Natural Reward Podcast
Natural Reward Podcast
Latest Episodes
Why Some Cells Die So Others Can Live
Episode summaryWhen starvation strikes, hundreds of thousands of solitary cellular-slime-mold cells ("social amoebae") assemble into a temporary multicellular body. Roughly one-quarter sacrifice reproduction to construct a dead stalk, al...
Why Myth-Busting Beats Shared Fictions
Episode OverviewIn this "deep dive" episode, the hosts take a sledgehammer to the comforting narratives of popular science. Drawing on the work of evolutionary biologist Dr. Owen Gilbert, the conversation explores the profo...
The Blind Entrepreneur: How Natural Reward Scales Life’s Greatest Inventions
SummaryIn this episode, we dive into a radical new evolutionary framework proposed by Owen M. Gilbert in his paper, "Natural Reward Drives the Advancement of Life." We explore why the traditional "scarcity mindset"...
Natural Reward’s Struggle to Exist: How a New Theory First Entered the Scientific World
I. What does it take for a new scientific theory to come into existence?Before a theory can spread, it must first emerge. It must be invented, named, clarified, defended, revised, and forced into a form that can survive public scr...
Hamilton’s Rule and Inclusive Fitness, Part I: What Did Hamilton (1964) Actually Define?
KeywordsInclusive fitness, Hamilton’s rule, kin selection, altruism, social evolution, population genetics, gene substitution, Fisher’s average effect, relatedness, evolution of cooperation, greenbeard effect, dominance, allele frequency...