The Human Idea

Juliet Clark dives into the fascinating world of ideas with guest Anne Riley, author of Dina: Nature’s Case for Democracy and The Human Idea. The conversation revolves around the concept of the “human idea” and its impact on society, exploring how ideas shape human behavior and the world around us. Anne Riley shares her insights into the parallels between human and ecological systems, offering a fresh perspective on how we think, act, and collaborate in the modern world. Tune in to discover how these groundbreaking ideas could change the way we understand ourselves and society.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Human Idea

Introduction

We have an author as a guest so I think you’ll like the ideas in her book. They’re very forward thinking. Before we get started with that, I want to remind you guys to go over and grab your free evaluation worksheet. You can find that at ReaderAvatar.com. What it does is it gives you a baseline to start from where are all your social media platforms, how many downloads are you getting and if you have content, where is this all going. The very last page has a calculator to see based on your numbers how many books you would sell.

I can tell you, sometimes it’s eye opening. I was even shocked and I have a pretty robust platform but it clearly showed me that I don’t think I could qualify for a traditional publishing contract at this time. It’s Illuminating. You can go over and find that at ReaderAvatar.com and when you flip to page two, there was an invite to our December training which will be given by Gina Hester who is a brand expert and has done work for Kathy Ireland books and a few other publishers out there. I believe she’s done some work for Jack Canfield, so illuminating on the brand. I love her stuff because it’s so glossy and pretty. She’s a truly fabulous branding expert and she branded me many years ago. I probably need to go back for a rebrand soon.

Our guest is Anne Riley. Anne was born in Richland Washington and is the 11th of twelve children and grew up in Naperville, Illinois. She graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in Accounting and earned the prestigious bone scholar award. She married her high school sweetheart, moved to the West Coast and started a family and earned an MBA from Portland State University.

For many years, she’s been balancing her family life with various other industries, including technology, teaching, and finance and she retired in 2011. She is influenced by the parallels between human and ecological systems. Her theory is articulated in her novel DINA: Nature’s Case for Democracy and a nonfiction book, the Human Idea, which is what we’re going to talk about nature’s newest ecosystem. Riley’s writing is characterized by humor and depth. She aims to engage and improve the lives of her readers. The basic promise of her book is do no harm. Stay tuned with my interview with Anne.

—

Anne, welcome. It’s great to have you.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.

I’m excited to talk about your book. This is your second book and I referenced DINA in my introduction. We start with DINA? How did you get started? Why DINA? How did you move to this?

This is a pretty significant theory. I look at it as an extension of the theory of evolution by Darwin and it’s a lot. When I first tried to write the book, I tried to write it as a nonfiction book and I got stuck as I went forward because I am not a scientist in any one field. I’m not a scientist in any field. It makes a difference if you’re trying to explain something that has scientific background to it, but I realized that I didn’t think I had the credibility to write an overview that crosses fields.

I thought, “How do I do this and explain this theory in a way that’s approachable to people?” I came up with the idea of doing it as a fictional novel like a Socratic novel. It’s patterned after Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a protagonist has a conversation with an ape. I said, “That’s the idea, to have a conversation with a more knowledgeable being about this theory and then have the back and forth be explanatory in and of itself.”

For me, it was a perfect opportunity to put in a lot of bad puns and a lot of jokes. A lot of ways for people to laugh along the way because it’s a significant shift of mine. I wanted something that would relieve the pressure of that. That’s a double-edged sword. It’s worked well with women readers. It’s worked very poorly with male readers. I said, “Maybe there is a place for a nonfiction book.”

Maybe because we’re more social creatures. It’s probably because we’re open to newer ideas in that area. As an author, you bring up this concept about ecosystems. Ecosystems an older one but ideas is fair. What are the key characteristics of each so people can understand what you’re trying to explain?

