our own eyes how evolution works.

Lensky first cultured the same kind of E. coli in 12 bottles. Each bottle contains the same 10 ml nutrient solution, the environment is exactly the same, but the evolution of the 12 bottles is independent.

Each bottle of nutrient solution is enough for E. coli to reproduce for seven generations in one day. Every morning, the researchers extracted 0.1 milliliters of E. coli-containing nutrient solution from each old bottle and put it into a new bottle containing 9.9 milliliters of pure nutrient solution, thus allowing E. coli to evolve. Every 500 generations, the researchers frozen the samples. Over the years, we have a road map for the evolution of E. coli.

The discovery of Lensky’s experiment can be said to be thought-provoking.

I think this story can be compared to too many phenomena. There is gradual progress, a general trend of development, group struggle, and elusive luck factors.

Did the E. coli race that can digest citric acid do something right? Did other races do something wrong? Actually, it’s not. It was pure luck. Only evolutionary thinking can help us understand such a phenomenon.

In this chapter, we will tell a truth with three soul-stirring stories. Let me get this straight.

This is also the fourth of Tinbergen’s four problems we talked about last time, the problem of growth. The growth of life is neither building blocks nor building houses. “growing” and “building” are completely different processes.

The process looks flexible, but it is actually very strict. There can be no errors in the software itself. Your input information must be reliable. If there is chaos, your tax form will be wrong. It’s the same with growing up. Genes are software, and environment is input information.

Growth is a frightening process step by step.

We know that cataract is a common eye disease in which the transparency of the eyeball lens decreases, resulting in the inability of light to enter. Cataract is not a serious disease, it can be cured by an operation. The origin of the story we are going to talk about is that some newborn babies also have cataracts.

Former doctors worried that cataract surgery on newborns was a bit dangerous. They decided to wait for the child to grow up before performing the operation. As a result, the child grew up, the operation was successful, and the light could enter the eyes. But the child still can’t see.

Why is that? Because the eye is not a camera. I won’t say which part is broken. You can use it as soon as you fix it.

Eyes need to grow under the stimulation of light. The brain is not born to process visual nerve signals. This ability is learned from birth and growing up at the same time. If there is no light stimulation in the infant stage, if you miss this stage of growth, it will be too late to have light when you grow up.

Let’s look at another example. The picture below is a very cruel experiment decades ago. Someone keeps kittens in a cage surrounded by vertical lines. The kitten can’t see any horizontal structure, not even its own body, but only these vertical lines.

As a result, when the kitten grows up, it has serious visual problems. It has no way to recognize the outline of an object.

Why is that? Because of the visual function of recognizing contours, three kinds of nerve cells are needed to work together: one is responsible for horizontal direction, one is responsible for vertical direction, and the other is responsible for oblique direction. The kitten lacks horizontal and oblique visual stimulation in its infancy, so its nerve cells do not grow well.

The development of eyes is very sensitive to the environment. And this is probably why so many children in China are nearsighted now.

For children of the same age, the myopia rate of Nepalese children is only 3%, while that of Guangzhou children in China is as high as 69%! Why is that? The environment set by evolution for children is to grow up in nature. Nepal’s educational conditions are poor, and children are more in line with this setting, while Chinese children spend most of their time in school. For the eyes, the school environment is not a normal growing environment.

What’s the difference in the school environment? According to a study of pupils who are also 6-7 years old, of Chinese origin and spend the same time in school every day, the myopia rate of primary school students in Singapore is 9 times higher than that of Australian pupils. The major difference between the two countries is that school education in Australia places great emphasis on outdoor activities. Australian pupils have 14 hours of outdoor activities per week, while Singapore has only three hours.

I think there are still many ophthalmologists clinging to outdated ideas, thinking that tired reading leads to myopia, excessive use of eyes, and even requiring students to do “eye exercises.” but there is no scientific evidence to prove the usefulness of eye exercises. The fact is that the mainstream international view now holds that the root cause of children’s myopia is the lack of time for outdoor activities.

So what is the fundamental difference between outdoor and indoor? There is no strict conclusion on this at present. Maybe it’s because all we can see indoors is something close to us. But when I look at the information from all sides, it is more likely that the indoor light intensity is not strong enough.

It has only happened for nearly a hundred years for children to stay indoors all day. And the impact of this environmental change on people is not limited to the eyes.

You can’t grow without light, and you can’t grow without bacteria.

The immune system is not a machine part. Install one if you want to install it, or change it if it breaks down. The immune system, like the eyes, grows slowly. The growth of the immune system requires a suitable microflora environment.

Wilson made an analogy that the human immune system is like a farmer on a farm. There are seedlings, weeds, cats and dogs, and enemies such as mice and foxes on the farm. So how can the farmer tell which are seedlings and friends, which are weeds and enemies? He wasn’t born with a plenum.

So if the immune system is exposed to an unnatural microflora for a long time, it is tantamount to not giving him a chance to learn, and it will go wrong. Modern medicine believes that the problems of the immune system are not only physical symptoms, but also psychological symptoms, such as feeling stressed, depressed, even autistic and autistic, but also in behavior. such as nausea, loss of appetite, reluctance to go out and communicate with people, and so on.

Let’s think about it, if a child has the above problems, is it possible because. His house is too clean?

Wilson cited a series of studies to illustrate the role of microflora in the immune system.

For example, the number of people with immune system disorders and frequent allergies in developed countries and cities is significantly higher than that in developing countries and rural areas.

