Krista Tippett: Welcome back. Today, in this session, we are going to continue on the theme of what a wondrous moment it is to be alive, cosmically speaking and scientifically seen — this, as a sweeping perspective for hope. And what we heard from Mario Livio — what is true of our view of the cosmos — is also true of our sense of ourselves. We are on these incredible frontiers of exploring our bodies and brains with intricacy for the first time. We are seeing this terrain of dazzling interactivity, of higher thinking in a lightning interplay with ancient animal impulses. What we’ve imagined as our physicality, or what we called “qualities of emotion,” or “heart,” or “intellect,” or “spirit” — all of these are interactive and intertwined.

Our teacher for this session, Agustín Fuentes, is a scientist on other new frontiers of how humans behave and function together and change together. I spoke with him in 2020 because he brings this beautifully spacious perspective to what I’ve taken to calling and seeing as our species moment. He is so aware that our bodies are themselves ecosystems. In every sphere of life, we inhabit ecosystems. But interestingly, our societal systems and our institutions were not built with that understanding in mind, and in many ways, they work against it.

And a fascinating part of my conversation with him, which you’re going to hear a bit of, was about the theory of evolution and how the idea that came down in the 20th century that I learned in school is actually really — I mean, not just a simplification of the truth, but kind of a caricature of the truth. Agustín Fuentes says that even if you go back and read Darwin and read Wallace, read through a lot of evolutionary theorists and biologists, you find that it’s much more complicated than being about survival of the fittest, those who are bigger and faster will win. It was never just about winners and losers. The field of evolution in our time is itself evolving.

So I asked him if he could take his mind back to when he first started thinking about evolutionary biology and learning about it — how he has watched the field change from what he thought growing up. And here’s what he had to say.

Fuentes: So when I did absolutely think about it — and I remember some of the early stuff I read — I was really influenced, as so many were, by something like Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, Robert Ardrey’s book about killer apes, this whole idea — Space Odyssey 2001, those apes finding the bone and smashing each over the head — this Hobbesian notion that you strip away the veneer of culture, there’s this competition and this aggressive animal.

But you know what really started to push me away from that was, I started doing science. I started researching things and watching organisms. It had always struck me that humans weren’t nearly as bad, on average, as we think they are; that most people are actually doing great stuff all the time. We have an amazing capacity to be horrible, but day in, day out, most people are pretty cool with one another. So that struck me.

And then I started watching all these other animals, and I started noticing, wait, wait. This cost-benefit analysis, this winner-loser competition, that doesn’t seem to pan out. And then I started taking classes and reading, with really good evolutionary biologists, and they really spun my head around.

Tippett: They’ve totally moved away from that.

Fuentes: Yeah, and evolutionary biology itself, with something now called the “extended evolutionary synthesis,” is moving away from these simplistic, linear explanations of “progress” or “change via competition over time” and just seeing — back to the beginning of our conversation — this great ecosystem dynamics, these different processes pushing, pulling, melding, shifting across the landscape. Again, it’s messy, it’s actually hard to explain, but once you start to get into it, it makes so much more sense with the actual world.

Tippett: I’m so struck, when I’m speaking with people like David Sloan Wilson and others who are looking at us in this way, there’s been the fascination with the dysfunction, the focus on the dysfunction, and there was the focus on what I think we would call our dysfunction, hyper-competitiveness. And now there’s this fascination with the human superpower of cooperation and how that’s what helped us survive, as much as fighting and winning.

Fuentes: So I wish we would stop with the binaries. It’s always like, “Well, no, it’s this!” “No, no, no, it’s totally not that. You’re completely wrong. It’s this!” And the problem is, that whole competition on one end and cooperation on the other, that’s a false dichotomy. Those things are not in opposition to one another. In fact, for humans, the best cooperators make the best competitors, [laughs] if you think about that.

Tippett: It’s a way to success.

Fuentes: Exactly. Exactly. And so I think what we really want to do is step back and say, what do we see? And that’s why I do focus on cooperation and collaboration as central, because the data are in. David Sloan Wilson has demonstrated this; many, many folks working in human evolutionary processes, people working with other primates — collaboration and cooperation is central to social mammals and extremely important for primates, and most important for humans.

