Global Order and Institutions
What Can Cultural Evolutionary Theory Teach Us about Obstacles to and Prospects for International Cooperation and Peace?

Introductory Remarks 

by Stewart Patrick

Good morning and welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For those of you I’ve not yet met, I’m Stewart Patrick, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Global Order and Institutions at Carnegie. On behalf of my co-sponsors, David Sloan Wilson of Pro-Social World, Guru Madhavan of the National Academy of Engineering, and Dennis Snower of the Global Solutions Initiative, I want to welcome you to what we hope will be a fascinating brainstorming session.

Our purpose today is to consider what light recent developments in cultural evolutionary theory might shed on prospects for and challenges to international cooperation and peace. This is obviously an enormous topic, and an inherently multidisciplinary one, spanning biological sciences, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, history, as well as applied fields like conflict management, foreign policy, international law, global governance, and more. The multidisciplinary nature of this inquiry is reflected in the folks around this table, who range from evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to experts in democracy promotion and disinformation. Another twenty prominent experts were unable to join us this morning but have expressed interest in participating in our future conversations. 

In a minute we’ll go around the table for brief introductions, but first I wanted to explain a bit more about the genesis of this event and what we hope to accomplish. This past May, I participated in the annual Global Solutions Summit organized by Dennis Snower in Berlin. One of the most provocative sessions, featuring David and Guru, was devoted to how evolutionary principles might inform the design of pro-social institutions. 

I was immediately fascinated, because as a Stanford undergraduate back in the 1980s, I had studied under William H. (Bill) Durham, a pioneer in the study of gene-culture coevolution and the author of numerous pathbreaking articles and books, among these “The Adaptive Significance of Cultural Behavior” (1975) and Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity (1991). I am beyond delighted that Bill—who has been so inspirational generations of Stanford Students and remains highly engaged as an emeritus professor—is with us today.

As an undergraduate, I fell in love with everything “Darwin” and studied human evolution in Stanford’s Human Biology program. I spent one summer on an archeological digs in highland Peru and two more on paleoanthropological expeditions in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Under Bill’s guidance, as well as that of the philosopher John Dupre, I wrote a senior honors thesis in 1987 with the grandiose title “Toward a Systematic Evolutionary View of Human Culture.” Building on Bill’s ideas and those of Boyd and Richardson, Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, it explored the implications of dual inheritance theory (DIT).

The fundamental insight of DIT, of course, is that our species has evolved a parallel, non-genetic track of inheritance. Like our genes, human culture possesses all the attributes of a “selective retention system”: units of inheritance, sources of variation, mechanisms of replication and transmission, forces of selection, and (at times) sources of isolation. The implications of this insight are profound. Culture and human institutions evolve, in a manner analogous to biological evolution, and the dynamics of this “descent, with modification, from ancestral forms” can be understood and modeled.

As a graduate student at Oxford, I went on to study international relations. I was repeatedly struck by the status quo bias of what were (and arguably still are) the dominant theoretical paradigms in the study of world politics: realism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Nobody, it seemed, had adopted an explicitly evolutionary approach to the study of international affairs. At the same time, these paradigms often betrayed an implicit evolutionary logic. A prominent example the influential neorealist theorist Kenneth Waltz. In his Theory of International Politics, Waltz argues that the international “system selects” for sovereign state behaviors consistent with the survival of the fittest dictums of structural realism. Other theorists, arguing from a liberal and constructivist perspective, focused on the emergence and diffusion of international ideas and norms, as well as of the impact of “path dependence” on the design of international institutions, but hesitated to adopt explicitly evolutionary language. Finally, international relations scholars grappled with a recurrent “levels of analysis” problem reminiscent of debates within evolutionary biology over “multi-level selection” (MLS) as the sought to untangle the relationship among variables at the level of the individual, the state (or society), and the international system itself.

In the ensuing years, I made occasional forays into evolutionary thinking and international relations. Two decades ago, I wrote a chapter for a volume on Evolutionary interpretations of World Politics, edited by William R. Thompson, titled “The Evolution of International Norms: Choice, Learning, Power and Identity.” It explored how the logic of selective retention might affect the differential transmission and selection of international norms, focusing on four potential forces of selection: rational choice, imposition, social learning (according to the logic of anticipated consequences), and fit with existing culture (according to the constructivist logic of appropriateness). I know that a number of political scientists here today, including Miles and Jennifer Sterling-Folker, have made similar forays into evolutionary thinking over the years. 

