Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn so that we can accelerate and accentuate a life of real purpose. A few months ago, I got an email from a publisher making the case that the book they were about to publish was the most important book in the history of their imprint. They asked whether I would endorse that book, and after going through the manuscript, I was so eager to do it. The book is simply called Purpose, but the subtitle is a volume in and of itself: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence.
Wilkinson is wrestling with the secrets of the universe. He is doing something bold, using principles from a whole variety of scientific disciplines to provide a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.
The description of the book is clear. “Generations have been taught that evolution implies there is no overarching purpose to our existence,” says Wilkinson. “That life has no fundamental meaning. We are merely the accumulation of tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents.”
Some scientists, according to Wilkinson, take this logic one step further. “The fact of evolution, he writes, is to them inherently atheistic. It goes against the notion that there is a God.”
But is this true? Is evolution and the belief in an overarching purpose to our existence inherently at odds? Wilkinson certainly believes that they are not.
So if you’ve ever struggled to reconcile faith and reason, I think Wilkinson’s profound book Purpose may have been written for you. I believe Purpose is an essential book by every measure, beautifully written, superbly researched, and at least potentially life changing. You will, I think, never think about your life, or the earth, or the purpose of each in the same way again. This is part one of a two-part conversation. Let’s get to it.
Samuel, welcome to the podcast.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Thanks, thanks for having me.
Greg McKeown:
Thanks for being here.
So help us to see the journey from birth to the point that you wrote this book.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, it’s a bit of a journey. So right now, I’m an associate professor of medicine at Yale, and I wanted to write this book for almost 15 years now, since I was a first year medical student. And it came about basically because in my first year of medical school was the first time I really started to confront this big and important theory of evolution. I went into medicine in a bit of a roundabout way. I studied engineering, and it never really grappled with what evolution implied, about human nature and about our origins, and I grew up religious, and so there was a bit of a conflict that emerged in my mind. It was quite vexing for a period of time, and I spent several months kind of wrestling with this and studying it and thinking and praying and reflecting, and it kind of in a sort of epiphany, things seemed to resolve themselves in my mind, and I viewed things a little differently and ever since then I had wanted to write this book.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so that’s interesting. Now, how did you end up at medical school in the first place? Just give me a little more color to that.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, well, as an undergraduate, I studied mechanical engineering, and as I got to the point where I started thinking, okay, what do I actually want to do? It started leaning more and more toward some sort of biomedical engineering, and I did a little research on that, and at one point, I had a conversation with a mentor who said you know, you should really just think about going into medicine. This is a position where you do a lot of interesting things; you can do research, you can treat patients, and my brother, actually, at the time, was prepared to apply to medical school, and conversation with him and so forth. You know I shifted direction a little bit. I was probably going to get a doctorate in engineering in some form but went into medicine. So that’s how I ended up. I was fortunate to go to a great medical school in Baltimore. I spent four years of my life there and had some great experiences and then, after graduating, came up to New Haven, Connecticut, where my family and I have been ever since.
Greg McKeown:
So go back to that wrestle, that period. Yeah, what really required this thinking? I mean, you’re implying that it just was there? Was it just in the air, or was it that you were studying the theory of evolution specifically, like, how direct was that initiation?
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, I had been studying it, I had been wrestling it and wrestling with it. Two issues, in particular, were difficult for me, and one is this sense, which I believe is mistaken, and one of the things that I tried to correct, that evolution was totally random and haphazard and the implication that our lives are essentially an accident and ergo meaningless. That was something that was off-putting, and I think is still off-putting for many people. Almost everyone has a sense of seeking purpose and meaning in life. And at least on one level, on the highest level, what I would call a rudimentary understanding of evolution implies that that’s all just an illusion, that there’s no meaning or purpose to our existence, that it’s an act, that I think the last 20 years or so in evolutionary biology there’s a framework that that’s not necessarily the case, and I happen to go into that further detail as we converse.