The Concept Of Human Ideas

I wondered basically for pretty much all my life why humans were so different from every other creature on Earth. I knew what we were thinking but I didn’t understand. I knew that’s the significance. You look at a dog or a cat and they know things. They think but it’s very limited in scope. If I asked my dog to go on a walk, the dog would say, “Of course.” Jump up and down and we’ll go on a walk. We’ll take a path, but the dog doesn’t know to go down Elm Street and then Jefferson Street.

Let’s say, I tell my dog, “We got to get home. I’ve got an emergency. I’ve got to go home. Let’s cut through the park.” My dog does not know that. He’s like, “Going home means we have to go down all of these other streets that we normally go on our walk.” They can’t adjust that way. We can say, “Where am I going? I want to go to this restaurant or I want to go to that restaurant.” We can think in very great detail and choose our actions in a very great detail. That is what struck me as very important.

The idea sphere is like to me, it was like, “Ideas are at the base of all humans and how we create ideas is how we communicate and how we build the world.” Everything that we build starts with an idea and we can share those ideas. Each thing we build contains the ideas in it. If you build a house, it has all of the mathematical calculations that went into making sure that angles work and plumbing flows. All of these things that are in there. That thing then exists as its own thing and can be transferred to other people.

This is easier to understand with books. Darwin wrote the Origin of Species and he wrote this Theory of Evolution in 1859. He died in 1882 but the book is still alive. I picked it up and I’ve read it. It was a base for me to write my book about the human idea. Human ideas don’t have a lifetime warranty like a human does or an animal does. We’ve ended up creating a whole ecosystem of ideas that are out there and being spread in all kinds of different ways. What I wanted to do was understand how that worked and how it compares to the natural ecosystem.

You talked in your book a lot about the choice. Choice is a uniquely human ability. What implications do you think that has for human behavior and society?

It is huge. It is dramatic in the sense that if an animal doesn’t have much choice that is required to follow its DNA instructions. It’s born with all its DNA instructions and an animal life. Whether it’s a cat or a dog or a squirrel. They all have to follow the instructions that they have inherited from their DNA. Humans have come along and they basically have the ability to choose their instructions. They don’t have to follow every instruction. They can create ideas and follow one set of ideas versus the other.

When animals follow their instructions, nature decides who gets to live and die. They do their instructions, then the environment works on them. Whoever fits in the environment can survive and everybody else doesn’t. When you go along in time, when you look at animals, they are all the winners of life. They are all the best information possible but humans come along. We can choose our information.

We can choose a good idea or a bad idea equally well. We can Implement bad ideas very well just as well as we can implement good ideas and there’s no control. There’s no environmental control over us to decide which one wins. The only thing that decides which idea wins is acceptance by others. If you have an idea that says, “Apollo, the Sun God rides his chariot across the sky and carries a son with it every day.” People go, “It works.” Every day, they look up, “There’s the sun. It must be Apollo.”

That’s a bad idea because it’s not true but people accepted it for thousands of years. That’s what humans do, they don’t have to accept only true ideas. We can implement bad ideas and good ideas. I think that what we see with humanity is that. We’re a mixed bag. We implement both ideas because we don’t have the controls. We literally remove those controls when we develop our ability to think.

That is so interesting because I look around in the environment and I see people who are out there talking about their victimization. My first thought is, “You’re choosing to be a victim.” If you would heal, move on and change the way you’re thinking about this. You wouldn’t have this victimology behavior. I’m not saying that people aren’t victims of things but it’s always how you handle it. Are you going to martyr yourself as a victim or are you going to accept that strength that you’ve come back from and flourish? It’s weird in this environment when so many people are wallowing. I don’t mean to downplay but they wallow in the victimization.

You make a broader point, which is that I think people are disconnected. They don’t know what to think and how to think. I tell you there’s an easy explanation for why that occurs. When we are born, we are born with zero ideas. Animals are born with 100% of their DNA instructions to allow them to work. We as humans are born with our 100% of DNA instructions to allow us to survive but we have no ideas.