I had always promised myself I would come back to this topic, and the serendipitous meeting with David and Guru in Berlin finally provided an impetus to do so.

At first blush—and to many in Washington, D.C.—cultural evolutionary theory might seem an esoteric topic for a think tank focused on practicalities of war and peace, conflict and cooperation. But from its founding in 1910 to explore the pacific settlement of disputes, the Carnegie Endowment has never shied from looking at the deeper picture—and from drawing on potential insights from other disciplines, even if it means pushing the envelope. 

In recent decades, scholars and practitioners like David, Guru, and Dennis have applied new understandings of the dynamics of cultural evolution to explain societal adaptation and maladaptation, as well as to consider alternative forms of institutional design that might promote human flourishing and pro-social outcomes in a variety of settings.

But relatively few scholars and practitioners to date have explicitly applied concepts and perspectives from cultural evolution—such as MLS and DIT—to the study of international relations, the world economy, and global order. I believe this is a missed opportunity—and that models of cultural evolution have the potential to illuminate the history and current dynamics in world politics and to inform strategies and institutions to advance international peace, shared prosperity, human dignity, and planetary habitability. 

As we outlined in our invitation letter, the potential field of inquiry is vast. The diversity of the memos and articles that you all submitted for this conference, and the fascinating nuggets within them, have already revealed rich veins of inquiry.

I believe that an evolutionary mindset might improve our understanding of many of the most interesting and challenging questions in international affairs. As a first cut, I’ll list eleven of these: 

1.     What light might a cultural evolutionary approach shed on dynamics of change—particularly the possibilities of peaceful change—both within and across global orders. What might it suggest about the most typical tempo and mode of this evolution? (e.g., gradual or punctuated)

2.     How might evolutionary insights help explain emergence and persistence of the sovereign state as the primary unit of world politics vis-à-vis other institutional rivals, from city-states to empires? Might different selection pressures someday lead to a “world state” or, alternatively a “new medievalism”?

3.     How might a cultural evolutionary theory help us think through the respective roles of structure and agency, stasis and change, in international relations—as well as the different selection pressures that operate on relevant units. How might it help us differentiate between exogenous, environmentally determined selection by consequences, analogous to natural selection AND endogenous, self-conscious, human-guided selection according to consequences?

4.     What insights might an evolutionary perspective shed on selection pressures operating on and the global distribution of alternative political regime types, most notably democracies, anocracies, non-democracies?

5.     What might evolutionary theory tell us about the underlying forces behind humanity’s enduring “cultural speciation”, the pull of nationalism and national sovereignty, and its benefits and drawbacks of for cooperation and peace?

6.     How might an evolutionary perspective help explain the origins, spread, and adaptation of international norms and law, including through micro- or macro-evolutionary processes of selective retention? (There is in fact an entire subfield of evolutionary law—and indeed Carnegie colleague Oona Hathaway wrote first law review article on the topic). 

7.     How might appreciation of cultural evolution—and particularly MLS processes--help us  better understand collective action failures and maladaptation at the multilateral level—including obstacles to the provision of global common or public goods? Might greater attention to evolutionary principles explain why world politics is almost inevitably a “complex maladaptive system”—to use David and Guru’s phrase--and help us design institutions and engineer systems for more effective international cooperation? Might it be possible to apply evolutionary analysis to the well-known “levels of analysis” problem in International Relations?

8.     Similarly, might an appreciation of cultural evolutionary dynamics help us understand and overcome the normative barriers that current understandings of sovereignty pose to cosmopolitanism, or even the creation of a global polity, in which the distinction between our “perfect” ethical obligations to fellow citizens and our “imperfect” obligations to other members of humanity might begin erode? Might it help us reconcile national pluralism with global solidarity?

9.     Then there is the question of global paradigms and world views, including in international political economy. How might cultural evolutionary theory explain how dominant paradigms, such as Keynesianism or neoliberalism, arise, erode, and collapse? What might such a perspective suggest about the strengths and vulnerabilities of a global economy premised on homo economicus, dis-embedded from evolutionary concerns of social solidarity and environmental sustainability?