Studies have found that babies born by caesarean section are more likely to suffer from immune system disorders because they are not in contact with the bacteria in the birth canal. The use of antibiotics by pregnant women may do harm to the child’s immune system.

The influence of eyes on people is purely physiological, and the influence of the immune system is physical as well as psychological and behavioral. What we are going to talk about below is mainly behavioral and psychological.

Birds like quails have an interesting feature: as soon as a bird is born, it knows to follow its mother. This is because they have a sense of hearing when they hatch in the eggs, and they are used to their mother’s voice.

The eggshell of a bird’s egg is crucial to the development of the bird’s perceptual ability. The eggshell is breathable and has a good penetration of sound, so the bird can breathe inside and see its mother’s voice. But the eggshell is opaque. No light can be seen before the bird is born.

As a result, after the baby quail is born, it will not follow its mother.

Exposure to light two days in advance makes the vision of the little quail develop ahead of time. This interferes with the normal development of hearing and leads to hearing disorder after the baby quail is born. They can’t recognize their mother’s voice.

The bird experiment tells us that when you don’t need it, don’t let it happen in advance. Early appearance may lead to developmental disorders.

Speaking of which, you may immediately come up with a question. Will there be stimuli that should not be given in advance in our education of our children?

If you can ask this question, it shows that you have evolutionary thinking. The answer is indeed that the intellectual growth of human children is similar to that of bird vision.

Wilson cited a large number of studies to show that the order of early childhood education is very important.

What we say in this chapter is that every step of the growth process requires the correct stimulation and cooperation of the external environment. Wilson put forward a concept called “strict flexibility”.

If a child stays indoors all day, he is easy to be nearsighted. If he has been living in a very clean environment, there will be something wrong with his immune system. If you act too hastily with his early education, it may endanger his future temperament.

The environment in which we live today is abnormal relative to the long history of human evolution.

This is a wisdom brought to us by evolutionary thinking. Of course, this is definitely not to say that people should return to the life of a primitive society or an agricultural society. “strict flexibility” is just a theory, and its application in every specific field has to be verified by experiments. The stories we tell today about eyes, immune system and perception are strictly scientifically proven, but not necessarily in other areas.

As a matter of fact, people today live much longer than in the past, and even if they marry and give birth later, their children are still healthy. I don’t think evolutionary thinking can explain such progress.

However, when you find that something is not normal, evolutionary thinking can provide you with an idea to solve the problem. In particular, evolutionary thinking gives you a warning when you want to change the environment.

In this chapter, we use evolutionary thinking to solve an old question: why are there always good guys and bad guys in this world?

Christianity says that God created the world in good faith, and we in China also say that human nature is good, and karma punishes evil and promotes good. Well, if this is the case, the bad guys who benefit themselves at the expense of others should not appear, or they should be eliminated soon, but why are there always bad guys in the world? Theologians and road guards have created various theories to explain this problem, but what they say is far-fetched.

On the other hand, if you consider it from the simplest theory of evolution, according to the principle of “survival of the fittest” in Yan Fu’s translation, it is precisely that the creatures that are most selfish and most desperate to seize resources to strengthen themselves should have the greatest chance of survival and reproduction. Then if this is the case, there should be no good people in the world who sacrifice themselves to survive.

Darwin, when he first put forward the theory of evolution, was also puzzled by the problem of this good man. But Darwin came up with an answer.

The idea of group choice has always been controversial. We have combed the logic of various academic factions when we talked about Edward Wilson’s “the Origin of creation”. Edward Wilson, a professor at Harvard University, is a respected and beloved figure in the field of evolutionary biology. As far as I know, Edward Wilson and David Wilson, the author of the Perspective of Life, are not related, but they collaborated on a paper in 2007 that systematically discussed the current academic understanding of group selection. In this paper, the two men said a famous saying, a total of three sentences

This is the end of the relationship between the good and the bad, the individual and the group.

However, please note that the devil is in the details, and there are some reasons for group choice that are particularly worth pondering. * A key idea put forward by David Wilson is that the contradiction between the individual and the collective is multifaceted. There is a contradiction not only between people and their own collective, but also within the human body. *

Let’s start with the simplest logic. It is cancer that embodies this logic.

The human body, including various organs and tissues, is made up of cells. If you look at it from the standpoint of cells, the human body is actually a large ecosystem, and each cell is a separate life.

Cells need to absorb nutrients, cells also have to reproduce, cells still have personality. Every cell in the human body carries the same gene, but its “gene expression” is different. Gene expression determines whether different functions can be expressed on this cell and what kind of cell it is.

Under normal circumstances, a cell constantly divides and multiplies, and the number becomes larger and larger, and the tissue formed by the cell grows slowly. When the tissue grows to a certain extent, the cells will actively stop expanding, and the cells will die voluntarily when they grow to a certain extent, and will no longer divide, so that there is a certain limit to the growth of our body tissue.

However, as an independent life, the division and reproduction of cells is also a process of life evolution. Then there will be all kinds of genetic mutations in this process. And there is a genetic mutation that makes a cell choose not to die when it is time for a cell to die voluntarily. It wants to continue to split.

Then the cell continues to divide and reproduce, and its offspring will form a tissue that is redundant to the human body. This extra tissue is a tumor.

But fortunately, most tumors are benign. Then what is “malignant tumor”? It is that mutated cells not only have to continue to divide, but also because they have to compete with other mutated cells and seize nutritional resources, they divide faster, and they have to “spread” to other organs, so this kind of cell is cancer cells. Spread and metastasis is the most terrible manifestation of cancer.

