Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham,
00:00:03 a biological anthropologist at Harvard
00:00:05 specializing in the study of primates
00:00:08 and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,
00:00:12 and other aspects of ape and human behavior
00:00:15 at the individual and societal level.
00:00:18 He began his career over four decades ago
00:00:20 working with Jane Goodall
00:00:22 and studying the behavior of chimps,
00:00:24 and since then has done a lot of seminal work
00:00:27 on human evolution and has proposed
00:00:29 several theories for the roles of fire and violence
00:00:33 in the evolution of us, hairless apes,
00:00:36 otherwise known as homo sapiens.
00:00:39 This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
00:00:41 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:43 in the description.
00:00:44 And now, here’s my conversation with Richard Wrangham.
00:00:50 You’ve said that we’re much less violent
00:00:53 than our close living relatives, the chimps.
00:00:57 Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are
00:01:01 and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?
00:01:04 Well, I haven’t said exactly
00:01:05 that we’re less violent than chimps.
00:01:07 What I’ve said is that there are two kinds of violence.
00:01:11 One stems from proactive aggression
00:01:13 and the other stems from reactive aggression.
00:01:15 Proactive aggression is planned aggression.
00:01:17 Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.
00:01:20 It’s reactive because it takes place
00:01:24 in seconds after the threat.
00:01:27 And the thing that is really striking about humans
00:01:30 compared to our close relatives is the great reduction
00:01:36 in the degree of reactive aggression.
00:01:40 So we are far less violent than chimps
00:01:43 when prompted by some relatively minor threat
00:01:46 within our own society.
00:01:48 And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data
00:01:53 but the study which is particularly striking
00:01:59 is one of people living as hunter gatherers
00:02:05 in a really upsetting kind of environment,
00:02:09 namely people in Australia living in a place
00:02:15 where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
00:02:19 There’s a lot of domestic violence.
00:02:21 It’s all a sort of a society that is as bad
00:02:29 from the point of view of violence
00:02:30 as an ordinary society can get.
00:02:34 There’s excellent data on the frequency
00:02:36 with which people actually have physical violence
00:02:39 and hit each other.
00:02:40 And we can compare that to data
00:02:42 from several different sites comparing,
00:02:46 we’re looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence.
00:02:50 And the difference is between two and three orders
00:02:53 of magnitude.
00:02:55 The frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other,
00:02:58 chase each other, charge each other, physically engage
00:03:02 is somewhere between 500 and a thousand times
00:03:06 higher than in humans.
00:03:08 So there’s something just amazing about us.
00:03:09 And this has been recognized for centuries.
00:03:13 Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave
00:03:17 in many ways like domesticated animals
00:03:19 because we’re so unviolent.
00:03:21 But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements
00:03:26 of this 20th century?
00:03:29 The First and Second World War and much else besides.
00:03:33 And that is all proactive violence.
00:03:37 All of that is gangs of people
00:03:42 making deliberate decisions to go off and attack
00:03:45 in circumstances which ideally the attackers
00:03:48 are going to be able to make their kills
00:03:51 and then get out of there.
00:03:53 In other words, not face confrontation.
00:03:55 That’s the ordinary way that armies try and work.
00:03:58 And there it turns out that humans and chimpanzees
00:04:04 are in a very similar kind of state.
00:04:07 That is to say, if you look at the rate of death
00:04:10 from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalition violence,
00:04:15 it’s very similar in many ways to what you see in humans.
00:04:20 So we’re not down regulated with proactive violence.
00:04:23 It’s just this reactive violence
00:04:25 that is strikingly reduced in humans.
00:04:29 So chimpanzees also practiced kind of tribal warfare.
00:04:34 Indeed they do, yeah.
00:04:36 So this was discovered first in 1974.
00:04:38 It was observed first in 1974,
00:04:40 which was about the time that the first major study
00:04:48 of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall
00:04:51 had been going for something like five years
00:04:55 during of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went.
00:05:02 Until then, they’d been observed at a feeding station
00:05:07 where Jane was luring them in to be observed
00:05:11 by seeing bananas, which is great.
00:05:12 She learned a lot, but she didn’t learn
00:05:15 what was happening at the edges of their ranges.
00:05:17 So five years later, it became very obvious
00:05:22 that there was hostile relationships between groups.
00:05:25 And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form
00:05:30 of the kind of hostile relationships
00:05:32 that you see in many animals,
00:05:33 which is a bunch of chimps in this case
00:05:38 shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.
00:05:44 But dramatically, in addition to that,
00:05:47 there is a second kind of interaction.
00:05:49 And that is when a party of chimpanzees
00:05:55 makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory,
00:06:00 silently, and then search for members of neighboring groups.
00:06:08 And what they’re searching for is a lone individual.
00:06:11 So I’ve been with chimps when they’ve heard
00:06:15 a lone individual under these circumstances,
00:06:17 or what they think is a lone one,
00:06:19 and they touch each other and look at each other
00:06:23 and then charge forward, very excited.
00:06:26 And then while they’re charging,
00:06:30 all of a sudden, the place where they heard a lone call
00:06:35 erupts with a volley of calls.
00:06:37 It was just one calling out of a larger party.
00:06:40 And our chimps put on the brakes
00:06:43 and scoot back for safety into their own territory.
00:06:46 But if in fact they do find a lone individual
00:06:49 and they can sneak up to them,
00:06:52 then they make a deliberate attack.
00:06:55 They’re hunting, they’re stalking and hunting,
00:06:57 and then they impose terrible damage,
00:07:00 which typically ends in a kill straight away,
00:07:03 but it might end up with the victim so damaged
00:07:08 that they’ll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.
00:07:13 So that was a very dramatic discovery
00:07:15 because it really made people realize for the first time
00:07:20 that Conrad Lorentz had been wrong
00:07:22 when in the 1960s, in his famous book, On Aggression,
00:07:26 he said, warfare is restricted to humans.
00:07:30 Animals do not deliberately kill each other.
00:07:33 Well, now we know that actually there’s a bunch of animals
00:07:35 that deliberately kill each other,
00:07:36 and they always do so under essentially
00:07:38 the same circumstances, which is
00:07:40 when they feel safe doing it.
00:07:44 So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.
00:07:48 Animals feel safe when they have a coalition.
00:07:52 A coalition that has overwhelming power
00:07:54 compared to the victim.
00:07:56 And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that,
00:07:59 and hyenas will do that, and chimpanzees will do it,
00:08:02 and humans do it too.
00:08:05 Can they pull themselves into something
00:08:08 that looks more like a symmetric war
00:08:10 as opposed to an asymmetric one?
00:08:12 So accidentally engaging on the lone individual
00:08:15 and then getting themselves into trouble?
00:08:17 Or are they more aggressive
00:08:19 in avoiding these kinds of battles?
00:08:21 No, they’re very, very keen to avoid those kinds of battles,
00:08:24 but occasionally, they can make a mistake.
00:08:28 But so far, there have been no observations
00:08:32 of anything like a battle
00:08:33 in which both sides maintain themselves.
00:08:37 And I think you can very confidently say
00:08:40 that overwhelmingly what happens is
00:08:42 that if they discover that there’s several individuals
00:08:45 on the other side, then both sides retreat.
00:08:48 Nobody wants to get hurt.
00:08:50 What they want to do is to hurt others.
00:08:52 Yes.
00:08:52 So you mentioned Jane Goodall.
00:08:54 You’ve worked with her.
00:08:56 What was it like working with her?
00:08:58 What have you learned from her?
00:09:01 Well, she’s a wonderfully independent, courageous person
00:09:05 who she famously began her studies
00:09:09 not as a qualified person in terms of education,
00:09:14 but qualified only by enthusiasm and a considerable
00:09:19 experience, even in her early 20s, with nature.
00:09:24 So she’s courageous in the sense
00:09:26 of being able to take on challenges.
00:09:30 The thing that is very impressive about her
00:09:32 is her total fidelity to the observations,
00:09:37 very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,
00:09:43 waiting until they mount up
00:09:45 and you’ve really got a confident picture,
00:09:48 and tremendous attention to individuals.
00:09:53 So that was an interesting problem from her point of view
00:09:57 because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,
00:10:02 this particular community of Kazakus,
00:10:05 this particular community of Kazakela,
00:10:08 about 60 individuals,
00:10:10 so Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.
00:10:14 She was there initially with her mother
00:10:16 and then alone for two or three years
00:10:20 of really intense observation
00:10:22 and then slowly joined by other people.
00:10:28 What she discovered was that there were obvious differences
00:10:31 in individual personality
00:10:34 and the difficulty about that was that
00:10:37 when she reported this to the larger scientific world,
00:10:42 initially her advisors at Cambridge,
00:10:47 they said, well, we don’t know how to handle that
00:10:49 because you’ve got to treat all these animals
00:10:52 as the same basically,
00:10:54 because there is no research tradition
00:11:00 of thinking about personalities.
00:11:03 Well now, whatever it is, 60 years later,
00:11:07 the study of personalities is a very rich part
00:11:11 of the study of animal behavior.
00:11:14 At any rate, the important point in terms of
00:11:17 what was she like is that she stuck to her guns
00:11:19 and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,
00:11:23 describe in great detail the differences in personality
00:11:27 among these individuals
00:11:28 and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologists
00:11:30 to think about what it means.
00:11:32 So what is the process of observation like this like?
00:11:37 Observing the personality but also observing in a way
00:11:41 that’s not projecting your beliefs about human nature
00:11:45 or animal nature onto chimps,
00:11:48 which is probably really tempting to project.
00:11:52 So your understanding of the way the human world works,
00:11:55 projecting that onto the chimp world.
00:11:59 Yes, I mean, it’s particularly difficult with chimps
00:12:01 because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior
00:12:05 that it’s very easy to make those projections, as you say.
00:12:10 The process involves making very clear definitions
00:12:14 of what a behavior is.
00:12:18 Aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit,
00:12:24 a bite, and so on,
00:12:26 and writing down every time these things happen
00:12:30 and then slowly totting up the numbers of times
00:12:32 that they happen from individual A
00:12:35 towards individuals B, C, D, and E,
00:12:39 so that you build up a very concrete picture
00:12:41 rather than interpreting at any point
00:12:43 and stopping and saying,
00:12:44 well, they seem to be rather aggressive.
00:12:48 So the sort of formal system
00:12:51 is that you build up a pattern of the relationships
00:12:54 based on a description of the different types
00:12:58 of interactions, the aggressive
00:13:00 and the friendly interactions,
00:13:03 and all of these are defined in concrete.
00:13:07 And so from that, you extract a pattern of relationships.
00:13:12 And the relationships can be defined as
00:13:18 relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive,
00:13:23 based on the frequency of these types of interactions.
00:13:27 And so one can talk in terms of individuals
00:13:30 having a relationship which, on the scores of friendliness,
00:13:34 is two standard deviations outside the mean.
00:13:39 I mean, you know, it’s…
00:13:40 In which direction, sorry, both directions?
00:13:45 Well, I mean, that would be, obviously,
00:13:47 the friendly ones would be the ones
00:13:49 who have exceptionally high rates
00:13:52 of spending time close to each other,
00:13:54 of touching each other in a gentle way,
00:13:56 of grooming each other, and, by the way,
00:14:00 finding that those things are correlated with each other.
00:14:03 So it’s possible to define a friendship
00:14:06 with a capital F in a very systematic way,
00:14:10 and to compare that between individuals,
00:14:14 but also between communities of chimpanzees
00:14:18 and between different species.
00:14:21 So that, you know, we can say that in some species,
00:14:23 individuals have friends, and others, they don’t at all.
00:14:26 What about just, because there’s different personalities
00:14:29 and because they’re so fascinating,
00:14:31 what about sort of falling in love
00:14:33 or forming friendships with chimps, you know?
00:14:37 Like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer?
00:14:43 What role does that play?
00:14:46 Because you’re tracking these individuals
00:14:47 that are full of life and intelligence
00:14:50 for long periods of time.
00:14:53 Plus, as a human, especially in those days for Jane,
00:14:58 she’s alone, observing it.