Another part of the theory of evolution that was really off-putting was what it implied about human nature, and again, I think that was a result of my somewhat elementary understanding of the theory. I think when the theory first came out, it was 1859 when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and there’s a sense that, at our core, we must be selfish. If this is actually true, there’s this wonderful quote it probably never happened, but the Bishop of Canterbury or someplace, his wife said, well, if this is true, let’s hope this is not true, and if it’s true, let’s hope it doesn’t become widely known. And the thinking was if this is true, what this implies about human nature is not good, and it’s much more complicated and nuanced than that. And there’s a huge amount of data to suggest that, yes, we do have the capacity to be selfish, but we also have an immense capacity to be altruistic. So those two aspects one is kind of the randomness or what this one physician writer called the doctrine of randomness. That was a big kind of stumbling point for me. Another was this notion of what evolution implied about human nature and how, at least from my elementary understanding, was not good.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, you’re just wrestling with the axiomatic underpinnings of the universe and human nature. That’s all. That’s all that’s at stake here.
But I want to have a moment here with you because we took our family to the Galapagos Islands a few years ago, and of course, that’s where Darwin was, where he was making these pretty extraordinary observations about and not just limited to there, but that was sort of a crescendo moment in his thinking about how the world works, how nature works, and he’s observing it directly, and he’s trying to make sense of it. And it’s a pretty amazing place to be because, both when he was there and even now, the natural world interacts with the human world in a way that’s unlike, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the world because you can be within just a few feet of the most extraordinary richness of wildlife and they’re not afraid of humans and that you don’t touch them and that’s in the law, of course, but you could easily because they just go to sleep wherever you’re walking and they’re just, you know, nature’s everywhere. And so there is something really magical about that and marvelous to sort of imagine him being there trying to make sense of what we’re experiencing as well.
Well, there’s something in what you’re saying, I think, right from the beginning, implies that how people interpret his writing at the surface level is not actually even what he wrote or what he meant. Does this sound right? Does this ring true? What are your thoughts?
Samuel Wilkinson:
Well, a lot has changed since then. You know, as Darwin wrote and as he developed this theory and he dealt with the consequences, the theory and the implications it had for society, it was pretty clear that he shifted into an area of disbelief in a creator. You know that there’s, there’s a. At the very end of The Origin of Species, there’s this sentence, and in the initial edition, it went along the lines of, you know, but by this, various forms of animal life are evolved. In a subsequent edition, he added these three words “by the creator.”
And it’s anyone’s guess whether at the time he just did that to kind of appease his audience, which was largely composed of believing Christians, or whether he actually believed at the time. He believed at the time. He later wrote that you know he regretted doing that. He clearly shifted, his theory, for him at least, clearly shifted him into an area where he did not necessarily believe in a higher, you know, divine being that somehow orchestrated this. But I think, you know, there have been subsequent developments and observations that now make it clear, at least on this, this part of the concept of randomness, there’s a lot to be said for the fact that it seems like there are higher order principles whereby patterns just keep emerging over and over and over again such that randomness wasn’t nearly as much of a driving force as was originally assumed, I think it still played some role.
For instance, you could say you know your eye color is determined by a random reassortment of your parents’ genes. But the fact that you have eyes and they are shaped and configured the way they are, and the remarkable structures that they are is not random.
Greg McKeown:
This idea of whether life is random or not is entirely random or not I don’t think it’s a trivial question at all. I remember in graduate school, reading Fooled by Randomness, which its sort of fundamental thesis is that everything is random and only humans have this predisposition to find patterns where they don’t really exist and then to lay on to those patterns’ meaning. And so I sort of went through a period, and I’m not dissimilar, I think, to what you’re describing of going okay, well, what does that mean? If you really just subscribe to the fact that life really is randomness, Does it matter? Does it have any implications?
And I felt that the direct implications for my life, you know, like it came with a specific feeling and sensation, and of course, that sensation grows out of the idea of, well, if it’s all random, therefore it is all without meaning. And this is why, of course, it is such a fundamental axiom that of course you were wrestling with and you’ve now wrestled with in a more formal way in this book because meaning is the only antidote to the suffering that is so universal in the human experience. And so if you say, well, it’s all random, all this suffering is randomness, there is no meaning to it, it is an extremely bitter pill to swallow. And if you were to go to its total conclusion, I think that it would be rather than just one more idea that people sort of adopt in a sort of half form. I think it would have an extreme effect on the psyche of anybody who would really observe it and hold onto it.
