The long-held dominant narrative about evolution is that it works like a tree. But as science has advanced in the last century, the idea of a family tree might not tell the full story anymore.

Evolutionary biologist David P. Mindell is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the author of The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution which explores the concept of horizontal evolution alongside traditional Darwinian vertical evolution.

Greg and David discuss the importance of creating an updated narrative for evolutionary biology, the intricate nature of hybridization and horizontal gene transfer, the ethical implications of gene editing, and horizontal evolution’s potential application in medicine, agriculture, and public health.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Charles Darwin
• Richard Dawkins
• Ötzi
• Simon Schwendener
• Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper
• Frederick Griffith
• Gregor Mendel

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Website

His Work:

• The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution

Why horizontal evolution matters for understanding life

35:07: We really have to rethink what are the major mechanisms of evolution for all of life, not just what we see in animals or animals and plants. And this is why I think there's been some resistance to this idea that horizontal evolution really is highly consequential. It's just that we tend still to be human-centric, then animal-centric, and then maybe animal- and plant-centric. But if we really want to understand the evolution of all of life, then we can see that horizontal evolution is a big deal. There's both still vertical and horizontal, but we can't neglect the horizontal evolution from the basic, the most basic narrative, especially for the public, if we want them to understand how evolution operates.

How important is an overarching narrative in making sense of new discoveries?

07:37: Narrative is so important because, especially for the public, we understand stories. We're kind of wired to understand a story. And when you get the outlines of a story, you get a lot more information than just the basics of the story. You get new information, and you can plug it into the story as well. So having a narrative that is squared with our best science is valuable because it informs our understanding of evolutionary biology overall.

The power of decentralized evolution in rapid change

14:08: I talk in the book [The Network of Life] about inheritance when you're talking about how horizontal evolution can be decentralized. This is a powerful concept because they are supposed to have pros and cons of decentralization, but one of the advantages of it is its rapid change and rapid innovation. And this certainly can be advantageous for organisms, particularly when they're in a changeable environment, to suddenly get a new set of genes that have already been honed for millions of years in some other organism. If you can manage, if an organism can, if those can be expressed, and they are potentially useful, that's a way to get much faster adaptation than single base pair substitutions, which is what you usually see between parents and progeny.

Can we use horizontal evolution to our benefit—wisely?

41:50: Humans will be doing more and more forms of hybridizations or tinkering with life forms. If we can find some that carry particular functions that humans are interested in and talk briefly about bacteria that have the ability to remediate environmental toxins, this is something most everybody agrees could be a good thing, or bacteria that are capable of producing energy, and so we will eventually be using horizontal evolution to our benefit. You know, the question is, can we do it wisely enough?

When COVID-19 hit, many predictions were made about how the global pandemic would impact the macroeconomy. Some of those predictions were accurate, some of them turned out to be false alarms. But when business leaders need to make strategic decisions with macroeconomic forecasts in mind, how do they tell the truth from the doomsaying?

Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is the global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group. He also leads the BCG’s Center for Macroeconomics and regularly contributes to publications like the Harvard Business Review and Fortune.com. His book, Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk delves into strategic ways business leaders can assess macroeconomic risk in the face of events like a global pandemic, war, or even presidential elections.

Philipp and Greg discuss the necessity for today’s executives to understand the macroeconomy, a new approach to judging macroeconomic risk, and why conventional models of the past might not be the best predictor for the macroeconomy’s future.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Ludwig von Mises
• Friedrich Hayek
• John Maynard Keynes
• The Phillips Curve
• Thucydides Trap

Guest Profile:

• Professional Profile at Boston Consulting Group
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk

Technology fuels productivity growth

31:53: What's important to recognize is that technology is only the fuel of productivity growth. That's what we call in the book [Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms]; it's the fuel, but you also need the spark. You need firms to actually embrace the technology and put it to use. And the spark—that's the tight labor market. When the availability of labor is low or when the price point is too high, that's when you first nudge firms and later force firms to replace their labor needs with technology.

How are leadership and macroeconomics connected?

06:30: Most leadership is about coming to a conviction of what the future will be like and adjusting actions around that conviction. Macro is no different, and the more we treat macroeconomics as a science, the worse the outcome will be.

How do we decide the optimal amount of history we ought to incorporate into our way of thinking about the world?

25:40: History has great case studies. It shows often coherent drivers that illuminate important parts of the story. But history is always idiosyncratic, and so applying it, extrapolating, or copy-pasting from history is exceedingly difficult, all the way to the sort of inevitability of the great power war. It's simply not true that a rising rival power always leads to great power conflict. I mean, most obviously, Britain was displaced by the U.S., and it didn't come to a head, or like a war or conflict in that sense. So, if you look at the patterns of some of these predictions, it fails right there in the sense that there never is a sort of template-like use of history. All of it is rather idiosyncratic, and that makes it both beautiful and treacherous as an analytical tool.

Navigating distractions with a strategic perspective

49:19: It's so easy to be distracted and go down every rabbit hole the financial press will lay out for you. Every data point is spun into disaster. For every true crisis, many false alarms. And how do we learn to navigate that with more calm and, frankly, a better experience? Well, it's by learning about that more strategic picture of how the thing works.