The interviewee, Geoff Mulgan, is chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and a senior visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Ash Center.
Part of the 'Complexity' series at Evonomics:
Markets, science, and humanity don’t automatically generate solutions.
David Sloan Wilson interview Geoff Mulgan
Say the word “mind” and most people immediately think about the workings of an individual brain. The idea that something larger than an individual might have a mind seems like science fiction—but modern evolutionary theory says otherwise.
It is now widely accepted that eusocial insect colonies—ants, bees, wasps, and termites—have collective minds, with members of the colony acting more like neurons than decision-making units in their own right. For example, a critical stage in the life of a honeybee colony is when it fissions and the swarm that leaves must find a new nest cavity. Exquisite research by Thomas Seeley and his associates shows that the swarm behaves like a discerning human house hunter, scouting the available options and evaluating them according to multiple criteria. Yet, most scouts visit only one cavity and have no basis for comparison. Instead, the comparison is made by a social process that takes place on the surface of the swarm, which is remarkably similar to the interactions among neurons that take place when we make decisions. After all, what is a multi-cellular organism but an elaborately organized society of cells?
The reason that multi-cellular organisms and eusocial insect colonies both have minds is because they are both units of selection. Lower-level interactions that result in collective survival and reproduction are retained, while lower-level interactions that result in dysfunctional outcomes pass out of existence. What we call “mind” focuses on the lower-level interactions that result in the gathering and processing of information, leading to adaptive collective action.
As soon as we associate “mind” with “unit of selection”, then the possibility of human group minds leaps into view. It is becoming widely accepted that our distant ancestors found ways to suppress disruptive self-serving behaviors within their groups, so that cooperating as a group became the primary evolutionary force. Cooperation takes familiar physical forms such as hunting, gathering, childcare, predator defense, an offense and defense against other human groups. Cooperation also takes mental forms, such as perception, memory, maintaining an inventory of symbols with shared meaning, and transmitting large amounts of learned information across generations. In fact, most cognitive abilities that are distinctively human are forms of mental cooperation that frequently take place beneath conscious awareness. It is not an exaggeration to say that small human groups are the primate equivalent of eusocial insect colonies, complete with their own group minds. As the great 19th century social theorist Alexis d’Toqueville observed, “The village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that, wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to constitute itself.”
The adjective “small” is needed because all human groups were small prior to ten thousand years ago, although a tribal scale of social organization needs to be recognized as important in addition to the fission-fusion bands within each tribe where most of the social interactions occurred. In addition, cultural evolution is a multi-level process, no less than genetic evolution. As Peter Turchin shows in his book Ultrasociety, the societies that replaced other societies during the last 10,000 years did so in part because of their ability to gather and process information, leading to effective collective action at ever larger scales, such as the nations of France and America which were the main objects of Toqueville’s attention. Some elements of culturally evolved group minds are consciously designed, but many others are the result of unplanned cultural evolution, taking place beneath conscious awareness. They work without anyone knowing how they work.
Not only do units of selection tell us where group minds are likely to exist, but also where they are unlikely to exist. In many animal societies, within-group selection is the primary evolutionary force, leading to behaviors that would be regarded as selfish and despotic in human terms. If these societies have group minds at all, they are highly impaired, unlike eusocial insect colonies. By the same token, despotic human societies have group minds that are highly impaired, unlike more cooperatively organized human societies.
Knowing all of this has tremendous potential for recognizing collective intelligence in human life where it currently exists and socially constructing it where it is needed. However, most of what I have recounted is new, emerging only within the last two or three decades, and is often not reflected in the thinking of otherwise smart people on the subject of collective intelligence. In particular, there is a tendency to naively assume that collective intelligence emerges spontaneously from complex interactions, without requiring a process of selection at the level of the collective unit.
It was therefore with trepidation that I began reading Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World, by Geoff Mulgan—founder of the think tank Demos, director of the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and head of policy under Tony Blair, and current chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s National Endowment for Science. That made him smart—but was he smart about collective intelligence from a modern evolutionary perspective?
To my delight, I found him very well informed, clearly recognizing that collective intelligence only exists under very special conditions, which makes it both present andabsent in human life. In addition to his conceptual understanding, his book is filled with examples from his extensive policy experience that were previously unknown to me, along with practical advice about how to enhance collective intelligence where it does not already exist. I therefore lost no time inviting him to have an email conversation, which he generously accepted. An excerpt of his book is featured on the online magazine Evonomics.com.
DSW: Welcome, Geoff, to TVOL and congratulations on your superb book. In our correspondence leading up to this conversation, you called my attention to a 1996 issue of Demos Quarterly devoted to evolutionary thinking. Tell us about your background and how you came to appreciate the relevance of evolutionary theory in relation to human affairs. Bear in mind that while you are already well known in some quarters, you will be new to many of our readers.
GM: My intellectual background is a combination of economics, philosophy, social science and telecommunications, the subject of my PhD. By the time I started becoming interested in public policy there was already widespread dissatisfaction with the overly mechanistic, equilibrium models of economics which failed adequately to explain patterns of change: how technologies arise and spread; how economies grow. Many of us looked to evolutionary thinking as a useful tool. It could provide metaphorical frames – understanding social change in terms of the generation of new possibilities, selection and then replication (which has subsequently helped feed a very dynamic field of social innovation); it gave some new insights into how we were formed as human beings, and new psychological insights into policy. The Demos Quarterly you mentioned was a good showcase of the state of the field at the time. But it had little immediate influence.
One interesting spin-off was what is now called behavioural economics, which adapted many insights from evolutionary biology into the language of economics. The next issue of Demos Quarterly in 1996 focused on that, and I later commissioned quite a bit of work in the UK government (including a big 2002 study on the implications of behavioural psychology for public policy). A few years later Nudge was published by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler and introduced these ideas to the mainstream, helping the creation of a behavioural insights team in the Prime Minister’s office in the UK.
Another result, which I write about quite a bit in the book, is to see large scale cognition, like evolution more generally, in terms of trade-offs. I call it cognitive economics: what selection or survival advantages are provided by certain kinds of cognition, and at what cost. A great deal of work has been done on this at the individual organism level in terms of the advantages of a larger, but very energy hungry, brain. I’m interested in the parallels for groups of organisations: if they spend scarce resources on abilities to observe, analyse, create or remember does that confer advantages? Can they overshoot – like the clan that spends so much time remembering its ancestors that it fails to protect itself from threats; or a company that spends so much time trying to create the new that it fails to attend to the present. My hunch is that a new discipline is possible that draws on evolutionary thinking to analyse these kinds of trade-offs in more precise ways.
DSW: That’s very helpful background. I don’t want to assume that we agree upon everything, so please comment on my rather lengthy introduction. Is there anything that you would like to add or amend, to set the conceptual stage broadly for our conversation?
GM: Your introduction makes a great deal of sense to me, and coming from a social science background it’s obvious that the group is a unit of selection. The question that animated me was a version of this: why do some nations, cities, organisations manage to thrive and adapt while others don’t, even though they appear to be endowed with superior intellectual resources or technologies? Why did some of the organizations that had invested the most in intelligence of all kinds – from firms like Lehmann Brothers to the USSR in the 1980s – fail to spot big facts in the world around them and so stumble? I was looking for a theory that could explain some of these patterns and understand how and when some groups are able to optimize for a particular environment and then adapt to a rapidly changing one....MORE