00:15:00 It gets lonely as a human.
00:15:02 I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being,
00:15:05 observing these other intelligent species.
00:15:07 It’s a very reasonable question,
00:15:08 and of course, Jane, in those early years,
00:15:11 I think she’s willing now to talk about the fact
00:15:15 that she regrets, to some extent, how close she became.
00:15:19 And the problem is not just from the humans.
00:15:23 The problem is from the chimpanzees as well,
00:15:25 because they do things
00:15:28 that are extremely affectionate, if you like.
00:15:32 You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit
00:15:39 to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.
00:15:42 David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand,
00:15:47 as if to say thank you.
00:15:48 And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.
00:15:51 Yeah.
00:15:52 Um.
00:15:52 No, thank you.
00:15:55 Right.
00:15:57 Oh, it’s almost like thank you
00:15:59 and returning the affection by giving the fruit.
00:16:02 Yeah, exactly.
00:16:03 If they did something like that.
00:16:04 Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze.
00:16:05 I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard,
00:16:08 as occasionally has happened.
00:16:11 Some chimps are aggressive to people,
00:16:14 and others are friendly.
00:16:16 And the ones that are friendly tend to be
00:16:18 rather sympathetic characters,
00:16:20 because they might be ones who are having problems
00:16:24 in their own society.
00:16:26 You know, so Joe Mio in Gombe used to come
00:16:29 and sit next to me quite often,
00:16:31 and he was having a hard time making it in that society,
00:16:35 which I can describe to you in terms of the number
00:16:38 of aggressive interactions, if you want, you know,
00:16:39 but just to be informed about it.
00:16:43 So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.
00:16:49 And in the community that I’ve been working with in Uganda
00:16:52 for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress
00:16:56 on all of the research students who come with us,
00:16:58 that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall
00:17:01 into that temptation.
00:17:02 Now, you know, we heard a story of one person
00:17:05 who did reach out and touch one of our chimps.
00:17:09 It’s a very, very bad idea.
00:17:12 Not because the chimp is going to do anything violent
00:17:16 at the time, but because if they learn that humans
00:17:22 are as weak physically as we are compared to them,
00:17:25 then they can take advantage of us.
00:17:28 And that’s what happened in Gombe.
00:17:30 So after Jane had done the very obvious thing
00:17:35 when you’re first engaged in this game
00:17:38 of allowing the infants to approach her
00:17:41 and then tickling them and playing with them,
00:17:45 some of those infants had the personality
00:17:49 of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later.
00:17:53 And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo,
00:17:56 who was violent on a regular basis towards humans
00:17:59 when he was an adult, and he was quite dangerous.
00:18:01 I mean, he could easily have killed someone.
00:18:02 In fact, he did kill one person.
00:18:05 He killed a baby that he took from a mother,
00:18:09 a human baby, that he took off her hip
00:18:11 when he met her on the path.
00:18:15 So it’s a reminder that we’re dealing with a species
00:18:20 that are rather humanlike in the range of emotions
00:18:23 they have, in the capacities they have,
00:18:26 and even in the strength they have,
00:18:28 they are in many ways stronger than humans.
00:18:33 So you’ve got to be careful.
00:18:37 So in the full range of friendliness and violence,
00:18:39 the capacity for these very human things.
00:18:44 Yes, I mean, it’s very obvious with violence,
00:18:47 as we talked about, that they will kill.
00:18:50 They will kill not just strangers.
00:18:53 They can kill other adults within their own group.
00:18:57 They can kill babies that are strangers.
00:18:59 They can kill babies in their own group.
00:19:01 So, you know, this is a long lived individual.
00:19:04 Obviously, these killings can’t have very often
00:19:06 because otherwise they’d all be dead.
00:19:09 And we’re now finding that they can live
00:19:11 to 50 or 60 years in the wild
00:19:14 at relatively low population density
00:19:16 because they’re big animals eating
00:19:17 a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits.
00:19:22 So it doesn’t happen all the time.
00:19:23 With friendliness, they are very strong
00:19:27 to support each other.
00:19:28 They very much depend on their close friendships,
00:19:33 which they express through physical contact
00:19:38 and particularly through grooming.
00:19:41 So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.
00:19:45 I might present for grooming,
00:19:48 a very common way of starting,
00:19:50 turning their back or presenting an arm
00:19:53 or something like that, and the other
00:19:54 just riffles their fingers through the hair.
00:19:57 And that’s partly just soothing
00:20:00 and it’s partly looking for parasites,
00:20:04 but mostly it’s just soothing.
00:20:06 And the point about this is it can go on
00:20:09 for half an hour, it can go on for sometimes even an hour.
00:20:15 So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.
00:20:21 When did your interest in this one particular aspect
00:20:25 of Chim come to be, which is violence?
00:20:28 When did the study of violence in chimps
00:20:32 become something you’re deeply interested in?
00:20:35 Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,
00:20:41 I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall
00:20:43 and was studying feeding behavior.
00:20:46 But during that time, we were seeing,
00:20:49 and I say we because there were half a dozen
00:20:52 research students all in her camp,
00:20:55 we were discovering that chimps
00:20:58 had this capacity for violence.
00:21:02 The first kill happened during that time,
00:21:05 which was of an infant in a neighboring group.
00:21:09 And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.
00:21:13 And this was the start of my interest
00:21:16 because it was such chilling evidence
00:21:19 of an extraordinary similarity between chimps
00:21:23 and humans. Now, at that time,
00:21:27 we didn’t know very much about how chimpanzees
00:21:31 and humans were related.
00:21:33 Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three
00:21:37 big black hairy things that live in the African forests
00:21:40 and eat fruits and leaves when they can’t find fruits
00:21:46 and walk on their knuckles.
00:21:47 And they all look rather similar to each other.
00:21:49 So they seem as though they’re very similar
00:21:51 so they seem as though those three species,
00:21:54 chimps and gorillas and bonobos,
00:21:56 should all be each other’s closest relatives
00:21:59 and humans are something rather separate.
00:22:01 And so any of them would be of interest to us.
00:22:04 Subsequently, we learn that actually that’s not true
00:22:08 and that there’s a special relationship
00:22:10 between humans and chimpanzees.
00:22:13 But at the time, even without knowing that,
00:22:15 it was obvious that there was something very odd
00:22:18 about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered
00:22:22 they were making tools.
00:22:25 She had seen that they were hunting meat.
00:22:29 She had seen that they were sharing the meat
00:22:31 among each other.
00:22:33 She had seen that the societies were dominated politically
00:22:36 by males, coalitions of males.
00:22:38 All of these things, of course,
00:22:39 resonate so closely with humans.
00:22:43 And then it turns out that in contrast
00:22:47 to conventional wisdom at the time,
00:22:50 the chimpanzees were capable of hunting
00:22:53 and killing members of neighboring groups.
00:22:56 Well, at that point, the similarities
00:23:00 between chimps and humans become less a matter
00:23:04 of sort of sheer intellectual fascination
00:23:09 than something that has a really deep meaning
00:23:11 about our understanding of ourselves.
00:23:14 I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans
00:23:18 as a species apart from the rest of nature
00:23:21 because we are so peculiar.
00:23:23 But when it turns out that, as it turns out,
00:23:27 one of our two closest relatives
00:23:30 has got these features that we share
00:23:33 and that one of the features is something
00:23:36 that is the most horrendous,
00:23:39 as well as fascinating, aspect of human behavior,
00:23:43 then how can you resist just trying
00:23:47 to find out what’s going on?
00:23:49 So I have to say this.
00:23:50 I’m not sure if you’re familiar with a man,
00:23:53 but fans of this podcast are.
00:23:55 So we’re talking about chimps, we’re talking about violence.
00:23:59 My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan,
00:24:02 is a big fan of those things.
00:24:03 I’m a big fan of these topics.
00:24:05 I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.
00:24:09 So as you’re saying, why do we find
00:24:15 the exploration of violence
00:24:17 and the relations between chimps so interesting?
00:24:20 What can they teach us about ourselves?
00:24:26 Until we had this information about chimpanzees,
00:24:29 it was possible to believe that the psychology
00:24:34 behind warfare was totally the result
00:24:43 of some kind of recent cultural innovation.
00:24:49 It had nothing to do with our biology.
00:24:52 Or if you like, that it’s got something to do
00:24:54 with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing.
00:24:59 But what the chimps tell us after we think carefully
00:25:07 about it is that it seems undoubtedly the case
00:25:11 that our evolutionary psychology has given us
00:25:18 the same kind of attitude towards violence
00:25:22 as has occurred in chimpanzees and in both species.
00:25:27 It has evolved because of its evolutionary significance.
00:25:32 In other words, because it’s been helpful
00:25:34 to the individuals who have practiced it.
00:25:37 And now we know that, as I mentioned,
00:25:41 other species do this as well.
00:25:44 In fact, wolves, which this is a really kind of
00:25:50 ironical observation, Conrad Lorentz, who I mentioned
00:25:54 had been the person who thought that human aggression
00:25:59 in the form of killing members of our own species
00:26:02 was unique to our species, he was a great fan of wolves.
00:26:05 He studied wolves.
00:26:07 And in captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely
00:26:11 to harm each other in spats among members of the same group.
00:26:17 What happens is that one of them will roll over
00:26:19 and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park
00:26:21 nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck
00:26:25 but will not bite.
00:26:27 Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves
00:26:30 in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting
00:26:35 for each other, they are in fierce competition,
00:26:39 and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves
00:26:43 is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.
00:26:47 Wow.
00:26:48 So it’s a really serious business.
00:26:50 The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern
00:26:54 of understanding animals in which you don’t have
00:26:59 an instinct for violence, what you have is an instinct,
00:27:03 if you like, to use violence adaptively.
00:27:06 And if the right circumstances come up, it’ll be adaptive,
00:27:10 if the right circumstances don’t come up, it won’t be.
00:27:13 So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent
00:27:17 than others because of things like the frequency
00:27:21 with which a large party of males is likely to meet
00:27:25 a lone victim, and that’s going to depend
00:27:28 on the local ecology.
00:27:31 But, you know, so the overall answer to the question
00:27:34 of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take
00:27:38 very seriously the notion that in humans,
00:27:42 the tendency to make war is a consequence
00:27:47 of a long term evolutionary adaptation
00:27:50 and not just a military ideology
00:27:53 or some sort of local patriarchal phenomenon.
00:27:58 And of course, you know, a reading of history,
00:28:01 a judicious reading of history fits that very easily
00:28:05 because war is so commonplace.
00:28:08 It’s not an accident, so it’s not a constraint.
00:28:11 It’s not an accident, so it’s not a construction
00:28:12 of human civilization.
00:28:14 It’s deeply within us, violence.
00:28:17 So what’s the difference between violence
00:28:20 on the individual level versus group is,
00:28:24 it seems like with chimps and with wolves,
00:28:26 there’s something about the dynamic of multiple
00:28:32 chimps together that increase the chance of violence.
00:28:36 Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual?
00:28:41 Like would an individual be as violent
00:28:45 as they might be as part of a group?
00:28:47 If we’re talking about killing,
00:28:51 then violence in the sense of killing
00:28:54 is very much associated with a group.
00:28:59 And the reason is that individuals don’t benefit
00:29:03 by getting into a fight
00:29:05 in which they risk being hurt themselves.
00:29:08 So it’s only when you have overwhelming power
00:29:12 that the temptation to try and kill another victim
00:29:16 rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.
00:29:23 The average number of chimpanzee males
00:29:27 that attack a single male
00:29:30 in something like 50 observations
00:29:33 that have accumulated in the last 50 years
00:29:36 from various different study sites
00:29:38 is eight, eight to one.
00:29:41 Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one,
00:29:46 but that’s getting risky.
00:29:49 But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.
00:29:51 I mean, basically you have one male on one foot,
00:29:55 another male on another foot, another male on an arm,
00:29:58 another male on another arm.
00:29:59 Now you have an immobilized victim
00:30:02 with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.
00:30:06 And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax
00:30:08 and tear off his testicles
00:30:10 and twist an arm until it breaks
00:30:12 and do this appalling damage with no weapons.