Samuel Wilkinson:
I think you’re right, and I think it has had an effect on our collective psyche, as you know, in serving in Western society over the 150 or so years since Darwin initially published The Origin of Species.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, talk to us about that. What do you mean when you say that?
Samuel Wilkinson:
You know, Niche said that God is dead, right, and you know this was somewhat contemporary with this emerging view of this notion that our existence is an accident. I think there is a lot of evidence now to suggest that that is not the case, and I think that’s good news. That doesn’t necessarily bring us to the conclusion that, oh, there is a purpose and there is meaning, there is God and so forth.
A lot of what I write in this. I have a chapter dedicated to this issue of randomness and, really the nonrandom nature of evolution. Richard Dawkins would agree with the fundamental biological principles I lay out. I think most people know him as probably the most outspoken atheist of our time. He would certainly bristle with any theological implications I try to connect to it, but I think increasingly this is not controversial, and there’s this emerging picture that there are higher order principles that have, you know, guided, Biologists would hate the use of that term, by the way, many will not use the word guided, maybe constrained that have constrained evolution to go in certain directions. But it’s certainly becoming clear, and there’s still a lot that is not known about this about why certain forms tend to evolve, and others do not. But I think increasingly this is becoming acknowledged in biology that there are these emerging patterns, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, that speak to this.
Greg McKeown:
Can you outline, you know, the key points within that chapter?
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, this goes back to the 70s and 80s and 90s. There was a famous biologist named Stephen Gould. He worked and taught at Harvard, and he proposed this thought experiment. He said well, if we could somehow rewind at the tape of life and watch it again, then nature would have come to a totally different result that everything was so contingent upon these chance circumstances. And that was a prevailing view, and he was very respected; certainly had his critics, but he was respected, and this was a prominent view.
Since that time, really, I think primarily by the work of a biologist named Simon Conway Morris, who has just brought together many, many examples of what is called convergent evolution. And this is the phenomenon where creatures that are very, very, very not closely related develop the same structures or functions or what have you, independently. And so one example that I provide is the birds, bats, and butterflies. Their supposed last common ancestor did not have the capacity to fly or wings, but they all developed this capacity independently. Another example is the body shape of a dolphin and a shark. They look very, very similar. They have this streamlined body, and they have dorsal and pectoral fins that help them maneuver through the water, but the dolphin is a mammal, and is believed that the dolphin’s ancestors were land-willing and somehow came back to the water and developed the same body type as a shark, and they look very, very similar. In some instances, they have a light shading on their underbelly and a dark shading on the top, and this helps camouflage them. So from viewing them from above, you can’t see them, or from below, you can’t see them because the light is contrasted against the light of the sky. So dolphins and sharks are not closely related at all, but they look incredibly similar.
Another classic example is the eye. Eyes have evolved. This is an old estimate. Eyes have evolved independently about 40 different times. I imagine that an updated piece of literature would actually have that number as higher, and there are different types of eyes. We have what’s called a camera-type eye, and we share this eye. It’s almost an identical structure, as the same as the eye that you would find in a squid. We are not closely related to a squid, but we somehow developed the almost identical structure independently, and so you get these patterns that occur over and over and over and over again. This is called convergent evolution.
So there’s this anecdote from Richard Dawkins where he asked a colleague of his to list off a few examples of quote, “Good ideas in biology that have evolved only once”. And his colleague could think of just a few, and I think it’s Simon Conway Morris who says pretty much everything has evolved more than once and there may be only very, very few exceptions, so you get this pattern. There’s a saying I like that you know once is, you know, maybe an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times or more makes a pattern. At this point, we’re well beyond three, and so there seems to be these patterns that occur over and over, and over and over again, such that there are higher level principles, or I think Conway Morris calls them deep structures of biology, that seem to constrain evolution to go in certain directions.