10.  There are also a suite of questions related to humanity’s inventiveness as a toolmaker—(or “handy man”, as Louis Leakey called homo habilis)—as well as an information animal. Might cultural evolutionary theory contribute to better understandings of the emergence of transformative technologies and possibilities to constrain their violent use? What might it suggest about the possibilities, benefits, and dangers for humanity and world order posed by the imminent advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) far exceeding humanity’s own? What might it suggest about emerging sources and mechanisms of dis/misinformation and strategies for countering “truth decay” and corruption of the “noosphere”?

11.  Finally, how might an evolutionary approach inform our understanding of our current, existential ecological emergency, and how we might best adapt to the Anthropocene? What impact might a new appreciation of planetary limits have in weakening (or strengthening) in-group/out-group dynamics, the emergence of planetary identities, and possibilities for multi-scalar global governance that distributes political authority across local, national, and supranational levels?

Needless to say, we will only scratch the surface of these and other topics today. We envision this workshop as an initial, brainstorming meeting, intended not to arrive at answers to these and other questions but as an exercise in concept development, where we throw lots of topics up for consideration and identify a few that we consider most compelling for more structured inquiry in the future.

Our day will be divided into 3 segments: The first session will be on Foundations, focused on evolutionary principles. The second will be on Applications. And the third will be on Implications. In each case, we’ve asked for a speaker or two to kick off discussion, as an icebreaker, to be followed by open discussion.

These are not meant to be “serve and volley” with the initial speaker alone being expected to answer all these questions from the floor, but an opportunity for all of us to put thoughts on the table and debate them. We’ll close the workshop with an hour-long “Open Forum” that will allow you all to expand upon or revisit themes you found most compelling. We hope to capture the flavor of this conversation in a meeting note, without attribution.

We hope this will be just the first meeting in a series, and we welcome suggestions. We may also do online meetings.

Finally, I want to thank the David and Lucille Packard Foundation for their support to the Carnegie Endowment, which made this event possible.

With those preliminaries, I’d like to go around the room, have each person introduce themselves.

Introductory Remarks 

by Stewart Patrick

Good morning and welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For those of you I’ve not yet met, I’m Stewart Patrick, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Global Order and Institutions at Carnegie. On behalf of my co-sponsors, David Sloan Wilson of Pro-Social World, Guru Madhavan of the National Academy of Engineering, and Dennis Snower of the Global Solutions Initiative, I want to welcome you to what we hope will be a fascinating brainstorming session.

Our purpose today is to consider what light recent developments in cultural evolutionary theory might shed on prospects for and challenges to international cooperation and peace. This is obviously an enormous topic, and an inherently multidisciplinary one, spanning biological sciences, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, history, as well as applied fields like conflict management, foreign policy, international law, global governance, and more. The multidisciplinary nature of this inquiry is reflected in the folks around this table, who range from evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to experts in democracy promotion and disinformation. Another twenty prominent experts were unable to join us this morning but have expressed interest in participating in our future conversations. 

In a minute we’ll go around the table for brief introductions, but first I wanted to explain a bit more about the genesis of this event and what we hope to accomplish. This past May, I participated in the annual Global Solutions Summit organized by Dennis Snower in Berlin. One of the most provocative sessions, featuring David and Guru, was devoted to how evolutionary principles might inform the design of pro-social institutions. 

I was immediately fascinated, because as a Stanford undergraduate back in the 1980s, I had studied under William H. (Bill) Durham, a pioneer in the study of gene-culture coevolution and the author of numerous pathbreaking articles and books, among these “The Adaptive Significance of Cultural Behavior” (1975) and Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity (1991). I am beyond delighted that Bill—who has been so inspirational generations of Stanford Students and remains highly engaged as an emeritus professor—is with us today.

As an undergraduate, I fell in love with everything “Darwin” and studied human evolution in Stanford’s Human Biology program. I spent one summer on an archeological digs in highland Peru and two more on paleoanthropological expeditions in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Under Bill’s guidance, as well as that of the philosopher John Dupre, I wrote a senior honors thesis in 1987 with the grandiose title “Toward a Systematic Evolutionary View of Human Culture.” Building on Bill’s ideas and those of Boyd and Richardson, Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, it explored the implications of dual inheritance theory (DIT).