If you allow me to use human society as an analogy,

Of course, the cancer cells are actually short-sighted. People die when they get cancer, and so do cancer cells when they die. But the cell has no foresight! As a life, it just instinctively wants to develop.

So using the perspective of evolutionary thinking, Wilson suggests that we do a comparative study of elephants and mice. Elephants have much more cells in their bodies than mice, and their lifespan is much longer, so they are supposed to have a longer history of cell evolution in their lifetime and must be more prone to cancer cell mutation. But why is it that elephants are as likely to get cancer as mice? This suggests that there must be a mechanism in the bodies of large animals to restrain malignant competition from cancer cells, which we do not know at present.

Unfortunately, in the current research on cancer, the investment in this evolutionary idea is far from enough.

However, our human society has found a coordination mechanism to suppress vicious competition. Before we talk about this mechanism, let’s consider another question: why are there always bad guys in human society? what’s the use of this?

This is a very famous study, and we talked about it when we talked about ​​ in Bara Brazil. it’s a story about hens.

The hen that lays the most eggs is also the hen that likes to bully others most. Some people have studied that hens with more eggs were raised together, hoping to evolve the best laying hens from generation to generation. It turns out that they are all very belligerent, fighting all the time, regardless of the death or injury.

In such a group, there are hens who love to lay eggs but also like to bully people, but hens who are docile and willing to be bullied must have both good and bad guys. The bad guys bully others, but they lay more eggs; the good guys produce few eggs, but they can be all bad guys!

So the world of hens is not simple. Chicken farmers usually put several chickens in a cage to keep each other, which is very inhumane to the chickens. But if free-range breeding, those fighting hens will be more rampant, they will wantonly bully other hens, so that other people can not eat to build a nest. But you can’t kill all these bad hens, because they are precisely the main force for laying eggs.

Let’s think about whether there is such a phenomenon in human society to a certain extent. Bad guys are rich, not benevolent and bully men and women, but they have given birth to a lot of children; honest people are bullied silently, but without honest people, bad guys can’t survive. Can you say that whoever is “excellent” and who is “backward”?

But a man is not a hen after all. After all, we can do better than animals. In fact, the evolution trend of human society is becoming more and more like the honeybee society.

An extremely rare phenomenon sometimes occurs in the history of the evolution of life. When the pressure of competition between groups is very great, the competition within groups may be completely suppressed. This is like saying that when a country is facing war, its citizens can often unite as one.

In the biological world, sometimes intra-ethnic competition is suppressed to the point where there is no competition at all. Bees, ants, wasps and termites are such creatures. A single ant has almost no intelligence, while an ant colony can show an extremely high level of intelligence. Every ant will not hesitate to sacrifice himself for the ant colony, and the result is that the ant colony is a strong competitor.

Perhaps because of a genetic mutation in ancient times, we humans are the most cooperative of all primates. Chimpanzees also have politics, but their cooperation is small. * our human-to-human cooperation is not limited to brothers and families, but everyone is likely to cooperate within human society. This is the real evolutionary advantage of human beings.

In that case, we can imagine that even if mankind realizes the great harmony of the world in the future, there will be no war between countries, and “group choice” will not stop. If you look at the human body, you can see that the human body is the most harmonious ecological tissue, but even in the human body, cancer cells may be produced!

There are many particularly grand and basic questions, all kinds of thinkers, philosophers, writers and writers in history have thought about and confused. If you look at it with evolutionary thinking, you will find that the answer is extremely clear.

A real scholar must dare to think about big problems. Evolutionary thinking can satisfy all your fantasies about grand narration.

In this chapter, we put together several major topics that people often think about, and use evolutionary thinking to give an ultimate explanation. On the surface, these problems seem to belong to different fields.

All of this can be explained by two concepts of evolutionary thinking.

By figuring out these two concepts, you can figure out the big problems mentioned above.

There is a kind of frog called Pacific tree frog. Biologists have found that tadpoles of Pacific tree frogs respond to three different environments.

Do you think these three behaviors of Pacific tree frog tadpoles are natural? Or did you learn it by fighting with fish and insects in the environment after you were born?

The answer is born with it. The researchers did a very persuasive and intuitive experiment. This experiment proves that what really determines the behavior of tadpoles is not the existence of fish and insects themselves, but the different chemicals in the water brought by fish and insects.

The researchers artificially created a kind of water that contains chemicals released by fish, which is almost equivalent to the smell of fish, but there is no fish, and then let some tadpoles grow in the water. At the same time, it also makes water that contains the smell of insects, but does not have insects, and allows some tadpoles to grow in it.

OK, now put these two groups of tadpoles in an environment with real fish, how do you think they will behave? The result is that tadpoles grown in fish water have a much higher survival rate than tadpoles grown in insect water. This shows that tadpoles who grow up in fish water naturally know how to deal with fish!

Similarly, when two groups of tadpoles were put into an environment with real insects, tadpoles grown in insect water had a higher survival rate.

It looks like two different kinds of tadpoles, but in fact, their genes are exactly the same. The researchers just used different chemicals to open up their different behavior patterns, and the three behavior patterns were actually written in the genes.

Let me give you an analogy in programming language. All tadpoles have the same factory code (the same gene). This code begins to “start” after birth, and after startup, the running result of the program is closely related to the specific external parameters (in the environment).