00:30:18 What is the way in which they prefer to commit the violence?
00:30:23 Is there something to be said
00:30:24 about the actual process of it?
00:30:27 Is there an artistry to it?
00:30:29 So if you look at human warfare,
00:30:32 there’s different parts in history
00:30:34 prefer different kind of approaches to violence.
00:30:37 It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.
00:30:41 But just the nature of violence itself,
00:30:44 sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,
00:30:47 is it basically the same?
00:30:49 You improvise, you immobilize the victim,
00:30:53 and they just rip off different parts
00:30:54 of their body kind of thing?
00:30:56 Yeah, you have to understand
00:30:58 that these things are happening at high speed
00:31:01 in thick vegetation, mostly,
00:31:04 so that they have not been filmed carefully.
00:31:08 We have a few little glimpses of them
00:31:12 from one or two people like David Watts,
00:31:15 who’s got some great video,
00:31:16 but we don’t know enough to be able to say that.
00:31:19 It’s hard for me to imagine that there are styles
00:31:22 that vary between communities, cultural styles,
00:31:26 but it is possible.
00:31:28 It is possible, and one thing that is striking
00:31:32 is that the number of times that an individual victim
00:31:37 has been killed immediately has been higher
00:31:41 in Kibale forest in Uganda
00:31:45 than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
00:31:48 It’s conceivable that’s just chance.
00:31:50 We don’t have real numbers now, but what is this?
00:31:54 I can’t remember the exact numbers,
00:31:55 but 10 versus 15 or something.
00:32:00 So maybe they damaged to the point
00:32:04 of expecting a death in one place
00:32:07 and they just finished it off in the other,
00:32:08 but most likely that sort of difference
00:32:11 will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.
00:32:16 You know, human beings are able to conceive
00:32:19 of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.
00:32:23 Is there any of that for chimps
00:32:28 when they’re thinking about violence?
00:32:30 Is violence, like what is the nature
00:32:33 of their conception of violence, do you think?
00:32:36 Do they realize they’re taking another conscious being’s life
00:32:41 or is it some kind of like optimization
00:32:45 over the use of resources or something like that?
00:32:48 I don’t think it’s, I can’t think of any way
00:32:53 to get an answer to the question
00:32:55 of what they know about that.
00:32:58 I think that the way to think about the motivation
00:33:03 is rather like the motivation in sex.
00:33:09 So when males are interested in having sex with a female,
00:33:14 whether it’s in chimpanzees or in humans,
00:33:18 they don’t think about the fact
00:33:20 that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby, mostly.
00:33:25 You’re right.
00:33:26 Mostly what they’re thinking about is,
00:33:27 I wanna get my end away.
00:33:29 And I think that it’s a similar kind of process
00:33:34 with the chimps.
00:33:35 What they are thinking about is,
00:33:38 I wanna kill this individual.
00:33:41 And it’s hard to imagine that taking
00:33:45 the other individual’s perspective
00:33:47 and thinking about what it means for them to die
00:33:50 is gonna be an important part of that.
00:33:51 In fact, there’s reasons to think
00:33:53 it should not be an important part of it
00:33:55 because it might inhibit them
00:33:56 and they don’t want to be inhibited.
00:33:57 The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.
00:34:01 But I think it’s interesting to think about
00:34:03 this whole motivational question
00:34:04 because it does produce this rather haunting thought
00:34:09 that there has been selection
00:34:11 in favor of enthusiasm about killing.
00:34:16 And in our relatively gentle
00:34:21 and deliberately moral society that we have today,
00:34:26 it’s very difficult for us to face the thought
00:34:28 that in all of us,
00:34:32 there might’ve been residue
00:34:37 and more than that, sort of an active potential
00:34:42 for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else.
00:34:47 But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously
00:34:52 by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true
00:34:57 that the ordinary human male would be delighted
00:35:03 to be part of a group that was killing someone.
00:35:06 What you’ve got to do is to be in a position
00:35:10 where you’re regarding the victim
00:35:12 as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.
00:35:17 But the pure enjoyment of violence.
00:35:21 There’s, I don’t know if you know this historian,
00:35:23 Dan Carlin, he has a podcast.
00:35:25 He has an episode, three, four hour episode
00:35:32 that I recommend to others.
00:35:33 It’s quite haunting.
00:35:34 But he takes us through an entire history.
00:35:38 It’s called painfotainment.
00:35:40 The history of humans
00:35:45 enjoying the murder of others in a large group.
00:35:48 So like public executions were long part of human history.
00:35:53 And there’s something that for some reason,
00:35:58 humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die.
00:36:03 And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.
00:36:06 For example, he said if it was possible to televise,
00:36:11 to stream online for example,
00:36:13 the execution and the murder of somebody
00:36:15 or even the torture of somebody,
00:36:17 that a very large fraction of the population on earth
00:36:23 would not be able to look away.
00:36:24 They’d be drawn to that somehow.
00:36:26 As a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.
00:36:31 So you think that’s part of us in there somewhere.
00:36:33 That selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing
00:36:39 and the enjoyment of observing
00:36:44 those in our tribe doing the killing.
00:36:48 Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end
00:36:51 is critical I think.
00:36:52 Because it would be a little bit weird I think
00:36:57 to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people
00:37:01 in your own tribe being killed.
00:37:04 I don’t think we’re interested in violence
00:37:06 for violence’s sake that much.
00:37:09 It’s when you get these social boundaries set up.
00:37:15 And in today’s world, happily,
00:37:20 we kind of are already one world.
00:37:23 You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point
00:37:29 where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe
00:37:34 at some level, which is the whole human species.
00:37:37 But in ancient times, that would not have been true.
00:37:41 Because in ancient times,
00:37:43 there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers
00:37:47 in which the appearance of a stranger
00:37:50 would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight.
00:37:56 Because what was human was the people
00:37:59 that were in your society.
00:38:01 And the other things that actually looked like us
00:38:04 and were human in that sense, were not regarded as human.
00:38:09 So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization
00:38:12 of everybody that didn’t speak our language
00:38:14 or hadn’t already somehow become recognized
00:38:19 as sufficiently like us to escape
00:38:25 the dehumanization contact.
00:38:27 And so hopefully the story of human history
00:38:29 is that tribalism fades away,
00:38:35 that our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize
00:38:39 or tendency to dehumanize groups
00:38:42 that are not within this tribe, decreases over time.
00:38:45 And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.
00:38:49 Yeah, I mean, that’s the optimistic perspective.
00:38:52 And the great sort of concern, of course,
00:38:56 is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts
00:39:00 and then dehumanization happens
00:39:02 and then violence is released.
00:39:04 As Hannah Arendt says,
00:39:06 there currently is no known alternative to war
00:39:10 as a means of settling really important conflicts.
00:39:16 So if we look at the big picture,
00:39:18 what role has violence or do you think violence
00:39:21 has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens?
00:39:24 So we are quite an intelligent, quite a beautiful,
00:39:29 particular little branch on the evolutionary tree.
00:39:32 What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?
00:39:41 Well, I think that violence was responsible
00:39:43 for creating your Homo sapiens.
00:39:49 And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.
00:39:55 Yes.
00:39:57 Yeah, exactly.
00:39:58 So nowadays people begin the concept
00:40:06 of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features
00:40:10 that are very obviously different
00:40:12 from all of the other species of Homo.
00:40:15 And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,
00:40:21 our relatively small face, these are characteristics
00:40:24 which are developed in a relatively modern way
00:40:27 by about 170,000 years ago.
00:40:31 So that’s one of the earliest skulls in Africa
00:40:33 that really captures that.
00:40:36 But it has been argued that that is an episode
00:40:44 in a process that has been started substantially earlier.
00:40:50 And there’s no doubt that that’s true.
00:40:52 Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing
00:40:55 pretty continuously throughout the length of time it’s there.
00:41:00 And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,
00:41:03 315 literally is the time, the best estimate of a date
00:41:08 for a series of bones from Morocco
00:41:13 that have been dated three or four years ago at that time
00:41:16 and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.
00:41:21 Now at that point, they are only beginning
00:41:25 the trend of sapionization.
00:41:27 And that trend consists basically of gracilization
00:41:31 of making our ancestors less robust,
00:41:36 shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,
00:41:40 narrower face, thinner cranium,
00:41:45 all these things that are associated with reduced violence.
00:41:51 Okay, so that’s saying what,
00:41:54 that’s Homo sapiens beginning.
00:41:56 So it began sometime three to 400,000 years ago
00:41:59 because by 315,000 years ago,
00:42:01 you’ve already got something recognizable.
00:42:03 So you’re more on that side of things
00:42:05 that those are this gradual process.
00:42:06 It’s not 150, 170,000 years ago.
00:42:09 It started like 400,000 years ago and it’s just.
00:42:14 It started three to 400,000 years ago
00:42:16 and if you look at 170, it’s got even more like us.
00:42:19 And then if you look at 100, it’s got more like us again.
00:42:23 And if you look at 50, it’s more like us again.
00:42:25 It’s all the way, it’s just getting
00:42:26 more and more like the moderns.
00:42:28 So the question is what happened
00:42:30 between three and 400,000 years ago
00:42:32 to produce Homo sapiens?
00:42:34 And I think we have a pretty good answer now.
00:42:37 And the answer comes from violence.
00:42:39 And the story begins by focusing on this question.
00:42:43 Why is it that in the human species,
00:42:48 we are unique among all primates
00:42:51 in not having an alpha male in any group
00:42:56 in the sense that what we don’t have
00:42:59 is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male?
00:43:05 And the answer that has been portrayed most richly
00:43:10 by Christopher Boehm and whose work I’ve elaborated on
00:43:15 is that only in humans do you have a system
00:43:21 by which any male who tries to bully others
00:43:26 and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla
00:43:29 or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo
00:43:31 or an alpha baboon or anything like that,
00:43:33 any male who tries to do that in humans
00:43:36 gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.
00:43:40 That coalition.
00:43:43 That’s a really good picture of human society, yes.
00:43:46 I like it.
00:43:47 Okay, and that’s the way all our societies work now.
00:43:50 Yes.
00:43:51 Because individuals try and be alpha
00:43:53 and then they get taken out.
00:43:55 Yeah, I mean, we don’t usually think of ourselves
00:43:57 as beta males, but yes, I suppose that’s what democracy is.
00:44:01 Exactly.
00:44:02 And that’s the way we think of ourselves.
00:44:04 I suppose that’s what democracy is.
00:44:06 Exactly.
00:44:07 Yes.
00:44:08 Exactly.
00:44:09 Okay, so at some point alpha males get taken out.
00:44:14 Well, what alpha males are are males
00:44:16 who respond with high reactive violence
00:44:20 to any challenge to their status.
00:44:22 You see it all the time in primates.
00:44:25 Some beta male thinks he’s getting strong
00:44:28 and maturing in wisdom and so on,
00:44:31 and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.
00:44:35 And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.
00:44:39 Or maybe he’ll just wait for a few minutes
00:44:42 and then take an opportunity to attack him.
00:44:48 All of these primates have got a high tendency
00:44:51 for reactive aggression,
00:44:53 and that enables the possibility of alpha males.
00:44:56 We don’t.
00:44:57 We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.
00:45:00 And the question is, when did that reduction happen?
00:45:04 Well, cut to the famous experiments
00:45:08 by the Russian biologist Dmitry Belyaev,
00:45:12 who tried domesticating wild animals.
00:45:17 When you domesticate wild animals,
00:45:19 what you’re doing is reducing reactive aggression.
00:45:24 You are selecting those individuals to breed
00:45:28 who are most willing to be approached by a human
00:45:32 or by another member of their own species
00:45:34 and are least likely to erupt in reactive aggression.
00:45:40 And you only have to do that for a few generations
00:45:42 to discover that there are changes in the skull.
00:45:47 And those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth,
00:45:52 reduced maleness,
00:45:54 the males become increasingly female like,
00:45:58 and reduced brain size.