Greg McKeown:
That reminds me of a quote that Einstein is supposed to have expressed where, you know, it’s the one where he was, you know, as a young man and his parents give him a compass and he’s looking at it and either in that moment or at some point in his life, he starts to sense a deeper order, you know invisible, but obviously you know it’s like it’s deeply unseen but still deeply powerful, that are shaping the way that this compass works, and that seems similar to what you’re describing here.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, Again, there’s a lot that biologists don’t understand about why certain forms emerge over and over again. But there do seem to be these deeper principles, and we don’t necessarily know what they are. But there seems to be something at work here where, again, it’s pretty clear to me at least that it’s not in total a random and half-hazard process.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, and you know this is, therefore, a counter to the idea that the world is entirely random or, indeed, that evolution is entirely random. You’re not arguing, I think evolution is. Is it that there isn’t evolution or that this is not how the natural world has come to be, but that it is not the correct reading of the current data that we have to say this is the result of entire randomness? You know, whatever it is, it’s not that from your point of view. Is that right?
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, yeah, that’s correct.
Greg McKeown:
More, anything more on that, that specific subject, before we move to the, to the sort of the second area that sort of originated this, this wrestle that you had. I mean, is there more on this subject of just randomness, and in what evidence we have to suggest that it isn’t just driven by randomness?
Samuel Wilkinson:
Well, there’s an analogy that I have that I think may be helpful. So I mentioned I studied engineering as an undergraduate. There’s a manufacturing technique that is called injection molding, and this is used to make several everyday items such as, you know, toothbrush handles, plastic bottles, and so forth.
In this process, you have a solid material. Very commonly, these days, it’s plastic, and you heat it up until it becomes liquid, and in the liquid form, it is injected into a hollow cavity of a preformed structure, such that when the liquid cools, and then it reverts to its solid state, it will retain that structure.
And that’s a little bit how I think of this. So if you could somehow zoom in on the particles during this process, on these liquid particles moving about, it would look like they are randomly kind of bouncing around. So when you take a step back, they are filling the void of a mold, of a pattern, and this helps me think about this a little bit. So you know, you can imagine a mold in the shape of a very intricate tree, and you know, these mutations are essentially kind of filling that void, and they end up, you know, forming this tree of life that you know we have and enjoy in the natural world. So I think that helps me at least a little bit understand how things can look random from up close, and then you take a step back and oh, there’s a pattern.
Greg McKeown:
I really like that as a description because that’s another way in which one can say, OK, there could be natural law underpinning the universe that we exist in, and yet that still allows for something like a maximum sort of a maximum freedom within those constraints, right? Like within these constraints, there can be a lot of evolution, a lot of I don’t know if a choice is quite the right word when you’re thinking about the natural world, but you know, I’m sort of I’m taken because, perhaps because of spending so much time at Cambridge now and thinking about Sir Isaac Newton. I mean, I don’t even know how to describe it, really, what he did with Principia Mathematica, where he disappears into a room effectively for two years and comes out, I mean, honestly, it makes me emotional even to think about it, because it’s unbelievable, it’s impossible. It’s impossible what he did. How could he come out two years with that level of clarity of identifying three laws? Okay, there are relatively that’s a funny word to use to make my point points that have been made that update some of what he wrote, but effectively he described accurately not only how the immediate world works around him, the forces that play, invisible forces, but also, to a large extent, the entire solar system and universe that are all working by it. It is a leap of understanding that is just impossible. That’s all I can describe it as. And so, anyway, I’m thinking of that in relation to what you’re describing that there are laws that seem to at least challenge this idea of pure randomness. The Newtonian laws are not consistent with the idea of total randomness.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of sometimes in biology. There’s a disagreement as to what is the definition of life, and whatever it is, it has to be a little bit on the border between order and chaos. If it’s too ordered, it can’t work, but if it’s too chaotic, that doesn’t work either. There’s this fine line, and so I do think some level of randomness or unconstrained motion or something that is. I think that’s a critical part. But overall, there are these principles and patterns that have emerged as scientists such as Simon Conway Morris have brought together these many, many, many examples.