Which means that if we’re going to operate in a world where ideas are going to be important, we need to teach our children good ideas. We need to teach them not just how to read, write, and do math, which are very important. We need to teach them how to understand what it is to be a human. We need to understand how we should act in a world in which there’s so many choices to make. My guide for this is to look at how cells collaborate in your body.

You have 35 trillion cells in your body and they all work together to keep you alive and each of those cells alive. They do that with your brain and your neural system that says, “Everybody, here’s what you are going to do sells,” and they all do it. We’re not cells. We think and choose, so you can see where we have the chaos problem that occurs because we can think. What we haven’t done is understand that if we build societies the way cells build their communities, we might do better. They build it on one basic concept which is, “Cells, you get to do what you want but you can’t hurt the other cells. If you hurt the other cells, we’re going to come in and adjust that.”

That’s how our societies should work and the neural system for our societies is government. That’s where we choose our leaders to figure out how we’re going to live together. The cells all have the same DNA all over the cells. They all have the same goals which is, “We’re not going to hurt each other and each of us is going to do our jobs.” We have a government where we have a constitution that says the same thing. It says, “Provide for the general welfare. Preserve our common defense.” We do all these things, but then we have to create the rules that allow that to happen.

We create rules that don’t always say, “Do what you want and do no harm.” We do a bunch of other rules, some of which do harm and some of which don’t have anything to do with how we should live together. There’s a big mixed bag because I think we’re approaching it wrong. If we went back to your original question, if we educated all our people in terms of the idea that they get to maximize their choice, but they can’t harm others and hear all the things you can do. Let’s look at all the things you can do in this life and understand what harm means. Let’s understand how you can work out a problem with somebody. That’s what I want people to start thinking about in that term.

Getting back to the government aspect of this. We’ve been having so many conversations in this household about critical thinking. I feel like they quit teaching that in school and we’ve been having, if you see this on CNN or MSNBC and then you go over to Fox, which granted they’re all propaganda or alternative media where I think most people are living now. You hear two different views. It’s your job to go pull the documents, read and be a critical thinker. Not just follow what’s going on because I think the media has become such a dangerous function in our society. People aren’t critical thinking their way out of it because we quit teaching critical thinking in the schools.

We stopped teaching Civics, which is also how you organize yourselves as people. There’s a lot of things we have stopped teaching. That’s a critical place because when you’re born with no ideas, which ideas get put in your head determine your future. We are seeing what you’re talking about. The fact that we have had no critical thinking for many years because I remember thinking that when I was a kid. I was like, “People are thinking here.” At my house, I had a lot of older siblings. I had to think to stay alive.

That is true. It’s another thing that we have stopped with the kids in this critical thinking is readers are leaders and still am. I just listened to books instead of reading, but I’ve always been a voracious reader. I can remember back in school in the ‘60s, having these contests where who’s going to read the most books in the class and doing the book reports. Now, there’s so many kids that are cheating. They don’t read. Everything is video and I think video takes that critical thinking away too because now I’m a Zombie looking at a screen instead of, “Here is a concept. Let me read that again.”

Having the conversations about it and this is where having ideas that you don’t agree with is just as important as only having ideas you do agree with. How are you going to be able to discern what is an appropriate idea? Where I’m coming to is like almost a layer beneath ideologies that said, “This is the fundamental way things have survived for years.” They do their job, but they don’t harm each other which allows them to work together. They have all of these rules in order to let them work together.

It’s like every cell in a body must disclose its information up to the neural system. If you’re fine, the neural system is going to pass you by but let’s say you cut your finger. The neural system says, “Right digit there has got a problem. Send out the phagocyte. Send out the other cells. We’re going to do it. We got to fix them up.” The neural system does this, making sure that the cells are okay and it can work again. Let’s say you start to get cancer or some disease.

The cell goes, “We just got some place in that body that’s been infected with a virus. We’re not going to save it.” They’ll send in that thing and they’ll kill the cell. The way they do that is they kill the cell in order to keep the whole body alive. This is the process that they go through. They do everything they can to save it. I think the important thing is that it’s a community that we have to think about how we’re doing things.