Note that this code is executed when the tadpole is born, and only once. The chemical environment at birth determines the behavior pattern of tadpoles from infancy to adolescence.

The good news is that they don’t need to learn. The bad news is that they cannot change their behavior patterns at any time according to the circumstances after birth.

It seems to be a different behavior, but it is actually the same code. Tadpoles live in the shackles of genetic coding.

The behavior patterns of Pacific tree frog tadpoles are determined by the chemicals in the water at birth, while the behavior patterns of many birds are determined by the hormones their mothers leave in their eggs.

Female birds living in a difficult environment will feel the mental pressure of survival. This stress can lead to an increase in the concentration of a hormone called cortisol in the female. As a result, eggs laid by female birds also contain high cortisol. Birds hatched from such eggs have unique patterns of behavior.

They are born smaller, but their muscles react quickly, they fly faster, and they are better at fighting than rich baby birds. It seems that they are not destined to be born for the days of indulgence, they are born strivers. It’sounds like all these are advantages. However, because the baby birds of these poor families are more aggressive and more willing to take risks to get food, we can imagine that they often put themselves in danger.

In the experiment, the researchers could choose the eggs of rich females by injecting a little cortisol into the eggs without changing everything else, so that the hatched birds behaved in exactly the same way as babies from poor families.

The behavior pattern of the baby bird is completely opened by cortisol in the egg. So it’s all determined by genes, and genes are all the same genes. We can imagine that this is like a line of code in the genes of these birds.

As a representative of mammals, the life choices of mice are no freer than tadpoles and birds.

If the food is adequate and the environment is good, the life of the mother mouse will be more comfortable and leisure. after giving birth to the mouse, she will have a lot of time to lick her baby. The little mice that are often licked by their mothers are relatively stable, calm and leisurely in their temperament, and they look like the children of rich families. Mice that were licked less by their mothers when they were young were a different pattern of behavior.

A mother mouse born in a poor family will reach puberty earlier and she will be more aggressive in the face of other female mice. But for male mice, such a female mouse is more sexually attractive, so she will get pregnant earlier. On the other hand, male mice from poor families are more aggressive.

In a nutshell, these mice are precocious. They are simply in a hurry to pair up and give birth to the next generation. From an evolutionary point of view, this is perfectly understandable: even if the environment is so difficult, there will be days when there is no tomorrow, and if we do not give birth quickly, the genes may not be passed on.

However, this behavior pattern of mice is neither the choice of rational judgment, nor is it fumbled out by themselves in the environment, it is entirely determined by the number of times their mothers licked them when they were young. As long as the experimenter uses some artificial imitation method to lick the mice born to poor mothers, those mice will have the temperament of being rich.

The behavior pattern of mice during puberty is also written in the genes.

Tree frogs are like this, birds are like this, and so are mice. Is it possible that humans will be any different?

Of course people are different. People have the ability to think, judge and make rational decisions. As long as these powers are exercised, people should be able to get rid of the shackles of genes. What’s more, man is a much smarter and more complex animal. There are no factors like chemicals, hormones or licking that unilaterally determine a person’s pattern of behavior.

If a child lives in a difficult environment from an early age, lacks the care of his parents, and is faced with food shortage or even violence, he will show certain personality traits.

Playing with his buddies, he was not impressed by the happy scenes, but he was strongly impressed by those scenes of conflict and conflict. While he was doing it, there was something going on around him. He would turn his head and do it in a minute. He is good at taking part in adventurous activities. He is very good at getting immediate returns, but does not attach importance to long-term interests. He was happy to associate with the opposite sex a long time ago.

Don’t such children know how to study hard and postpone pleasure? Doesn’t he understand that he should cooperate well with others? His actions may not be conscious. If the environment is bad, it makes the most sense for him to do so.

When a smart male high school student obviously gets good grades but decides not to go to college and wants to work quickly to earn money, when a female high school student decides to marry and have children at the age of 18, is it useful for you to tell them what you think is the right truth in life?

They are carrying the shackles of genes. Each of us carries genetic shackles, which are strategies left to us by evolution to survive in affluence or hardship, but some of us are lucky enough to turn on the right gene expression.

I think this evolutionary thinking brings hope to everyone. Even if your financial situation is poor now, as long as you can give your child a lot of care, he can have a rich character.

As far as I understand it, Wilson’s explanation of evolutionary thinking has not yet been widely accepted in academic circles. But this is not to say that the theory is highly controversial. This situation is traditionally studied by different groups of people who study human behavior, brain science, animal behavior, and biological evolution. There must be some people like Wilson to act in order to consider the relevant knowledge of these disciplines together and form a comprehensive judgment.

From the perspective of evolutionary thinking, let’s take a look at Rousseau’s famous saying.

“Man is born free, but he is always in chains.”

We should be thankful to have these abilities that we can learn without learning. We are the product of the evolution and inheritance of life.

Put a group of outsiders directly to the North Pole, even if they are in good health and intelligence, they can’t survive on their own. However, there are many local people, who may be of average physical quality, but can survive there very well. People are all human beings. There is no essential difference in genes between this group of people and that group of people. The real difference is cultural heritage.

Wilson cited many examples, such as a tribe that made a living by fishing and hunting. As a result of an accident, the old people all died. As a result, a series of survival skills of that tribe were lost, and the rest of them had to find other ways to make a living. For an example like this, we don’t have to say much about it: * No one is isolated. Today, you stand here on the surface is an independent person, in fact, the way you do things, your knowledge, are given to you by cultural heritage, you come from inheritance. *

Why is this system a meaning system? Because this system not only gives us another purpose in life, but also gives us another purpose. It tells us what else to pursue besides the basic needs of survival.