Greg McKeown:
I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about how these duality of principles just across all of human experience are so necessary. You could talk about the legal system of justice and mercy. That would be a classic example of it that if anything is all justice, then mercy is of course, entirely violated and vice versa. But that idea of the duality of principles is not an exception. It’s like that’s the rule that there are these enormous numbers of combinations of principles that if you only apply one, you will inevitably cause problems, that they become like the scissors in the C.S. Lewis example right, the two sides of the same instrument. He said that with justice and mercy. But that seems like really what you just described order and chaos. Even that, the biologists. Even to define life, you need those both working.
I think that feels so accurate and clear in what you’ve been trying to write about in this chapter and then, of course, in the book more broadly, this idea of, yes, of course, there is some randomness, of course, there is some, that side of reality exists, but that if all you had was that, then that’s all you would have. It would just self-perpetuate randomness and chaos, and in this, maybe more even than the biologists intend by it, but like the very idea that a life is not possible. Maybe even in our own lives, a life is not really possible to be lived well if it’s just entirely random. Well, I take no responsibility for my choices; it’s just whatever I want to do. That is the right thing, you do you. It just discombobulates a proper, oriented life, and vice versa is also true. If you go all the other extreme and it’s all control and it’s all rules, then you could not call that really a life either. The pursuit of just comfort and the elimination of anything unknown that’s the adventure of life is not possible. So there’s like a sort of a philosophical point here that seems to be parallel to what you’re describing of you need both. You need both elements to be able to live a life of meaning.
Samuel Wilkinson:
Yeah, I think I understand what you’re getting at, and maybe to just make a bit of segue here, another context in which I’ve seen that principle in a way that I think is really fascinating from a philosophical perspective is the relationship between, say, love and sacrifice.
So let me shift this a little bit to humans and human biology and our nature and our psychology and so forth. So just to wrap up, I think what we talked about the random nature of evolution and how that’s not correct, and it seems to be a larger pattern, much of which is not random. That doesn’t prove that there is a purpose to our life. It kind of brings those worldviews a little closer together. To complete this argument, in my opinion, requires a deeper dive into human nature. So to bring it back to this concept of love and sacrifice, humans, in a biological sense, we, when our offspring are born, they’re extraordinarily premature.
Some scholars who study infant development refer to the first few months of life as the fourth trimester. A giraffe can walk within a few days of being born. In biological terms, this language is a little bit obsolete. But you talk about what are called case-elected species, and these are species that have relatively few offspring and the offspring in which they do have. They have a huge amount of effort that they have to invest into, care for, and help rear that offspring from a young age to maturity. And we are kind of the epitome of that. And because of this, from a biological perspective, we have a deep, deep capacity to love our children. If it weren’t like that, they wouldn’t have survived in the evolutionary pattern of development. But also related to that is this, you know, we have to say it’s hard being a parent, right, it’s hard being a mother. I would say especially a mother, but also a father. If you know you’re investing in your child’s outcome and helping to rear it. It’s not easy work at all.
There’s a book, I think it was, by a woman named Jennifer Sr. in maybe 2014. It was called I like the title, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, and the other pushback I have for that title is modern because I think parenthood has always been hard, and that’s kind of written into our nature and our evolution because our offspring are born so premature that we have to invest in sacrifice to care for them. But at the same time, this is, in my viewpoint, intrinsically connected with the deep love that we have for them. So you see, those principles of love and sacrifice to me in a sort of, you know, very worldly and secular and biological way. They’re intricately connected.
Greg McKeown:
So what stood out to you in this conversation with Samuel Wilkinson, the Yale professor? What can you do differently by challenging the idea that everything is randomness and instead to open yourself up more fully to the idea that there is meaning even in the evolution of the world and of ourselves? Who can you share this episode with so that you can continue this conversation now that the episode has come to an end?
Thank you, really thank you for listening and if you have a minute, please write a review on Apple podcasts of this episode. And if you go to gregmckeown.com/essential. There’s a thank you you can receive if you’re the first person to write the review a year’s access to the essentialism academy.