The fundamental insight of DIT, of course, is that our species has evolved a parallel, non-genetic track of inheritance. Like our genes, human culture possesses all the attributes of a “selective retention system”: units of inheritance, sources of variation, mechanisms of replication and transmission, forces of selection, and (at times) sources of isolation. The implications of this insight are profound. Culture and human institutions evolve, in a manner analogous to biological evolution, and the dynamics of this “descent, with modification, from ancestral forms” can be understood and modeled.

As a graduate student at Oxford, I went on to study international relations. I was repeatedly struck by the status quo bias of what were (and arguably still are) the dominant theoretical paradigms in the study of world politics: realism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Nobody, it seemed, had adopted an explicitly evolutionary approach to the study of international affairs. At the same time, these paradigms often betrayed an implicit evolutionary logic. A prominent example the influential neorealist theorist Kenneth Waltz. In his Theory of International Politics, Waltz argues that the international “system selects” for sovereign state behaviors consistent with the survival of the fittest dictums of structural realism. Other theorists, arguing from a liberal and constructivist perspective, focused on the emergence and diffusion of international ideas and norms, as well as of the impact of “path dependence” on the design of international institutions, but hesitated to adopt explicitly evolutionary language. Finally, international relations scholars grappled with a recurrent “levels of analysis” problem reminiscent of debates within evolutionary biology over “multi-level selection” (MLS) as the sought to untangle the relationship among variables at the level of the individual, the state (or society), and the international system itself.

In the ensuing years, I made occasional forays into evolutionary thinking and international relations. Two decades ago, I wrote a chapter for a volume on Evolutionary interpretations of World Politics, edited by William R. Thompson, titled “The Evolution of International Norms: Choice, Learning, Power and Identity.” It explored how the logic of selective retention might affect the differential transmission and selection of international norms, focusing on four potential forces of selection: rational choice, imposition, social learning (according to the logic of anticipated consequences), and fit with existing culture (according to the constructivist logic of appropriateness). I know that a number of political scientists here today, including Miles and Jennifer Sterling-Folker, have made similar forays into evolutionary thinking over the years. 

I had always promised myself I would come back to this topic, and the serendipitous meeting with David and Guru in Berlin finally provided an impetus to do so.

At first blush—and to many in Washington, D.C.—cultural evolutionary theory might seem an esoteric topic for a think tank focused on practicalities of war and peace, conflict and cooperation. But from its founding in 1910 to explore the pacific settlement of disputes, the Carnegie Endowment has never shied from looking at the deeper picture—and from drawing on potential insights from other disciplines, even if it means pushing the envelope. 

In recent decades, scholars and practitioners like David, Guru, and Dennis have applied new understandings of the dynamics of cultural evolution to explain societal adaptation and maladaptation, as well as to consider alternative forms of institutional design that might promote human flourishing and pro-social outcomes in a variety of settings.

But relatively few scholars and practitioners to date have explicitly applied concepts and perspectives from cultural evolution—such as MLS and DIT—to the study of international relations, the world economy, and global order. I believe this is a missed opportunity—and that models of cultural evolution have the potential to illuminate the history and current dynamics in world politics and to inform strategies and institutions to advance international peace, shared prosperity, human dignity, and planetary habitability. 

As we outlined in our invitation letter, the potential field of inquiry is vast. The diversity of the memos and articles that you all submitted for this conference, and the fascinating nuggets within them, have already revealed rich veins of inquiry.

I believe that an evolutionary mindset might improve our understanding of many of the most interesting and challenging questions in international affairs. As a first cut, I’ll list eleven of these: 

1.     What light might a cultural evolutionary approach shed on dynamics of change—particularly the possibilities of peaceful change—both within and across global orders. What might it suggest about the most typical tempo and mode of this evolution? (e.g., gradual or punctuated)

2.     How might evolutionary insights help explain emergence and persistence of the sovereign state as the primary unit of world politics vis-à-vis other institutional rivals, from city-states to empires? Might different selection pressures someday lead to a “world state” or, alternatively a “new medievalism”?