Let me give you an analogy. For example, now the environmental information is spring. So as an agricultural civilization, our culture tells us that it is time to sow seeds. The old people in the village will teach you exactly how to sow seeds.

Farming is not an instinct written in human genes, but the result of learning after birth. Uneducated ethnic groups will only want to enjoy the spring in spring. But one can think of seizing this opportunity to prepare for the future.

If Pacific tree frogs are educated, their tadpoles will change their environment. Just ask the older generation in the area and they will know how to change their behavior patterns. Unfortunately, they don’t. So culture empowers people, and culture makes people freer.

A northerner used to grow wheat for a living. When he came to the south, he found that there were many water resources, so he learned to grow rice from others. He does have more flexibility than the tadpole of the Pacific tree frog, and he can choose programs according to different environments. But he is still a program executor.

It can also be said that he is still controlled by a certain program.

What if we change to an environment that no one has ever experienced before? With no genes, no culture, no preinstalled program or optional program to tell him what to do, what should he do?

Let’s take another look at the immune system. A large part of the function of the immune system is congenital, such as how to respond to an injury, which is prescribed by pre-installed procedures. But there are always all kinds of new bacteria in the environment that our ancestors never experienced, especially all kinds of microbes are constantly mutating and evolving, and the immune system can’t expect to rely on genetic coding.

To deal with microbes, such a program can never be finished. The immune system evolves on its own.

Why can the immune system recognize new bacteria? Because we have 100 million different antibodies in our bodies! Each antibody is good at identifying certain types of microbes. It can be said that the antibodies have drawn a picture of all the microbes that may exist in theory, whether they actually exist or not, and this picture has a very high resolution and can be said to be fully covered.

And once an antibody finds a new invading bacteria, it will immediately notify the lymphocytes that produce the antibody, and the lymphocytes will immediately step up their efforts to produce such antibodies, you know, each lymphocyte can divide into 20,000 of the same lymphocytes in a week.

Of course, antibodies must learn not to accidentally injure friendly forces, which is why the immune system must grow up with people in the environment.

But Wilson stressed that this “adaptive” ability of the evolutionary system can only work with the “congenital” ability. Antibodies are only the mark of the enemy, the real kill of the enemy, or pre-installed means.

Some researchers have done experiments to see how children in kindergarten decide who to learn new things from.

The experiment is to let the children watch a video first. In the video, two people play with different toys for a while, and then eat different food. There are other people in the video, staring at one of the two in the process. It means that those two people, one is the one who is paid attention to, the other is the one who is unnoticed.

After the video was played, the researchers asked the children, if you were you, what toys would you choose to play with and what food would you eat? As a result, the children almost overwhelmingly chose to imitate the person who received attention.

I will imitate whoever gets attention, which is unlikely to be a reasoning decision made by children. They just instinctively notice who is noticed and instinctively imitate that person. This is an innate pattern of behavior.

So if we want to teach our children something new against instinct, find an idol star to teach it, and make use of the child’s imitation instinct, won’t we get twice the result with half the effort?

I like reading and learning, and I also have good concentration and perseverance. Because in my childhood memory, my mother insisted on taking various certificates when her family and work were very busy. I was often woken up at noon and vaguely heard her reading a strange remark, and later knew that she was practicing her Putonghua exam. At that time, my father studied until 3 am every day to prepare for the judicial exam. I sometimes got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and found that the living room light was still on.

At that time, I was too young, I basically did not have any speculative and philosophical ideas, I may just be silently influenced, and then produced some imitation.

Some heritage makes people feel very helpless. Some corrupt officials in China say, why am I still greedy with so much money? Because I was scared when I was a child. Poverty can make people struggling and adventurous, but poverty may also limit people’s values. But can you say that I don’t want those inheritance, and I have to be a new person from scratch?

You can’t. I think some scholars think that Chinese culture is so wrong and bad, but his style of thinking and handling affairs is precisely Chinese style. People are not isolated things, whether you like it or not, the inheritance is on you.

But the latest evolutionary thinking brings us three pieces of good news.

At present, the school of evolutionary thinking in the study of human behavior patterns has been ahead of the traditional “whiteboard” school and the later “human brain is a general-purpose computer” school, which can be said to be becoming mainstream.

The theme of this chapter is how to use evolutionary thinking to achieve self-change in social relations.

When we talked about the ​​ book by Ichiro and Koga Shijian, we said that Adler’s philosophy holds that people’s happiness and all troubles are rooted in interpersonal relationships. We say that Adler’s set is “the philosophy of life of the strong man”, it is philosophy. Philosophy can say what people “should” be, but you can’t say what people “are” like without being verified by scientific methods.

Wilson did not mention Adler, but in my opinion, evolutionary thinking and the scientific experimental evidence mentioned in the book can be said to be the same as Adler’s ideas on the issue of interpersonal relationships.

This is good news, which shows that what they say should be correct. The better news is that we now have deeper and more practical knowledge than Adler did. Adler said that interpersonal relationship is a first principle of life, and now Wilson is more radical.

If you want to understand individuals and society, you must first understand groups.

Why is that? Let’s start with the experiment.