00:46:01 Well, the changes that are characteristic
00:46:03 of domesticated animals in general
00:46:05 compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens
00:46:08 compared to our early ancestors.
00:46:11 So it’s a very strong signal
00:46:13 that when we first see Homo sapiens,
00:46:15 what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of change
00:46:18 in the shape of the animal.
00:46:20 What we’re seeing is evidence
00:46:22 of a reduction in reactive aggression.
00:46:26 And that suggests that what’s happening with Homo sapiens
00:46:29 is that that is the point
00:46:32 at which there is selection against the alpha males.
00:46:35 And therefore, the way in which the selection happened
00:46:39 would have been the way it happens today.
00:46:41 The beta males take them out.
00:46:44 So I think that Homo sapiens is a species
00:46:47 characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression
00:46:53 as a kind of incidental consequence
00:46:55 of the suppression of the alpha male.
00:46:58 And the story of our species
00:47:00 is the story of how the beta males took charge
00:47:05 and have been responsible for the generation
00:47:10 of a new kind of human.
00:47:11 And incidentally, for imposing on the society
00:47:20 a new set of values.
00:47:23 Because when those beta males discovered
00:47:25 that they could take out the previous alpha male
00:47:28 and continue to do so,
00:47:29 because in every generation there’ll always be some male
00:47:32 who says, maybe I’ll become the alpha male.
00:47:35 So they just keep chopping them down.
00:47:38 In discovering that, they also obviously discovered
00:47:41 that they could kill anybody in the group.
00:47:43 Mm hmm.
00:47:44 Females, young males, anybody who didn’t follow their values.
00:47:51 And so this story is one in which the males of our species,
00:47:58 and these would be the breeding males,
00:48:01 have been able to impose their values on everybody else.
00:48:05 And there is two kind of values.
00:48:07 There’s one kind of value is things
00:48:08 that are good for the group.
00:48:09 Like, thou shalt not murder.
00:48:11 Mm hmm.
00:48:12 And the other kind of value is things
00:48:15 that are good for the males.
00:48:18 Such as, hey, guess what?
00:48:20 When good food comes in, males get it first.
00:48:22 Yes.
00:48:24 I mean, it’s fascinating that that kind of set of ideals
00:48:27 could outcompete the others.
00:48:32 Do you have a sense of why,
00:48:34 or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals
00:48:36 and all the other early humans.
00:48:38 Why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish
00:48:43 and all the other ones,
00:48:44 all the other branches of evolution died out?
00:48:49 Or got murdered out.
00:48:50 I mean, nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens,
00:48:55 and we don’t know each other initially,
00:48:58 then conflict breaks out
00:48:59 and the more militarily able group wins.
00:49:04 We’ve seen that everywhere throughout the age
00:49:07 of exploration and throughout history.
00:49:12 So I’m rather surprised.
00:49:13 The conventional wisdom that you see nowadays
00:49:18 in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant
00:49:22 to point to success in warfare
00:49:25 as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals
00:49:30 within about 3000 years of the sapiens.
00:49:33 Coming into Europe 43,000 years ago.
00:49:37 And people are much more inclined to say,
00:49:40 well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,
00:49:43 so they just couldn’t survive the demographic sort of sweep
00:49:49 or the disease came in.
00:49:52 And maybe those things might’ve been important,
00:49:54 but far and away, the most obvious possibility
00:49:58 is that sapiens were just,
00:50:02 sapiens were just powerful.
00:50:06 They had, everyone agrees they had larger groups.
00:50:10 They had better weapons.
00:50:12 They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows,
00:50:15 to judge from the little microlith bits of flake,
00:50:22 which the Neanderthals didn’t.
00:50:25 Nowadays, there’s evidence of interbreeding,
00:50:29 quite extensive interbreeding
00:50:30 between sapiens and Neanderthals,
00:50:33 as well as with some other groups.
00:50:35 And sometimes people say, well, you know,
00:50:37 so they loved each other.
00:50:38 They made love, not war.
00:50:40 I think they made love and war.
00:50:42 And it wouldn’t necessarily mean too loving.
00:50:46 I mean, if you just follow through
00:50:49 from typical ethnographies nowadays
00:50:51 of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,
00:50:55 they didn’t know each other,
00:50:56 then you can imagine that Neanderthal females
00:51:00 would essentially be captured
00:51:02 and taken into sapiens groups.
00:51:07 Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently.
00:51:13 What’s the role of sexual violence in human evolution?
00:51:18 Because you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.
00:51:21 You’ve also mentioned that some of these rules
00:51:23 are defined by the male side of the society.
00:51:28 What’s the role of sexual violence in this story?
00:51:33 I think you’ve got to distinguish
00:51:34 between groups and within groups.
00:51:37 And I think the world has been slowly waking up
00:51:43 over the last several decades
00:51:46 to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war.
00:51:51 And that to me says that it’s just another example
00:51:58 of power corrupts because when frustrated,
00:52:04 scared, elated soldiers come upon females
00:52:11 in a group that has been essential dehumanization of,
00:52:16 then they get carried away by opportunity.
00:52:21 It is not always possible to argue
00:52:25 that this is adaptive nowadays
00:52:28 because you get lots and lots of stories
00:52:31 of women being abused to the point of being killed.
00:52:38 She’ll be gang raped and then killed.
00:52:41 There’s lots of terrible cases of that reported
00:52:46 from all sorts of different wars.
00:52:49 But you can see that that could build on a pattern
00:52:54 that would have been adaptive
00:52:57 if happening under so much less extreme circumstances.
00:53:02 The war is very extreme nowadays
00:53:05 in the sense that you get battles
00:53:07 in which people are sent by a military hierarchy
00:53:11 into a war situation in which they do not feel
00:53:14 what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt,
00:53:16 which would have been that if we attack,
00:53:18 we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
00:53:21 Nowadays, you’re sent in across the Somme or whatever it is
00:53:25 and there’s a very high chance you will be killed.
00:53:28 And that’s totally unnatural
00:53:30 and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.
00:53:34 Then there’s sexual coercion within groups.
00:53:37 And so that takes various kinds of forms.
00:53:42 But nowadays, of course,
00:53:44 I think people recognize increasingly
00:53:46 that the principle form of sexual intimidation
00:53:53 and rape occurs within relationships.
00:53:58 It’s not stranger rape
00:53:59 that is really statistically important.
00:54:03 There’s much more what happens behind the walls
00:54:08 of a bedroom where people have been living for some time.
00:54:14 And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this.
00:54:20 One is that it may seem odd
00:54:25 that males should think it a good idea, as it were,
00:54:34 to impose themselves sexually on someone
00:54:37 with whom they have a relationship.
00:54:40 But what they’re doing is intimidating someone
00:54:45 in a relationship in which the relative power
00:54:48 in the relationship has continuing significance
00:54:52 for a long time.
00:54:53 And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.
00:54:58 It’s to do with domestic relationships,
00:55:01 it’s to do with the man getting his own way all the way.
00:55:05 It’s power dynamics and the sexual aggression
00:55:09 is one of the tools to regain power,
00:55:12 gain power, gain more power and that kind of thing.
00:55:14 Yeah, exactly.
00:55:16 And in that respect, it’s worth noting
00:55:21 that although this wasn’t appreciated for some time,
00:55:25 it’s emerging that in a bunch of primates
00:55:28 you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel
00:55:32 kinds of sexual intimidation
00:55:35 where males will target particular females,
00:55:37 even in a group in which the norm is for females
00:55:41 to mate with multiple males.
00:55:43 But each male will target a particular female
00:55:45 and the more he is aggressive towards her,
00:55:49 then the more she conforms to his wishes
00:55:53 when he wants to mate.
00:55:55 So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation.
00:55:58 So there’s that aspect.
00:56:00 The other aspect I would just note is that
00:56:02 males get away with a lot compared to females
00:56:10 in any kind of intersexual conflict.
00:56:16 So the punishment, here’s one example of this,
00:56:19 the punishment for a husband killing a wife
00:56:23 has always been much less than the punishment
00:56:25 for a wife killing a husband.
00:56:29 And you see similar sorts of things
00:56:32 in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.
00:56:38 I bring this up in the context of males
00:56:42 sexually intimidating their partners,
00:56:47 be it wives or whoever,
00:56:50 because it’s a reminder that
00:56:53 it’s basically a patriarchal world that we have come from.
00:56:57 A patriarchal world in which male alliances
00:57:02 tend to support males and take advantage of the fact
00:57:06 that they have political power at the expense of females.
00:57:09 And I would say that that all goes back
00:57:12 to what happened three to 400,000 years ago
00:57:14 when the beta males took charge
00:57:16 and they started imposing their own norms
00:57:19 on society as a whole and they’ve continued to do so.
00:57:22 And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says,
00:57:26 we are not a patriarchal society.
00:57:28 Well, it’s true that the laws try and make it even handed
00:57:33 nowadays between males and females,
00:57:35 but obviously we are patriarchal de facto
00:57:38 because society still in many ways supports men
00:57:45 better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.
00:57:48 So beta male patriarchal.
00:57:51 If we’re looking at the evolutionary history.
00:57:55 Okay, is there, maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,
00:57:58 is there, so he’s a psychologist, right?
00:58:04 And what part of the picture do you think he’s missing
00:58:09 in analyzing the human relations?
00:58:16 Like what does he need to understand
00:58:20 about our origins in violence
00:58:22 and the way that society has been constructed?
00:58:24 Or I don’t want to go deep into his missing perspectives,
00:58:30 but I just think that what he’s doing
00:58:34 in that particular example is focusing
00:58:37 on the legalistic position.
00:58:41 And that’s great that you do not find formal patriarchy
00:58:47 in the law, anything like to the extent
00:58:49 that you could find it 100 years ago and so on.
00:58:53 Women have got the vote now, hooray.
00:58:56 But it took a long time for women to get the vote.
00:58:58 And it remains the case that women suffer
00:59:06 in various kinds of ways.
00:59:08 I mean, a woman who has lots of sexual partners
00:59:15 is treated much more rudely than a male
00:59:18 who has lots of sexual partners.
00:59:21 There are all sorts of informal ways
00:59:23 in which it’s rougher being a woman than it is a man.
00:59:27 And if we look at the surface layer of the law,
00:59:32 we may miss the deeper human nature,
00:59:38 like the origins of our human nature that still operates
00:59:41 no matter what the law says.
00:59:42 Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward
00:59:47 because it includes some unpleasant features
00:59:50 that when we sit back and reflect about them,
00:59:54 we would like them to go away.
00:59:57 But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned
01:00:05 to try and have sex with at least one woman,
01:00:11 and you know, often lots of women.
01:00:14 And so men are constantly putting pressure on women
01:00:17 in ways that women find unpleasant.
01:00:19 And if men sit back and reflect about it,
01:00:21 they think, yeah, we shouldn’t do this.
01:00:22 But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.
01:00:26 So maybe looking at particular humans in history,
01:00:30 let’s talk about Genghis Khan.
01:00:32 So is this particular human who was one
01:00:37 of the most famous examples of large scale violence,
01:00:42 is he a deep representative of human nature
01:00:45 or is he a rare exception?
01:00:47 Well, I think that it’s easy to imagine
01:00:53 that most men could have become Genghis Khan.
01:00:59 It’s possible that he had a particular streak
01:01:02 of psychopathy.
01:01:06 You know, it’s striking that by the time you become
01:01:11 immensely powerful, then your willingness
01:01:19 to do terrible things for the interest of yourself
01:01:23 and your group becomes very high.
01:01:31 Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories
01:01:36 in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.
01:01:39 But by the time they are big leaders,
01:01:41 they are really psychopathic in the sense
01:01:43 that they do not follow the ordinary morality
01:01:47 of considering the harm that they are doing
01:01:52 to their victims.
01:01:58 What kind of experiment would we need to discover
01:02:00 whether or not anybody could fall into this position?
01:02:04 I don’t know, but Lord Acton’s famous dictum
01:02:09 was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
01:02:14 And then the point that people often forget
01:02:16 is the next sentence that he said,
01:02:17 which is, great men are almost always bad men.