3.     How might a cultural evolutionary theory help us think through the respective roles of structure and agency, stasis and change, in international relations—as well as the different selection pressures that operate on relevant units. How might it help us differentiate between exogenous, environmentally determined selection by consequences, analogous to natural selection AND endogenous, self-conscious, human-guided selection according to consequences?

4.     What insights might an evolutionary perspective shed on selection pressures operating on and the global distribution of alternative political regime types, most notably democracies, anocracies, non-democracies?

5.     What might evolutionary theory tell us about the underlying forces behind humanity’s enduring “cultural speciation”, the pull of nationalism and national sovereignty, and its benefits and drawbacks of for cooperation and peace?

6.     How might an evolutionary perspective help explain the origins, spread, and adaptation of international norms and law, including through micro- or macro-evolutionary processes of selective retention? (There is in fact an entire subfield of evolutionary law—and indeed Carnegie colleague Oona Hathaway wrote first law review article on the topic). 

7.     How might appreciation of cultural evolution—and particularly MLS processes--help us  better understand collective action failures and maladaptation at the multilateral level—including obstacles to the provision of global common or public goods? Might greater attention to evolutionary principles explain why world politics is almost inevitably a “complex maladaptive system”—to use David and Guru’s phrase--and help us design institutions and engineer systems for more effective international cooperation? Might it be possible to apply evolutionary analysis to the well-known “levels of analysis” problem in International Relations?

8.     Similarly, might an appreciation of cultural evolutionary dynamics help us understand and overcome the normative barriers that current understandings of sovereignty pose to cosmopolitanism, or even the creation of a global polity, in which the distinction between our “perfect” ethical obligations to fellow citizens and our “imperfect” obligations to other members of humanity might begin erode? Might it help us reconcile national pluralism with global solidarity?

9.     Then there is the question of global paradigms and world views, including in international political economy. How might cultural evolutionary theory explain how dominant paradigms, such as Keynesianism or neoliberalism, arise, erode, and collapse? What might such a perspective suggest about the strengths and vulnerabilities of a global economy premised on homo economicus, dis-embedded from evolutionary concerns of social solidarity and environmental sustainability?

10.  There are also a suite of questions related to humanity’s inventiveness as a toolmaker—(or “handy man”, as Louis Leakey called homo habilis)—as well as an information animal. Might cultural evolutionary theory contribute to better understandings of the emergence of transformative technologies and possibilities to constrain their violent use? What might it suggest about the possibilities, benefits, and dangers for humanity and world order posed by the imminent advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) far exceeding humanity’s own? What might it suggest about emerging sources and mechanisms of dis/misinformation and strategies for countering “truth decay” and corruption of the “noosphere”?

11.  Finally, how might an evolutionary approach inform our understanding of our current, existential ecological emergency, and how we might best adapt to the Anthropocene? What impact might a new appreciation of planetary limits have in weakening (or strengthening) in-group/out-group dynamics, the emergence of planetary identities, and possibilities for multi-scalar global governance that distributes political authority across local, national, and supranational levels?

Needless to say, we will only scratch the surface of these and other topics today. We envision this workshop as an initial, brainstorming meeting, intended not to arrive at answers to these and other questions but as an exercise in concept development, where we throw lots of topics up for consideration and identify a few that we consider most compelling for more structured inquiry in the future.

Our day will be divided into 3 segments: The first session will be on Foundations, focused on evolutionary principles. The second will be on Applications. And the third will be on Implications. In each case, we’ve asked for a speaker or two to kick off discussion, as an icebreaker, to be followed by open discussion.

These are not meant to be “serve and volley” with the initial speaker alone being expected to answer all these questions from the floor, but an opportunity for all of us to put thoughts on the table and debate them. We’ll close the workshop with an hour-long “Open Forum” that will allow you all to expand upon or revisit themes you found most compelling. We hope to capture the flavor of this conversation in a meeting note, without attribution.

We hope this will be just the first meeting in a series, and we welcome suggestions. We may also do online meetings.

Finally, I want to thank the David and Lucille Packard Foundation for their support to the Carnegie Endowment, which made this event possible.

With those preliminaries, I’d like to go around the room, have each person introduce themselves.