Today, Razib talks to Robert Kurzban, an evolutionary psychologist and author whose work explores how evolution has shaped human behavior, morality, cooperation, and emotions. He earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he trained with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, before serving as a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and served as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and editor-in-chief of Evolution and Human Behavior. His books include Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, coauthored with Jason Weeden, and All the Feels: The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation (2026).
Razib and Kurzban explore the origins, controversies, and enduring insights of evolutionary psychology, tracing how John Tooby and Leda Cosmides combined evolutionary theory with a computational view of the mind. Discussing Kurzban’s book All the Feels, they examine emotions and sensations—including love, disgust, curiosity, and tickling—as evolved systems that address specific problems of survival, reproduction, and social relationships. Their conversation ranges from research showing how team membership can reduce racial categorization to cultural learning, personality differences, heritability, and the replication crisis, with Kurzban distinguishing stronger findings from speculative hypotheses. Razib and Kurzban also consider how competing mental systems explain contradictions between intellectual beliefs and visceral reactions, before closing with artificial intelligence’s transformative potential and the challenge its successes pose to assumptions about the necessity of specialized cognitive machinery.