01:02:22 And that is right.
01:02:23 It is very difficult to find a great man in history
01:02:27 who was not responsible for terrible things.
01:02:30 I think there’s some aspect of it that it’s not just power.
01:02:35 I think men who have been the most destructive
01:02:40 in human history are not psychopathic completely.
01:02:47 They have convinced themselves of an idea.
01:02:49 It’s like the idea is psychopathic.
01:02:52 Stalin, for example, Hitler’s a complicated one.
01:02:55 I think he was legitimately insane.
01:02:57 But I think Stalin has convinced himself that he’s doing good.
01:03:02 So the idea of communism is the thing that’s psychopathic
01:03:06 in his mind, like it bred, you construct the worldview
01:03:09 in which the violence is justified, the cruelty is justified.
01:03:14 So there, in that sense, first of all,
01:03:18 you can construct experiments, unethical experiments
01:03:21 that could test this, but in that sense,
01:03:25 anybody else could have been in Stalin’s position.
01:03:30 It’s the idea that could overtake the mind
01:03:34 of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts.
01:03:38 And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans,
01:03:42 is the ability to hold ideas in our minds
01:03:45 and share those ideas and use those ideas
01:03:49 to convince ourselves that proactive violence
01:03:53 on a large scale is a good idea.
01:03:57 So that, I don’t know if you have a comment.
01:03:58 I suppose so, I mean, but it seems to me
01:04:01 what really motivated Stalin was not so much communism
01:04:08 as the retention of power.
01:04:12 So once he became leader and in the process
01:04:17 of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate
01:04:20 to get rid of anybody who was a challenger.
01:04:24 He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,
01:04:28 even on his side, who might possibly be showing
01:04:32 a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.
01:04:36 So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,
01:04:42 Kirov was a great communist, Trotsky was a great communist,
01:04:46 all his rivals, and I mean, when he went into the towns
01:04:52 and murdered people by the tenths of thousands.
01:04:55 They were all communists.
01:04:56 A lot of them were explicit communists, that’s right.
01:05:00 But what he was worried about was that they were rivals
01:05:02 to him.
01:05:05 I suppose the thought is I am the best person
01:05:08 to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism
01:05:13 and others are not, and so we have to get rid
01:05:17 of those others.
01:05:18 Well, I suspect you’re being very charitable here,
01:05:20 but I mean, maybe you know enough about Stalin to really.
01:05:25 Yes, well, so the point I’m making, I do quite a bit,
01:05:29 is from my understanding and sense, of course,
01:05:33 we can’t know for sure, is he believed in communism.
01:05:37 This wasn’t purely a game of power.
01:05:41 Now, he got drunk with power pretty quickly,
01:05:45 but he really believed for, I believe his whole life,
01:05:49 that communism is good for the world.
01:05:53 And that, I don’t know what role that belief plays
01:05:58 with the more natural human desire for power.
01:06:02 I don’t know, but it just seems like.
01:06:05 As we agreed, he’s killing a lot of communists
01:06:07 on his journey.
01:06:09 On his journey.
01:06:11 Hmm, but it’s not, that calculus doesn’t work that way.
01:06:15 There’s humans who are communists
01:06:18 and then there’s the idea of communism.
01:06:20 So for him, in his delusional world view,
01:06:25 killing a few people is worth the final result
01:06:30 of bringing communism to the whole world.
01:06:32 But it was more than that, again, because I mean,
01:06:34 he really wanted power for the Soviet Union
01:06:37 and so surely the reason that he orchestrated
01:06:43 the export of wheat from Ukraine
01:06:49 and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation
01:06:53 was because he wanted to sell it on the market
01:06:56 in order to be able to build up
01:06:57 the power of the Soviet Union.
01:07:01 Alternative view of communism might have been,
01:07:03 well, let’s just make sure everybody survives
01:07:07 and make sure everybody has enough to eat
01:07:09 and we’ll all be mutually supportive in a communal network.
01:07:13 But no, but he wanted the power for the country.
01:07:16 Well, I guess exactly, so that it’s not even communism,
01:07:19 the set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that,
01:07:21 it’s the country.
01:07:23 I guess what I’m saying is it’s not purely power
01:07:27 for the individual, it’s power for a vision
01:07:31 for this great nation, the Soviet Union.
01:07:34 And it’s similar with Hitler, the guy believed
01:07:39 that this is a great nation, Germany,
01:07:42 and it’s a nation that’s been wronged throughout history
01:07:47 and needs to be righted.
01:07:49 And there’s some dance between the individual human
01:07:54 and the tribe.
01:07:55 Yes, absolutely, yes, and so just like chimpanzees,
01:08:00 we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides
01:08:04 particularly in male psychology and it’s very scary
01:08:09 because once you assemble a set of males
01:08:14 who share a tribal identity, then they have power
01:08:18 that they can exert with very little concern
01:08:25 about what they’re doing to damage other people.
01:08:29 Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power,
01:08:33 we talked about the corrupting nature of power,
01:08:36 do you think that’s a manifestation
01:08:38 of those early origins of violence?
01:08:42 What’s the connection of this desire for power
01:08:46 and our proclivity for violence?
01:08:50 You know, what we’re talking about is tribal power, right?
01:08:54 Power on behalf of a group.
01:08:56 Yes.
01:08:57 And yeah, that seems to me to go right back
01:09:00 to a deep evolutionary origin
01:09:04 because you see essentially the same thing
01:09:07 in a whole bunch of animals.
01:09:10 That most of the sort of cognitively complex animals
01:09:16 live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries.
01:09:22 And so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed
01:09:26 in almost all of the primates.
01:09:28 The difference between us and, you know,
01:09:32 chimpanzees and humans on the one hand
01:09:34 and other primates on the other
01:09:37 is that we kill and they don’t.
01:09:39 And the reason they don’t is because they never meet
01:09:42 in the context where there are massive imbalances of power.
01:09:46 So two groups of baboons, you know,
01:09:49 there’s 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine.
01:09:52 Nobody’s gonna try and kill anybody else
01:09:54 because the serious risks involved.
01:09:59 But nevertheless, they are tribal.
01:10:02 So, you know, they will have fairly intense
01:10:06 intergroup interactions in which everybody knows
01:10:09 who is on whose side.
01:10:12 And the longterm consequences of winning those battles,
01:10:18 nonlethal battles, is that the dominance get access
01:10:23 to larger areas of land, more safety and so on,
01:10:28 with chances are better record
01:10:35 of reproductive success subsequently.
01:10:40 Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective,
01:10:42 is a feature or a bug?
01:10:44 Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?
01:10:50 So what’s a bug?
01:10:51 Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy,
01:10:57 meaning like it would be more beneficial.
01:11:03 Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes
01:11:07 from an evolutionary perspective?
01:11:09 Yeah, yeah, but, but, but.
01:11:11 What does it mean?
01:11:12 What does a bug mean?
01:11:13 Yes, right.
01:11:14 I mean.
01:11:15 Well, yeah, like where’s evolution going anyway?
01:11:17 It’s beneficial from, you know,
01:11:19 it’s beneficial in the sense that it evolved
01:11:20 by natural selection to benefit the individuals who did it.
01:11:25 But if by bug you mean something that,
01:11:28 from the point of view of the species,
01:11:30 it would be great if you could just wipe this out
01:11:32 because the species would somehow do better as a result.
01:11:36 Then yes, but then, you know, males are a bug.
01:11:41 Come on now, there’s some nice things to males,
01:11:46 speaking as a male.
01:11:48 The fact that there are some nice things to males
01:11:50 doesn’t mean that they’re not bugs.
01:11:51 You know, maybe they’re quite nice bugs,
01:11:53 but it would be much better for the species as a whole
01:11:56 not to have to have males who impose this violence
01:12:00 on the species as a whole.
01:12:01 Yeah.
01:12:03 As somebody who practiced controlled violence
01:12:05 and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, I’m not sure.
01:12:10 It does seem kind of fun to have this kind
01:12:12 of controlled violence, also sports.
01:12:15 Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general,
01:12:18 I guess that’s the deeper question.
01:12:20 Don’t you think there’s some value to conflict
01:12:24 for the improvement of society, for progress?
01:12:27 That this tension between tribes,
01:12:31 isn’t this like a experiment,
01:12:35 a continued experiment we conduct with each other
01:12:37 to figure out what is a better world to build?
01:12:40 Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas
01:12:44 to go to war with each other.
01:12:47 It’s like the United States with the 50 states
01:12:50 and it’s the laboratory of ideas.
01:12:53 Don’t you think that is, again, feature versus bug?
01:12:59 This kind of conflict, when it doesn’t get out of hand,
01:13:02 is actually ultimately progressive,
01:13:05 productive for a better world.
01:13:08 Well, what do you mean by conflict?
01:13:10 I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of
01:13:12 people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.
01:13:16 And so their ideas are in conflict.
01:13:18 They can sit down on a log and chat about it
01:13:23 and then decide, okay, you’re right,
01:13:25 or I’m wrong or whatever.
01:13:29 But if by conflict, you mean a great idea
01:13:33 to build a nuclear bomb and set that off,
01:13:36 then no, I don’t see why it’s a good idea
01:13:39 to have all this violence.
01:13:40 Yeah, there’s, I wonder, I mean, it’s not a good idea,
01:13:49 but I wonder if human history would evolve
01:13:52 the way it did without the violence.
01:13:55 Oh, I’m sure you’re right.
01:13:56 Probably humans would not have evolved
01:13:58 in the sense that we have.
01:14:00 But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution
01:14:05 will continue in the way it has.
01:14:08 So, there’s all sorts of indications
01:14:11 that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.
01:14:18 And this is made famous in Steven Pinker’s book,
01:14:22 but others have written about it too,
01:14:26 that the frequency of death from violence
01:14:30 in every country you look at,
01:14:32 has been declining, that’s just great.
01:14:36 And so, you know, the amazing thing about this
01:14:38 is that even when you take the deaths
01:14:40 due to the First World War and the Second World War,
01:14:42 the 20th century appears to have been statistically,
01:14:47 meaning rates of death per individual,
01:14:50 the least violent in history.
01:14:56 So, we haven’t got very far down the course
01:14:59 to nonviolence, but we’ve got a long way to go.
01:15:02 But I don’t see why we shouldn’t just carry on doing it.
01:15:05 I think it’s ridiculous, frankly, excuse my frankness,
01:15:10 to say that violence is a good thing.
01:15:14 I think that it would be a wonderful concept
01:15:16 if we could evolve somehow to a world
01:15:19 3,000 years from now,
01:15:22 where violence is really regarded as simply appalling,
01:15:26 and that they look back on our time
01:15:29 and can’t believe what we were doing.
01:15:32 Yeah, but of course,
01:15:33 violence takes a lot of different shapes.
01:15:35 As we start to think deeper and deeper
01:15:37 about living beings on Earth,
01:15:40 for example, the violence we commit
01:15:41 and the torture we commit to animals,
01:15:43 and then perhaps down the line,
01:15:45 as we talked offline about with robots,
01:15:48 and that kind of thing.
01:15:49 So there’s just so many ways to commit violence to others.
01:15:52 And some people now talk about violence
01:15:54 in the space of ideas, which of course, to me at least,
01:15:58 is a bit of a silly notion relative
01:16:00 to use that same V word for the space of ideas
01:16:04 versus actual physical violence.
01:16:06 But it may be that a long time from now,
01:16:08 we see that even violence in the space of ideas
01:16:12 is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.
01:16:16 And so it is interesting where this is headed.
01:16:20 And I think you’re absolutely right.
01:16:23 A world, a nonviolent world, does seem like a better world.
01:16:27 I wonder if the constraints on resources
01:16:30 somehow make that world more and more difficult,
01:16:34 especially as we run out of resources.
01:16:36 Well, it’s got to be very, very different
01:16:37 from what we’re doing nowadays.
01:16:38 And it’s unimaginably different.
01:16:40 If we could imagine it,
01:16:41 then maybe we could work towards it.
01:16:43 At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.
01:16:45 Well, that’s kind of the stories of humans
01:16:46 is we don’t really know the future.