One day, the veteran’s wife accompanied him to Cohen for treatment. At first, the veteran didn’t listen to what he said, when his wife suddenly asked, “can I hold my husband’s hand?” Cohen said of course! And then something amazing happened.

As soon as the veteran shook his wife’s hand, he became a reasonable man and was very willing to cooperate with the doctor.

Cohen was acutely aware of the great learning involved. Can it be said that touching other people’s hands can have such a great impact on a person’s mental state? Cohen did the experiment immediately. In the experiment, the subjects lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, and then the experimenters gave intermittent electric shocks to the subjects’ feet. We can imagine that the subjects will feel very nervous.

But the experiment found that if the subject was asked to grasp a stranger’s hand, his nervousness could be calmed down. And if the subject grasps the hand of the person he loves, his mood can be greatly calmed down. We can imagine this is a touching scene: holding the hands of relatives, not to mention a slight electric shock in the laboratory, even if you are about to die, the heart is at peace.

In our opinion, isn’t this effect obvious? But Cohen’s experiment is a major impact on academia. The key is that the mainstream academic circles study people as individuals, and generally study the mechanism and growth problems mentioned by Tinbergen. Now that Cohen has proved that the presence of a loved one can have such a great impact on a person, aren’t the previous studies on individuals blind to the trees?

This is why loneliness can cause serious psychological and physical trauma. Social relationships may even affect your cognitive judgment. Some experiments have found that it is also to evaluate the slope of an uphill, if you have friends around you, you will feel that the slope is not so steep and you can go up; if you are alone, you will think that the slope is steeper.

What should we do if we have some problems in interpersonal relationships and want to improve them? Evolutionary thinking has a good method of operation, let’s first talk about how to transform others, and then how to transform ourselves.

Let’s imagine a common scenario. When you were shopping in the supermarket, you saw a child crying and making a scene. His mother not only failed to discipline him, but also gave him all kinds of coaxing. The child takes an inch and puts forward all kinds of non-separate demands; the mother gives in step by step, and in the end all conditions are met.

Evolutionary thinking fully understands this relationship: the child is fighting for resources for himself, and he wants his mother’s full attention and all his love. But this relationship will not last forever, because it is a vicious circle, in the future, either the mother can’t stand it and have to fight back, or the child is completely spoiled and unable to gain a foothold in society. The child’s personal evolution contradicts the evolution of his group, including his mother.

But this contradiction is not unsolved! The best way is to use evolution to deal with evolution.

Skinner’s approach is in line with evolutionary thinking. The learning method of evolutionary thinking is precisely

If Skinner can train even small animals, why can’t we take care of our children? Specifically, when it comes to educating children, evolutionary thinking gives a “golden rule”, a total of three sentences:

The child showed an outstanding performance today, and we should praise him generously. And if this happens in public crying, first of all, you must not coax, coax is tantamount to encouraging such behavior. The easiest way is to warn him first and isolate him for a while if the warning is not good. If that doesn’t work, cancel a TV time. This is an escalating form of punishment. As a passer-by, if you see another child having this kind of behavior, you can also give him a small negative feedback with contemptuous eyes.

So if you want to educate yourself, what should you do?

For example, when we were young, maybe because of the family environment or various reasons, our personality was a little withdrawn and could not be integrated into the society. When I grow up, I realize that my character is not very good. If I want to change myself, what should I do?

There’s a study like this. Some black students at Stanford University, probably because they are black, are admitted to lower standards by the university. when they come, they will feel a sense of inferiority that they do not belong here. And the researchers used a very simple way to help them.

The researchers showed black freshmen a survey that said that every Stanford freshman had the same confusion and unease. The researchers then asked the students to talk about their confusion and unease in front of the camera as a record for future freshmen. At the same time, in the following week, these students will record and verify their emotions every day.

This is equivalent to showing these students a road map. It turns out that all my predecessors have come through this way. I am not special. I am just like everyone else. In this way, the black students who took part in the experiment found a sense of belonging to Stanford, and studies showed that by the time they reached the senior year, their scores and health levels were higher than those of the control group. Another study said that even if people were asked to write down what was most important to them from time to time, their mental health improved significantly.

In this chapter, we talk about a theory, the social baseline model. Two methods to improve behavior are put forward.

Wilson believes that the most basic unit of human society is neither individuals nor large societies, but small groups. Do you think this statement is consistent with what we said in ​​, that our actual work is in small teams?

The golden rule of educating children is that praise should be generous and punishment should be mild. Does it have anything in common with how to give feedback to subordinates in the “Nine work Lies”?

Does the emphasis on the sense of belonging to the group confirm Adler’s signboard theory?

The theme of this chapter is how to view enterprise innovation with evolutionary thinking.

In the past, Kevin Kelly made an analogy between the evolution of technology and the evolution of life in his book what Technology wants. Technology is like a kind of life, can grow up, can reproduce, can mate, there are genetic mutations and environmental choices. We need to understand scientific and technological innovation with evolutionary thinking.

Kevin Kelly is looking at a more macro perspective. While Wilson looks at enterprise innovation, he sees a methodological problem, which I think is especially worthy of our Chinese people’s thinking.

Professor Jin Canrong of Renmin University gave a report on Sino-US relations and China’s future development, which is very encouraging. Professor Kim said that one of the figures is like this. Of so many patents approved each year in the United States, only 3% can eventually be acquired by companies. And only 1% of these patents were acquired, which finally became market-oriented. In this way, only 3/10000 of the patents are useful. It can be seen that innovation means great waste, innovation, is a very expensive thing.