But that doesn’t mean we’re good all the time or that we’re running, holding hands, through the daisies for most of our evolutionary history. No, we hit each other over the head. It’s just on average, those who spent all their time hitting people over the head didn’t do very well.

Tippett: And even filling out the picture — this is from your Gifford Lectures — “meaning, imagination, and hope are essential to the human story, as are bones, genes, and ecologies.” [laughs] And that’s kind of what we’ve looked at when we’ve told this human story of who we are, who we deeply are.

Fuentes: I think hope is an important thing, too. And I think my interactions with theologians, with philosophers and other humanists, have helped me see how including the way in which people live their lives and commit themselves — how they believe, what they engage in — those things are critical in shaping the human niche. And anthropological research also demonstrates that the deep ethnographic moment — how people actually are in the world — shapes the way they see, they perceive, they interact. And those are evolutionarily relevant processes.

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Tippett: That idea that hope is an evolutionary force, that how we actually are in the world — how we see, how we perceive, how we interact, these are evolutionarily relevant processes — in this insight, I also hear an echo of an idea of the great 20th century anthropologist Margaret Mead that I’ve thought a great deal about over the years. As she grew older, she turned her imagination to what she’d been learning across the sweep of her decades of life and study. And she used this language of cultural evolution. What she saw everywhere is that cultural evolution is always ongoing and that each and every one of us has it in our power — and these are her words — to be a propulsive, conscious, and responsible part of it.

She said we do not grasp our power to intervene in evolution; that evolution itself — and the other evolutionary biologists who Agustín Fuentes is working with, they say this too — evolution isn’t an arrow always moving purposefully forward in a victorious direction. Instead, again and again, what Margaret Mead called moments of divergence become turning points in history, when you’re talking about cultural evolution. And she is famous for a line that kind of contains this idea of hers, that “you should never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world. In fact, that’s the only thing that ever has.”

She called that kind of small group “evolutionary clusters.” And when I talk about the generative narrative of our time, another way to say that is that there are evolutionary clusters everywhere. Below our radar of dysfunction and disarray, of what is going wrong, there’s what is going right

One more thought I’m going to add here, because when I hear echoes of the same fresh, intriguing idea from wise people in very different corners, I pay attention. So the peacebuilder John Paul Lederach, who’s a great teacher to me and to On Being, has another phrase that I cleave to, and it seems to me another synonym for evolutionary clusters. And that is “critical yeast.” He points out that it’s critical mass that rivets our attention — we see bodies on a street and great movements and dramatic events. But critical yeast, like evolutionary clusters, is — and this is John Paul’s definition of critical yeast — about small groups of unlikely combinations of people in a new quality of relationship.

John Paul is a humble giant in the world of conflict resolution. He’s been in so many places around the world, over decades, where transformational change happened. And when that happens, he says, where there is not merely disruption or merely change, but transformation, it happens in generational time. And all that while, before and through and beyond the more visible upheavals, yeasty groups of humans are tending and growing the new forms and realities. To be critical yeast is the closest thing I have to a personal mission statement.

And that’s the invitation here, for all of us. So in the Pause, we’re going to sit with a reflection by John Paul Lederach that brings in physics and the mechanics of yeast and some wisdom about how to prepare a ground of relationship to be part of transformation.

And I hope you’ll listen to the Delve this time, too, which is something quite special. It’s a conversation between John Paul Lederach and the actor and social creative America Ferrera on how social change really happens and how we are living at the edge of our imaginations, at this moment in time, about how our social change will occur.

Of course, if you want to hear the whole conversation I had with Agustín Fuentes, on our species moment, we will put a link to that in Part 3, as well. You can always find any conversation mentioned here or excerpted here in full, at onbeing.org or in the On Being podcast, and that is wherever you find podcasts.

So there’s a lot here to work with. I will see you here for a new session of Hope Is a Muscle, whenever you’re ready to keep going.