01:16:48 We’re trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go
01:16:53 and sometimes get into trouble.
01:16:55 That’s the violence.
01:16:57 But George Orwell’s vision in 1984
01:16:59 was of two or three world powers each so powerful
01:17:04 that nobody could destroy the other.
01:17:11 But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship
01:17:16 among heavily armed world powers
01:17:20 just does not seem as though it’s reasonable at all.
01:17:27 That is to say, we’ve now got 170 or 190 nations in the world
01:17:36 dominated by a few big ones,
01:17:39 all with arms pointing at each other.
01:17:42 And the notion that we could just carry on
01:17:45 having peace talks and making sure that these arms
01:17:49 don’t get involved in some kind of massive conflagration
01:17:54 seems incredibly optimistic.
01:17:56 Some kind of major change has to happen whereby,
01:18:01 and some people would like to see all the weapons go.
01:18:04 That’d be great.
01:18:05 I’m a member of that sort of group
01:18:07 that tries to see that happen.
01:18:10 It’s going to be very difficult to see it happen.
01:18:13 Another kind of concept is the nations themselves
01:18:16 will dissolve and will become one government.
01:18:21 That itself is a terrifying vision
01:18:23 because the capacity for abuse by a single world power
01:18:28 would be so problematic.
01:18:30 And in addition, how do you get there
01:18:32 without a war in the first place?
01:18:35 So at the moment, we have no reasonable kind of future
01:18:40 in mind, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere.
01:18:41 It’s just that we haven’t yet to find it.
01:18:43 And a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space
01:18:46 argue that you can create decentralized societies
01:18:49 if you take away the power from states
01:18:52 to define the monetary system.
01:18:54 So they argue like if you make the monetary system
01:18:58 such that it’s disjoint from the control
01:19:01 of any one individual, any one government,
01:19:03 then that might be a way to form
01:19:05 sort of ad hoc decentralized societies.
01:19:08 They just pop up all over the place.
01:19:10 That’s a really interesting technological solution
01:19:13 to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.
01:19:17 Yes, right.
01:19:19 Absolutely.
01:19:20 And it may well be that the future will emerge
01:19:24 out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.
01:19:28 Is it nevertheless surprising to you
01:19:31 that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?
01:19:34 So the mutually assured destruction
01:19:36 that we’ve had for many decades
01:19:38 from somebody who studies violence,
01:19:41 how does that make sense to you?
01:19:43 Well, I mean, I’m surprised only in the sense
01:19:45 that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident
01:19:51 yet has been quite remarkable.
01:19:54 Yeah, because all the accounts are
01:19:56 that we’ve come very close to having very serious accidents
01:19:59 where people on either side have misread intentions
01:20:03 or apparent launches and so on.
01:20:05 So yes, I think it is remarkable.
01:20:08 There is a nasty generalization that can be made
01:20:14 that the longer that powerful states go without having wars
01:20:20 than the worst the war is afterwards.
01:20:23 And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense
01:20:28 because basically what’s happening with these tribal groups
01:20:32 that the nations are at the moment
01:20:33 is that after a big war like the Second World War,
01:20:38 they establish new kinds of dominance relationships.
01:20:41 And then during the periods of peace,
01:20:45 what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships
01:20:50 change because some nations become poorer,
01:20:53 some become richer,
01:20:55 some become more militarily powerful and so on.
01:20:57 Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand.
01:21:01 So right now, China emerged from the war
01:21:05 as a relatively low status state and is now high status.
01:21:09 So if this were chimpanzees, what would happen
01:21:11 is that you would predict a conflict
01:21:13 because you need to have a readjustment
01:21:16 of the formal dominance relationships
01:21:18 to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships
01:21:22 recognized by the economy and the military.
01:21:26 So the longer that you have of a period of peace
01:21:29 following a war, then the more these tensions
01:21:32 of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.
01:21:37 And the longer they take to occur,
01:21:39 then the more challenging are gonna be the conflicts.
01:21:46 That’s a terrifying view
01:21:47 because we’ve been out of conflict for quite a bit.
01:21:50 That’s right. Maybe it’s building up.
01:21:52 So it’s a scary view.
01:21:53 But on the other hand, things have changed hugely
01:21:56 with the advent of nuclear weapons
01:21:59 because at least that conforms to this psychology
01:22:05 that is very clear in other animals,
01:22:06 which is you don’t want to get into a fight
01:22:08 if you are going to get hurt.
01:22:11 So that’s the whole principle of MAD,
01:22:13 Mutual Assured Destruction.
01:22:15 And it’s doubtless been why powerful nations
01:22:18 like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons
01:22:23 since 1945.
01:22:25 So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches,
01:22:32 then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology
01:22:36 in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions
01:22:40 without using them.
01:22:41 But we haven’t yet really faced that challenge.
01:22:46 I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed
01:22:48 because of the poor economy,
01:22:50 but with China desperate to take back Taiwan
01:22:57 and America shifting its focus on the Pacific,
01:23:03 the potential for something going wrong
01:23:04 is clearly very high.
01:23:07 So what’s the hopeful case that you can make
01:23:10 for a long term surviving and thriving human civilization
01:23:14 given all the dangers that we face?
01:23:17 Well, I can’t really exactly make one.
01:23:19 I would just say that,
01:23:20 we’re talking about the dangers,
01:23:24 obviously the dangers are there.
01:23:27 But what I would sort of think about
01:23:29 is the notion that surprises come from all sorts
01:23:36 of different directions.
01:23:37 And I mean, you work in robotics
01:23:42 and I can well imagine that you have a lot of experience
01:23:46 and imagine that there will be advances in robotics
01:23:50 that in some way I can’t even conceive
01:23:52 will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.
01:23:58 Something about by the time chips have been planted
01:24:01 in human brains and we’re all instantly sharing information
01:24:05 in a way that we never did before,
01:24:08 will this change the nature of human existence
01:24:12 in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?
01:24:15 So remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic,
01:24:17 the beauty of what it means to be human.
01:24:19 So like still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life,
01:24:22 the full complexity of life.
01:24:24 Cause you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill
01:24:28 and then they go to sleep, right?
01:24:30 You still want life to be amazing, exciting, interesting.
01:24:37 And so that’s where you have to find the balance.
01:24:39 Well, it’s, yes, I mean, it’s all science fiction stuff.
01:24:42 And so how it’s gonna work out, totally unclear.
01:24:51 I don’t see any worry about the magic of life disappearing.
01:24:55 I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.
01:24:57 I think you really need to get rid of males
01:25:00 cause males are the source of a major problem,
01:25:05 which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.
01:25:10 But you don’t think the males are also source of beauty
01:25:14 and creation?
01:25:15 No, I mean, I don’t have anything against males
01:25:18 as individuals and that sort of thing.
01:25:20 And males have clearly done a lot.
01:25:22 I mean, they’ve been incredibly exploratory and creative
01:25:27 and what they’ve done in art and music has been wonderful
01:25:30 and that sort of thing.
01:25:32 On the other hand,
01:25:34 I’m not sure there’s anything particularly special.
01:25:36 And I think that probably females could do the same thing
01:25:39 just as well when given the chance.
01:25:42 Yes, including the dark stuff.
01:25:44 I mean, a partial part of me is not understanding the,
01:25:47 so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women,
01:25:52 but I tend to believe both men and women,
01:25:55 if you look out into the future, can be destructive,
01:25:58 can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.
01:26:02 So if you move males from the picture,
01:26:03 which are historically connected to this evolution
01:26:07 that we’ve been talking about, that women are gonna fill
01:26:09 that role quite nicely.
01:26:11 And then it’ll be just the same kind of process.
01:26:15 Not the same, but it’ll be new and interesting.
01:26:21 There’s a sense that the will to power, craving power,
01:26:25 committing violence is somehow coupled
01:26:28 with all of the things that are beautiful about life.
01:26:32 That if you remove conflict completely,
01:26:35 if you remove all of the evil in the world,
01:26:38 it seems like you’re going to,
01:26:45 you’re not going to have a stable place
01:26:47 for the beauty, for the goodness.
01:26:49 Like there’s always has to be a dragon to fight for the way.
01:26:54 If you look at human history, now you can say,
01:26:57 the reason I’m nervous about a sort of utopia
01:27:00 where everything is great is every time you look
01:27:03 through human history when utopia has been chased,
01:27:06 you run into a lot of trouble or again,
01:27:09 sneaks into this evil, this craving for power.
01:27:13 Now you could say that’s a male problem,
01:27:16 but I just think it’s a human problem.
01:27:18 And it’s not even a human problem, it’s a chimp problem too.
01:27:22 It’s life on earth problem,
01:27:23 intelligent life on earth problem.
01:27:25 So like it’s better to not necessarily get rid
01:27:30 of the sources of the darker sides of human nature,
01:27:34 but more create mechanisms that the kindness,
01:27:38 the goodness as the goodness paradox, your book,
01:27:41 that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.
01:27:50 Well, look, I don’t think it would be utopia
01:27:54 if you got rid of the males.
01:27:56 Right.
01:27:57 And certainly females are capable of conflict.
01:28:01 I just think it’s a gamble worth taking
01:28:03 if you could actually do it.
01:28:04 You can certainly find females in history
01:28:07 who’ve done unpleasant things, but nevertheless,
01:28:11 we have a very strong evolutionary theory
01:28:13 which explains why males benefit more
01:28:16 by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.
01:28:21 And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict,
01:28:28 then it would reduce it to get rid of males.
01:28:31 Now I understand this is a fantasy,
01:28:34 and I think it’s a fantasy that people would be able
01:28:37 to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology
01:28:40 is getting to the point where it’s quite likely
01:28:44 that human females could breed without the use of males.
01:28:49 Mm hmm.
01:28:50 And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic
01:28:55 if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.
01:29:01 It’s a really interesting thought experiment.
01:29:03 I will agree with you that if given two buttons,
01:29:07 one is get rid of all women,
01:29:09 and the other button is get rid of all men,
01:29:13 realizing that I have a stake in this choice,
01:29:18 you’re probably getting rid of all men
01:29:20 if I wanted to preserve earth
01:29:25 and the richness of life on earth,
01:29:28 I would probably get rid of all men.
01:29:30 I don’t know.
01:29:31 I don’t think you have a stake in it.
01:29:32 You know, I mean, you’re saying that because you’re a man.
01:29:35 Yeah.
01:29:36 But I don’t see why being a man should make you
01:29:39 any more interested in having a male future for the world
01:29:42 than a female future.
01:29:43 You know, you’ve got just as many ancestors
01:29:46 who were male as were female.
01:29:48 Well, my problem is I’ll have to die.
01:29:51 Well, that’s gonna happen anyway.
01:29:53 I know, but like, I prefer to die tomorrow, not today.
01:29:56 You know, I prefer to hit the snooze button
01:30:00 on the whole mortality thing, but it’s interesting.
01:30:03 But this is not suggesting that males have to die
01:30:05 in order to make room for females.
01:30:06 It’s just, you know, all you have to do is just say,
01:30:11 don’t let’s have any more males born.
01:30:13 Interesting.
01:30:14 Of course, you know, the difficulty is that
01:30:16 because we’re tribal, you know, some country somewhere
01:30:19 would say, well, we’re not gonna do that.
01:30:21 Yeah.
01:30:22 And then guess what?
01:30:23 They’d take over, you know, because they’re male.
01:30:24 So that’s why it’s impossible to imagine actually happening.
01:30:28 You know what, I’m gonna take that
01:30:31 and actually think about it.
01:30:32 I don’t know, I’m uncomfortable.
01:30:34 There’s a certain kind of woke culture
01:30:39 that I’ve been kind of uncomfortable with
01:30:41 because it’s not women necessarily.
01:30:44 It’s more just, there’s a lot of bullying I see.
01:30:47 There’s a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness
01:30:50 towards others that’s created by that culture.
01:30:53 So, but you’re speaking about something else.