Professor Jin said that in that case, the current imitation and follow-up innovation strategy of Chinese enterprises is highly efficient. We can focus on the “3” that has been proved effective by Americans and bring it to China to become bigger and stronger, without the need to do the remaining 9997 R & D projects. However, Professor Jin believes that this practice can only last for another 10 years, because ten years later, China’s technological level will surpass that of the United States, and at that time, there will be no one to follow.

But what will happen ten years later? Wilson provides us with a perspective. Let’s start with Toyota, which has its own unique set of innovation.

Toyota originated from the Toyota automatic Loom Company a hundred years ago, founded by Saji Toyoda. From the beginning of the production of looms, Toyota has a unique innovation gene.

Once, the drawings of Toyota Loom’s latest loom were stolen. Competitors can use this drawing to produce the same products as Toyota. At that time, Saji Toyoda made a speech, and that’s what he said.

Those thieves must be able to produce looms according to the design drawings. But we are improving the loom every day, and by the time they understand our drawings and make a great effort to copy them, we already have a newer loom. And if they want to improve the loom, it will take much more effort than we do, because this ability of improvement is accumulated by us from failure after failure. We don’t care about it, we just have to keep improving.

I don’t know how many Chinese entrepreneurs have such self-confidence today. What is really remarkable about Toyota is not drawings, patents, or a specific technology, but its ability to innovate.

Toyota’s ability to innovate is a system that it can’t even explain.

Building a car is a very complicated matter. If you are willing to look for it, you can find areas for improvement at any time. Let’s give a simple example: preparing materials.

The workers are lined up on the edge of the production line, and each worker only does a few things. If you want to be efficient, you should not bring in a lot of parts; it should be a small box and put it within the reach of the workers. Then there is a problem of reasonable preparation of materials. If you give too much, you can’t take up too much space, and if you give too little, you can’t keep up with the progress.

In order to make the assembly workers work quickly and save effort, the workers who prepare materials have to speed up the frequency of preparing materials. However, there is also a problem with the efficiency of material preparation workers. So how do assembly and material preparation work best? This needs to be explored and improved in practice.

And Toyota is improving every day. Any worker on the assembly line can pull and stop the whole production line as long as he feels any discomfort at work, which screw is wrong, which part supply does not keep up, and so on. Then the emergency team will come immediately to help solve the problem. If the superior thinks that this problem is worth popularizing, this is an improvement. Each team does work a day, on average, it stops the production line 1000 times!

In fact, Toyota also has ways to reduce the number of stops. For example, in addition to the regular material conveyor belt, there is an “inventory buffer belt” for spare parts. In case the parts on the regular conveyor belt fail to keep up, you can go to the buffer zone to get the parts and use them directly. But Toyota doesn’t want you to always go to the buffer belt to pick up parts, because this is tantamount to masking the problem of material preparation.

The researchers noticed that one day, the production line was pulled down only 700 times, and as a result, the team manager quit. The manager said that there are only two possibilities for such a small number of stops, either if you don’t report the problem, or if you don’t find it, it can’t be all right. So he ordered the reduction of parts in the buffer zone to expose the problem of inefficiency.

How many companies can do this deliberate fault-finding?

It is difficult for others to learn Toyota’s practice. In order to ensure efficiency, American and European car companies prohibit workers from shutting down production lines at will, while Toyota requires workers to stop production lines as much as possible to improve efficiency.

In fact, even Toyota itself does not understand why it is so good, building a car is too complicated. Later, Toyota hired some management consultants to study itself, and these people happened to have studied evolutionary thinking, and they used evolutionary thinking to provide an explanation for Toyota’s approach.

When a Toyota worker finds a problem and calls off the production line, it is as if an organism is attacked and feels pain. Toyota’s production system is an organism that reacts immediately. And Toyota also has the experience of improving only one mistake at a time, otherwise it will interfere with the system too much and easily lead to the butterfly effect.

So Toyota has grown up a little bit. No cell in its body may understand the whole situation, but the whole body works well.

When an enterprise is in normal operation, it is not easy to see where it needs to be improved. But if this enterprise is suddenly faced with a big event, leading to a super performance, you observe that everyone has those extraordinary performance, this is an idea for improvement.

For example, there was an oil production company where 450 people were trapped in the wild to work for 3000 people for four months because of an accident. As a result, they managed the well very well. Then we have to think about, how did they do it? Can we simply fix this emergency method?

Well, how many companies are using this method? Very little. Including Toyota’s innovative approach, there are very few companies that can actually apply it. Few people have even heard of these methods. So Wilson laments that it is a long way to go to promote evolutionary thinking.

Wilson didn’t mention China, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Toyota could be transplanted to China.

Wilson thinks Toyota is very difficult to learn. Toyota is like a creature, it is growing slowly, it is the product of evolution, and it is also evolving itself. Toyota is an “evolutionary evolution”. Every new employee of Toyota should be accompanied by an old master, just like the former state-owned enterprises in China, who led their apprentices. Toyota promotes cadres from within the company as far as possible. Toyota comes from inheritance.

Let’s imagine that if you want to copy Toyota in a new place, you will face the problem of inheritance. You have to recruit a lot of new workers, even if these workers are high-quality people, but where is their master? Where is the cultural heritage of the new company? Innovation system needs to be passed on and helped.