We, who are born with no ideas, need to understand what’s a good thought, a bad thought, and a helpful thought. The underlying idea is that we all should be able to work together, but do what we want and figure out our place in the world. We can’t harm anybody along the way because they then can’t harm me and that’s how we live together in harmony.

The Relationship Between Competition And Collaboration

That’s fantastic. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between competition and collaboration? I would say we are seeing a lot of that to say it to the point of toxicity in the environment.

In nature, when cells first arrived what happened with life is life does something very different than all the matter and energy before. Life takes resources. Converts them into other cell parts and then allows the cell to live. We do the same thing. We eat spinach, a spinach salad and we grow better parts, better brain and better muscles. Whatever it is. If you cut your body open, you wouldn’t find a spinach salad. It’s not there because you’ve converted those resources into something else.

Life needs resources to survive. The first thing that happens when life exists is they have to eat in order to live. Competition is defined as things that need the same resources to live. If there’s a lot of things that need the same resources to live, competition ensues. If there’s enough resources for everything to go around, no competition. Everybody gets their fill, but if you’re a cat or a dog or a wolf and you eat a lot of resources. The first thing you’re going to do is make a new generation of babies,

Sooner or later, there’s going to be a lot of little babies running around who all need the same food and the competition will grow with time. Success breeds competition. That’s what happens default-wise. Competition is our default survival mechanism. It makes sense. Competition is hard. Always pressure. Always looking for your shoulder. It’s always difficult. Some cells figure it out early on that if they don’t compete but instead work together. They might be able to make it a little bit easier to survive.

That’s what happened. We became multicellular animals. Cells turned into animals and plants over time. What they do is they all have the same DNA in them, but they split the jobs. They split the law. In order to do that, they need to be able to coordinate their behavior. Collaboration is what we talk about when our 35 trillion cells work together. They all work together to keep you alive. Now, you as a unit have to compete in the world but your cells do not compete with each other or you would be dead.

That’s how competition and collaboration fit. Collaboration always must have coordination with it, which is that brain in the neural system because something has to keep everything working in the same direction. When you look at humans, we are the cells in our ideas sphere. We’re the cells. We can join with institutions. We can compete by ourselves. join with institutions, and collaborate together to implement new ideas. Societies are all of us joining together to figure out how to coexist. Society as a collaborative unit. Does that explain the difference between the two?

Where To Buy Anne Riley’s Books

It does. DINA is on sale. You can buy it over on Amazon and the Human Idea will be out on 11/19, I believe. We’re already in pre-sale. Go check it out, the Human Idea. You can find it on Amazon pretty much any distributor that you buy books at. DINA is an Amazon exclusive, isn’t it? That’s just Amazon, but you could buy it before the other book comes out. Anne, thank you very much for taking the time to tell us about your book.

Thank you so much for this opportunity. I appreciate it.

Important Links

• ReaderAvatar.com
• Anne Riley
• DINA: Nature’s Case for Democracy
• Ishmael: A Novel
• The Origin of Species
• Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: The Origin of Species

About Anne Riley

Anne Riley, born in Richland, Washington, is the eleventh of twelve children and grew up in Naperville, Illinois. She graduated from Illinois State University in 1981 with a degree in Accounting, earning the prestigious Bone Scholar award.

She married her high school sweetheart, moved to the West Coast, and started a family. She earned an MBA from Portland State University. For many years, she balanced family life with a career in various industries, including technology, teaching, and finance, before retiring in 2011.

Influenced by Michael Rothschild’s Bionomics, Riley developed a theory known as the Ideasphere, exploring the parallels between human and ecological systems. Her theory is articulated in her novel DINA: Nature’s Case for Democracy and a non-fiction book The Human Idea, Nature’s Newest Ecosystem. Riley’s writing, characterized by humor and depth, aims to engage and improve the lives of her readers.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• superbrandpublishing.com
• Promote, Profit, Publish on YouTube
• Follow Juliet on LinkedIn
• Take the Quiz!