01:30:55 You’re speaking about reducing conflict in this world
01:31:00 and looking at the basics of our human nature
01:31:04 and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens
01:31:10 and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature
01:31:14 if we get rid of them will make for a better world.
01:31:18 It’s an interesting thought experiment worth thinking about.
01:31:20 But it is only a thought experiment.
01:31:21 I mean, you know, it’s got no practical meaning right now.
01:31:24 And I take your point that, you know,
01:31:28 males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways
01:31:32 because the balance of social power
01:31:38 is moving against,
01:31:42 I mean, you know, quite rightly
01:31:45 and in a strong sense, of course,
01:31:47 against all the nasty things that males do.
01:31:51 But what people sometimes fail to remember
01:31:55 is that life is very hard for males
01:32:00 who don’t have the power,
01:32:03 who don’t have money,
01:32:06 who don’t have access to women.
01:32:08 And, you know, I’m sympathetic to incels.
01:32:15 I’m not sympathetic to them using violence
01:32:18 to solve their problems.
01:32:20 But I am very sympathetic to the fact that
01:32:24 it’s not easy simply to be told by
01:32:29 well off, feminist, middle class people
01:32:36 that you shouldn’t behave like this
01:32:38 or you shouldn’t feel like this because you do.
01:32:40 Yes, it’s who you are.
01:32:42 I mean, in general, just empathy and kindness,
01:32:46 male or female,
01:32:51 I believe will be the thing that builds a better world.
01:32:54 And that’s practiced in different ways
01:32:57 from different backgrounds.
01:32:58 But ultimately, you should listen to others
01:33:01 and empathize with the experience of others
01:33:04 and put more love out there in the world.
01:33:06 Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict,
01:33:10 reduce violence,
01:33:12 and reduce that whole psychological experience
01:33:18 of being powerless in this world,
01:33:19 powerless to become the best version of yourself.
01:33:22 And that, you know.
01:33:23 Well, no one’s gonna disagree
01:33:24 with all those fine sentiments, right?
01:33:27 But that, yes.
01:33:29 But that’s an actionable thing
01:33:32 is actually practice empathy, right?
01:33:35 Like saying that somebody should be silenced
01:33:40 or just like this group is bad and this group is good.
01:33:43 I just feel like that’s not empathy.
01:33:45 Empathy is understanding the experience of others
01:33:50 and like respecting it.
01:33:52 Like, I mean, that’s what a better world looks like.
01:33:57 That’s what the reduction of conflict looks like.
01:33:59 It’s like, as opposed to saying my tribe is right,
01:34:03 your tribe is wrong.
01:34:06 Forget the violence and nonviolence part.
01:34:08 That’s just that act of saying my tribe is right,
01:34:11 that tribe is wrong.
01:34:12 Removing that from the picture,
01:34:13 that’s the way to make a better world.
01:34:15 Like that’s the way to reduce the violence, I think.
01:34:19 Not necessarily removing the people
01:34:21 who are causing the violence.
01:34:24 You have to get to the source of the problem.
01:34:25 I don’t mean the evolutionary source,
01:34:27 but just the mindset that creates the violence
01:34:32 is usually just the lack of empathy for others.
01:34:37 Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can’t just teach that
01:34:40 because our evolutionary psychology
01:34:43 puts us in particular directions.
01:34:45 So you don’t think, do you think it’s possible
01:34:48 to learn through practice to resist the basics
01:34:54 of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?
01:34:58 Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training.
01:35:01 Lots and lots of education can do it.
01:35:04 The famously most peaceful society
01:35:09 that anthropologists have recorded
01:35:11 involves tremendous amount of teaching,
01:35:16 including some punishment.
01:35:18 You know, it’s a society in Thailand.
01:35:21 You have to beat it out of children to make them nice.
01:35:25 There’s carrot and steak.
01:35:27 You know, the point is that you do not find societies
01:35:31 in which people are spontaneously
01:35:36 showing the kinds of behaviors
01:35:39 that we would all love them to show.
01:35:42 It requires work.
01:35:43 It requires work.
01:35:45 What is your book titled, Goodness Paradox?
01:35:48 What are the main ideas in this book?
01:35:50 Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes
01:35:56 in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.
01:36:00 And the violence is that we are one of these few animals
01:36:04 in which we use coalitionary proactive violence
01:36:08 to kill members of our own species.
01:36:10 And we do it in large numbers,
01:36:12 just like a few other species.
01:36:14 And the nonviolence is we’re particularly extreme
01:36:18 in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.
01:36:23 And I told you the story of how we get there.
01:36:26 So what’s so extraordinary about it is that
01:36:29 most animals are either high on both
01:36:32 or relatively low on both.
01:36:35 So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence
01:36:38 and reactive violence.
01:36:40 Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those,
01:36:44 but still hundreds of times more
01:36:47 reactively aggressive than humans are.
01:36:50 What we’ve done is retain proactive violence being high
01:36:54 and got reactive violence really being low.
01:36:59 And so we have these wonderful societies
01:37:01 in which we’re all so incredibly nice to each other
01:37:03 and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers
01:37:07 and have no problem about
01:37:11 leading to any kind of conflict
01:37:14 at the same time as we are one of the worst
01:37:18 killing machine species that’s ever existed.
01:37:21 So what’s so extraordinary about this is that
01:37:24 if you look at the political philosophers
01:37:26 of the last few hundred years,
01:37:29 you’ve got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes
01:37:33 and Jean Jacques Rousseau,
01:37:35 or literally you’ve got the fight between their followers.
01:37:38 So the followers of Hobbes say,
01:37:40 well, Hobbes was right,
01:37:41 because he says that we are naturally violent
01:37:44 and you need a Leviathan,
01:37:46 a sort of central government or a king
01:37:49 to be able to suppress the violence.
01:37:51 So we’re naturally horrid
01:37:53 and we can learn to be good.
01:37:55 Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseau is interpreted
01:37:58 as saying the opposite,
01:37:59 that we are naturally good
01:38:01 and it’s only when culture intervenes
01:38:03 and horrid ideologies come in
01:38:05 that we become uncivilized.
01:38:08 And so people have had this endless fight
01:38:10 between are we naturally corrupt
01:38:13 or are we naturally kind?
01:38:17 And that has gone on for years
01:38:19 and it’s only in the last two or three decades
01:38:22 that anthropologists like Christopher Boehm
01:38:25 and Bruce Naft have said,
01:38:26 look, it’s obvious what the answer is,
01:38:28 we are both of these things.
01:38:30 And what is so exciting now
01:38:32 is I think we can understand why we are both.
01:38:34 And the answer is we come from ancestors
01:38:38 that were elevated on proactive aggression,
01:38:40 that were hunters and killers,
01:38:43 both of animals and of each other.
01:38:47 And you’ve got to include that
01:38:49 as almost certain from the past.
01:38:52 And then now we’ve taken our reactive aggression
01:38:57 and we’ve down regulated it
01:39:00 and that’s given us power.
01:39:02 It’s given us power because
01:39:04 once you get rid of the alpha male,
01:39:06 once the beta males take over
01:39:08 and force selection in favor of a more tolerant,
01:39:13 less reactively aggressive individual,
01:39:17 the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable
01:39:21 of focusing on things other than conflict.
01:39:24 And so we have social groups
01:39:27 in which individuals, instead of constantly being on edge
01:39:30 in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,
01:39:34 are able to interact in ways that enable them to share
01:39:39 looking at a tool together or share their food together
01:39:44 or pass ideas from one to the other
01:39:47 or support each other when they’re ill
01:39:49 or whatever the issue is.
01:39:51 Cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.
01:39:56 So you asked earlier, what did I think about
01:39:58 why sapiens were able to expand
01:40:01 at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically
01:40:04 around 40,000 years ago?
01:40:06 And the answer is that whatever it was,
01:40:11 it had something to do
01:40:12 with the sapiens ability to cooperate.
01:40:16 That was what gave them bigger groups.
01:40:18 That’s what enabled them to have
01:40:21 a far more effective way of living.
01:40:23 And I suspect it was to do with the weapons
01:40:26 and military aspects.
01:40:28 But even if it wasn’t that,
01:40:30 the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing
01:40:35 would have been hugely important.
01:40:36 So sapiens then had groups of,
01:40:40 who knows exactly how big they were,
01:40:42 but scores of people to judge from their remains.
01:40:48 Whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated,
01:40:52 small groups of maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes,
01:40:58 where they saw others so rarely
01:41:00 that they were inbreeding at high levels.
01:41:03 Fathers having babies with their daughters.
01:41:08 Very different world.
01:41:09 Very different world.
01:41:10 And that’s probably what our world was like
01:41:12 before we got sapiens.
01:41:13 Before we got sapiens.
01:41:14 And it’s fascinating that there was that kind of violence
01:41:18 against, once you get rid of the alpha males,
01:41:24 you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta.
01:41:29 The beta males.
01:41:31 Not kindness, but collaboration, that’s the better word.
01:41:34 Yes, right, much more corruption.
01:41:36 Not just among the males, among the beta males,
01:41:38 but also among the gamma males and the females.
01:41:42 Yeah, I don’t know what a gamma male is,
01:41:44 but I imagine there’s a whole alphabet.
01:41:47 Well, I don’t know about a whole alphabet,
01:41:48 but I think the big layers are the married men
01:41:52 and the unmarried men.
01:41:55 Because the married men had a problem
01:41:57 with the unmarried men, right?
01:41:59 I mean, you see it in ethnographies
01:42:01 of hunters and gatherers recently,
01:42:03 where the unmarried men would be given rules,
01:42:06 such as, I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia
01:42:09 was you cannot come to the camp for months.
01:42:13 You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush.
01:42:17 Because we don’t want you anywhere near our wives.
01:42:20 And then another kind of rule is,
01:42:23 if you are in the camp,
01:42:25 you must be in the firelight all the time.
01:42:27 Otherwise, we don’t know what you’re doing out in the dark.
01:42:31 You really have to control them
01:42:33 because the men who had lots of wives
01:42:36 did not want those horrid bachelors
01:42:38 sneaking around the place.
01:42:40 I love this.
01:42:42 You also wrote the book titled Catching Fire,
01:42:45 How Cooking Made Us Human.
01:42:47 What’s the central idea in this book?
01:42:50 The subtitle How Cooking Made Us Human
01:42:52 refers not to Homo sapiens, but to Homo erectus.
01:42:56 So human there means the genus Homo.
01:42:59 And Homo erectus is the first full member
01:43:03 of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us,
01:43:08 just with a sort of slightly more robust build
01:43:12 and a smaller brain.
01:43:15 And the central idea of Catching Fire
01:43:17 is that it was the control of fire
01:43:22 that was responsible for the emergence of Homo erectus
01:43:27 and therefore the genus Homo,
01:43:30 which happened two million years ago.
01:43:33 And it was an evolution from a line of Australopithecines.
01:43:42 And Australopithecines are the creatures
01:43:46 from whom we evolved.
01:43:49 They were present in Africa
01:43:52 from something like six or seven million years ago,
01:43:57 up to actually up to one million years ago.
01:44:00 And then a branch led off to Homo
01:44:04 around two million years ago.
01:44:06 And the way to think of Australopithecines
01:44:09 is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.
01:44:13 So they were erect bipedal walkers.
01:44:17 They were like chimpanzees in the sense
01:44:20 that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.
01:44:24 They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee,
01:44:27 a little bit smaller actually.
01:44:29 And they had big jaws
01:44:32 because they were still eating raw food.
01:44:36 They had big teeth and big jaws.
01:44:39 And then around two million years ago,
01:44:42 the line of Australopithecines,
01:44:44 which ended with an intermediate species,
01:44:46 a kind of missing link area,
01:44:48 because it is not missing, called habilis,
01:44:52 sometimes called Homo habilis,
01:44:54 but more properly, in my view,
01:44:55 called Australopithecus habilis.
01:44:57 That gave rise to Homo erectus.
01:45:00 And Homo erectus, here’s how different it was.
01:45:04 It had a smaller mouth,
01:45:08 a smaller jaw, smaller teeth,
01:45:11 and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.
01:45:17 In addition, it had lost what Australopithecines all had,
01:45:21 which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.