At present, China’s innovation ability has been ahead of the world in many areas, but it cannot be said that there is no deficiency. If we are given an obvious right direction, let us tackle and improve the key problems and realize the technical details, I think China has the most superior R & D capabilities and market conditions, but when it comes to that kind of breakthrough, subversive and unplanned innovation, I don’t think it’s enough.

We need a more advanced innovative temperament, we need an innovation system with Chinese genes.

Evolutionary thinking is not just a theory, Wilson believes that it is also a worldview. Theory can tell you what the world is like, while worldview can tell you what to do. So the focus of this chapter is how to use evolutionary thinking, especially how to use evolutionary thinking from a high point of view.

Wilson’s book is about evolutionary thinking, which is quite different from the theory of evolution in ordinary textbooks. He is talking about a more advanced version. In my opinion, it is precisely these avant-garde places that are the key for us to make good use of evolutionary thinking.

Let’s first review how the middle school textbook talks about evolution.

Everything is genetic. Evolution is caused by genetic mutations, which are completely random. A mutation itself does not matter whether it is good or bad, a mutation that does not adapt to the environment is bad, and this situation is the most common. Mutations that adapt to the environment are extremely rare, but if they give the creature a greater chance of survival and more reproductive rights, the gene will be transmitted.

Random gene mutation, environmental natural selection, this is the theory of evolution. Creatures gamble in all directions, and nature regards everything as a ruminant dog. What “survival of the fittest” and “social Darwinism” are all derived from this simple version of evolution.

But Darwin’s own ideas were not that simple.

Wilson highlighted two key ideas. Darwin had these two ideas at the beginning, but they are still controversial today. Evolution is still a learning in progress, not a dead thing.

The relationship between biological individuals is not only competitive with each other, but also not necessarily competitive. Group evolution requires cooperation between individuals. If there is good cooperation within the group, the group as a whole will have greater development, and the genes of the group can spread more widely.

Cooperation requires some kind of coordination within the group, or at least the ability to suppress individuals like cancer cells. The coordination methods of human society include social norms, public morality, and the innate ability of individuals to feel shame.

Group evolution also requires us to intervene appropriately in the internal affairs of the group. Now even ecologists no longer think that we should stand idly by and let nature develop freely, they think that proper intervention can avoid ecosystem disasters. Apply this idea to economics, Wilson’s economic position is relatively left, he does not believe in a completely free market economy, he believes in a certain degree of government coordination.

You can imagine that the Evolutionary Economics Society has a lot of controversy. This aside, evolutionary thinking’s view of “small groups” is very reliable.

We now know that people are first of all members of small groups. What is a good small group like?

There are many natural fishing grounds and grasslands, and the local people do not privatize, sign legal agreements, or invite government supervision, but people spontaneously protect them well and do not form any vicious competition like a prisoner’s dilemma. What’s going on?

Wilson believes that these features have universal value. All small groups that run well are in line with these eight characteristics. You deserve to know.

Ostrom’s research shows that the groups that meet these eight principles are harmonious groups, United groups and groups with evolutionary advantages.

We can use these eight principles to compare what we have learned before, such as “decentralization”, “self-organization” and so on. Okay, what’s the team like? Okay, what’s the system like? What is the ideal organization? I think it’s a match. There are some universally applicable laws of human cooperation.

By the same token, you can also use these eight principles to compare your community property committee and community property, you will find that a community is essentially a group, which is very consistent with the characteristics of group autonomy.

On the one hand, it shows the inheritance of genes. For example, children who grow up in an environment of material scarcity have a specific pattern of behavior that can be inherited through genetic expression. But precisely because it is not just genes that determine behavior, individuals can actively adapt to the environment without being restricted by genetic shackles.

A classic example of cultural and genetic co-evolution is lactose tolerance. Adults cannot digest dairy products, but some nomads have the genes to digest milk after generations of choices because they control an adequate supply of milk. Culture can influence the choice of gene mutations.

This is a taboo topic for the classical theory of evolution, and it is generally believed that evolution has no direction. But now that Wilson is open to the issue, * believes that with the combination of culture, we can, at least to some extent, interfere with our own evolution. *

For example, we can actively create opportunities for innovation.

Silicon Valley took shape because of the westward movement in the United States, no matter who went to California, and California did not read the hukou book. As a result, California’s cultural diversity gave birth not only to Silicon Valley, but also to Hollywood. Israel’s diversity is due to the army. All the people in Israel are soldiers, regardless of whether your education is high or low, your family background is poor or rich, the army can bring different types of people together. These people have carried guns together, and after retirement, it is easy to make an appointment to set up a company together.

Let’s think about it. If a city’s culture is very closed, does not contain diversity, and restricts outsiders with various rules and regulations, can it be an innovation center?

Two scholars who understand evolutionary thinking, combining evolutionary thinking with an investigation of innovation centers, have published a book called the Rainforest: the Secret of Building the next Silicon Valley. They summarized seven characteristics that an innovation center should have.

Wilson said that human nature is happy to join a small group of mutual trust, which is good for cooperation, but human nature is not trusting people outside their group, while also afraid of risk, which is not conducive to innovation.

Therefore, active innovation is not in line with human nature. This is probably why there are so few innovation centers, and these seven lessons are so important.

If you are a leader, today’s content may alert you. Evolutionary thinking teaches us three lessons.

Let’s make a comparison. Now some leaders think that they fully know what to do in this cause, asking everyone to act according to his blueprint and use people as tools. Whenever they encounter setbacks, they blame others for not doing their best. Is this against evolutionary thinking?