Chris Guzelian: Searle Scholar, Northwestern University School of Law

Evidence increasingly suggests that selection between competing ideas to become a prevailing social belief may be strongly influenced by evolutionarily descended limitations on human sensory and mental capabilities. Scholars posit that these limitations permit many “selfish” ideas to gain social traction and spread epidemically, driving out and shutting out truth from collective understanding in the selection process. An evolutionary perspective, combined with settled principles of free speech law, indicates that the explicit combating of various selfish false ideas through technological, educational, legal, financial, or other means may be necessary to avoid self-sustaining mass delusions in a globalizing world.