01:45:24 And that meant that Homo erectus must have slept
01:45:26 on the ground.
01:45:28 And since it slept on the ground,
01:45:31 it should have been able to defend itself somehow
01:45:33 against predators.
01:45:34 And I can’t think of any way they could have done that
01:45:36 unless they had fire.
01:45:40 So there are two major clues to why it was
01:45:46 with Homo erectus that our ancestors
01:45:49 first acquired the control of fire.
01:45:52 One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees
01:45:55 in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos
01:45:58 and all the other primates do.
01:46:02 And the other is that there was this striking reduction
01:46:08 throughout the gut,
01:46:10 reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus
01:46:14 and in the gut itself.
01:46:16 And that conforms to what we have today,
01:46:20 that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans,
01:46:24 which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size
01:46:28 of what they would be if we ate raw food
01:46:32 to judge by the great apes.
01:46:35 So at some point in our evolution,
01:46:39 we acquired the skill of cooking
01:46:43 and skill of controlling fire.
01:46:44 At no time between two million years ago and the present,
01:46:49 do we see any changes in our anatomy
01:46:52 that can, as it were, justify the enormous change
01:46:58 that happens when you are an animal
01:47:01 that learns to control fire.
01:47:03 But at two million years ago,
01:47:04 we have exactly what you’d expect,
01:47:06 namely the guts becoming smaller
01:47:08 because the food is becoming softer
01:47:11 and much more easy to digest
01:47:12 so you don’t have to work so hard in the kitchen
01:47:14 or so hard in your body to digest it.
01:47:17 And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground,
01:47:22 which I think you’d be absolutely crazy to do nowadays
01:47:26 on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti
01:47:30 unless you had fire.
01:47:31 I’ve slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa
01:47:34 in the bush and you will not catch me
01:47:38 just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators
01:47:42 unless I got a fire with me.
01:47:44 I’m going to get eaten.
01:47:46 You’re gonna get terrified and you’re gonna get eaten.
01:47:49 Okay, so there’s a million questions I wanna ask.
01:47:51 So one, is it very naturally coupled,
01:47:55 the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire?
01:47:59 Is that an obvious leap?
01:48:01 Well, here’s what we know.
01:48:03 We know that all the animals that we’ve tested
01:48:06 like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.
01:48:10 So this is true for all the great apes.
01:48:13 We’ve tested them.
01:48:15 That’s fascinating, by the way.
01:48:17 Why is that?
01:48:18 That’s just like a property of food, I suppose.
01:48:21 Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking
01:48:25 for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.
01:48:31 And there are various signals in the food
01:48:33 such as the amount of sugar there,
01:48:35 the amount of free amino acids
01:48:37 because the amino acids can be tasted.
01:48:40 And the physical qualities of the food
01:48:44 be particularly important, how tough the food is.
01:48:47 Always prefer softer food, provided it feels safe,
01:48:52 tastes safe.
01:48:53 And these kinds of sensory cues
01:48:57 are all there in cooked food.
01:49:01 It’s soft, it doesn’t have so many toxins.
01:49:04 It’s not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.
01:49:08 So everyone loves it spontaneously.
01:49:11 Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food.
01:49:14 Well, maybe you can say that’s a consequence
01:49:16 of domestication, but even, as I say,
01:49:19 all of the great apes, you test naive ones
01:49:23 and they prefer it cooked if they can.
01:49:25 So then obvious, once you have fire,
01:49:28 you’re going to accidentally discover
01:49:29 that food changes when you apply fire to it
01:49:32 and then it’s going to be the big, crazy new fad.
01:49:37 You took the words out of my mouth.
01:49:38 I mean, if they have fire at all
01:49:41 and their food rolls into it,
01:49:43 five minutes later it tastes better than it did before.
01:49:46 How big of an invention from an engineering perspective
01:49:50 do you think is the discovery of fire?
01:49:53 Do you think for homo erectus, homo sapiens,
01:50:00 do you think it’s the greatest invention ever?
01:50:02 Yeah, I think that the control of fire
01:50:09 has been ultimately responsible for essentially
01:50:15 how grandiose do I want to be here,
01:50:17 the entire human story, going back to homo.
01:50:21 It is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.
01:50:26 And perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely
01:50:30 to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty
01:50:35 of making a large brain.
01:50:38 So the story here is that the constraints
01:50:43 on brain size are energetic.
01:50:47 You and I have brains that are something
01:50:51 like 2.5% of our body weight.
01:50:55 It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.
01:51:03 So it’s disproportionate.
01:51:05 There are other expensive organs in our body as well,
01:51:08 such as the heart.
01:51:11 And what’s different about the brain is that in addition
01:51:16 to us being able to fuel it in a way
01:51:19 that other animals can’t, we also have reasons
01:51:22 for wanting to have an even bigger brain,
01:51:24 whereas we don’t want an even bigger heart.
01:51:29 So what those reasons are is unclear.
01:51:31 But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain,
01:51:36 cooking makes it possible
01:51:38 because it’s supplying more calories
01:51:42 and it is enormously reducing the amount of time
01:51:46 that it takes to chew your food.
01:51:48 So if you were a gorilla and you wanted
01:51:51 to have a bigger brain, you might say, okay,
01:51:54 well, let’s just eat some more.
01:51:56 But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day
01:52:02 in the sense that they are eating
01:52:04 for maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.
01:52:10 That’s just chewing.
01:52:11 And then they’ve got to sit around and digest their food
01:52:13 because they can’t just eat all the time.
01:52:15 They’ve got to take a break while the food is digested
01:52:20 in the stomach and then passed into the gut.
01:52:23 So the stomach is already full.
01:52:26 So basically gorillas are eating
01:52:29 about the maximum rate already.
01:52:31 So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?
01:52:33 It doesn’t, it’s actually got a smaller brain
01:52:36 relative to its body size than a chimpanzee does.
01:52:39 And that’s the basic problem for our ancestors.
01:52:44 Then you come along and cook and all of a sudden
01:52:47 you can get an increased amount of energy from your food.
01:52:50 You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.
01:52:56 You know, there are 25 bodily processes or more
01:53:00 that are involved in digesting your food,
01:53:03 making the acid that takes the proteins apart,
01:53:07 maintaining the brush border where the molecules
01:53:12 are taken across the gut wall and so on.
01:53:15 That all costs.
01:53:16 It costs you to digest your food.
01:53:17 It costs less if you cook your food.
01:53:19 So you get a net gain in the amount of energy
01:53:22 and you are reducing the amount of time
01:53:25 from in our case, our ancestors,
01:53:29 probably around 50% of the day chewing
01:53:32 to nowadays one hour a day chewing.
01:53:36 So all of a sudden you’ve got hours a day
01:53:38 in which to do other things and to use those brains
01:53:41 that you’ve now enabled to grow.
01:53:44 So with Homo erectus, you start the process
01:53:46 of getting a bigger brain and famously,
01:53:49 throughout the whole period of the evolution
01:53:51 of the genus Homo, you have a steadily increasing
01:53:54 size of brain until right at the end
01:53:59 when it actually gets smaller, but that’s a different story.
01:54:02 Which end is this?
01:54:03 Which, are we talking about Homo sapiens?
01:54:06 Yeah, with Homo sapiens, you’ve got a smaller brain
01:54:09 from, people haven’t got it exactly down,
01:54:13 but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining.
01:54:17 And so the fascinating thing about that
01:54:20 is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains
01:54:23 than their wild ancestors.
01:54:25 And I.
01:54:30 The domestication is intricately connected
01:54:32 to this brain size, you think?
01:54:34 And exactly, so I think what we’re seeing in humans
01:54:37 is that same manifestation.
01:54:39 And then the fascinating question is why?
01:54:43 And the only point I would want to make about this
01:54:45 is that there’s no evidence that in the small brain
01:54:50 domesticates, they’re losing say an average
01:54:53 about 15% of brain size.
01:54:55 In the small brain domesticates compared
01:54:57 to their wild ancestors, there’s no indication
01:54:59 of a loss of cognitive ability.
01:55:03 So I think what’s going on is that it’s a younger brain.
01:55:08 It’s a more pedomorphic brain,
01:55:10 looking like the juveniles of the ancestor.
01:55:13 But just as our kids are very smart
01:55:17 and can learn amazing things compared to adults,
01:55:19 all they lack is wisdom and maturity,
01:55:21 but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.
01:55:25 And I think that’s the same with domesticated animals
01:55:27 compared to their wild ancestors,
01:55:28 and probably therefore with Homo sapiens,
01:55:32 say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors.
01:55:36 So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.
01:55:38 Size, Richard, isn’t everything.
01:55:43 Exactly.
01:55:45 What’s the connection between fire, cooking,
01:55:47 and the eating of meat?
01:55:50 Which came first, do you think?
01:55:53 Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat
01:55:56 or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?
01:56:01 I think that fire increased the using of meat.
01:56:04 But the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt
01:56:09 and kill meat, as do bonobos, certainly puts us in,
01:56:14 so those two species have a common ancestor with us
01:56:18 going six, seven million years ago,
01:56:20 and it was from that common ancestor
01:56:22 that you get the Australopithecine line.
01:56:24 It’s very likely therefore Australopithecines
01:56:26 were eating meat when they could get it,
01:56:28 which wouldn’t be very often
01:56:29 because they wouldn’t be very good sprinters.
01:56:31 But nevertheless, they would occasionally be able
01:56:33 to get some meat, and I bet they loved it all the time,
01:56:36 and basically all primates like meat
01:56:38 if they can get it, almost all of them.
01:56:41 But I think fire would have been very important
01:56:45 for a couple of reasons.
01:56:47 One is that once you eat your food cooked,
01:56:52 then you’re saving yourself time.
01:56:55 By saving yourself time, you can free up
01:57:00 the opportunity to go and hunt more.
01:57:03 Because hunting is a high risk, high gain activity.
01:57:07 There’s every risk that you will get nothing
01:57:10 on one particular afternoon that you go off
01:57:13 looking for opportunities to kill.
01:57:16 But it’s high gain because when you do get something,
01:57:20 you bring down a kudu,
01:57:21 then you’ve got a serious amount of meat.
01:57:26 What did males and females do
01:57:28 with the time they were saving
01:57:29 from not having to chew their food?
01:57:32 I think that in the case of males,
01:57:35 it’s very reasonable to think they spent
01:57:36 a greatly increased amount of time hunting.
01:57:39 So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month,
01:57:44 and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.
01:57:47 With humans, they’re hunting maybe 20 times a month,
01:57:53 and the average hunt length is six hours.
01:57:55 It’s a huge difference.
01:57:57 So, and that’s possible because the time was available,
01:58:00 because they were cooking.
01:58:01 Less chewing, more hunting.
01:58:03 You got it.
01:58:05 The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.
01:58:11 So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,
01:58:14 and I mean, they are so excited about killing a monkey.
01:58:17 They’re so excited about going into the hunt,
01:58:19 and when they make the kill,
01:58:21 then there’s screams everywhere,
01:58:23 and some don’t like to seize it and capture it
01:58:27 and take it away from the others,
01:58:28 and eventually the strongest one has it,
01:58:31 and the others sit around begging
01:58:33 and trying to get some and tear it off,
01:58:35 and so they all love it.
01:58:37 There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree
01:58:41 in order to be able to get away
01:58:42 from all of these beggars and scavengers,
01:58:44 and while he’s there, drops of blood
01:58:47 or little scraps will fall down to the bottom,
01:58:50 and the junior members of society,
01:58:52 you know, the females and young and that sort of thing,
01:58:55 they are racing through to find a particular leaf
01:58:58 that’s got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it.
01:59:00 I mean, they love it, but it takes them a lot of time
01:59:07 to chew it.
01:59:08 I mean, it’s the same thing as for cooked food in general.
01:59:11 So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies,
01:59:16 and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,
01:59:19 I’ve had enough of this, I need real food,
01:59:21 and they’ll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again
01:59:25 because they can get fruit into their bodies
01:59:27 so much faster than they can get meat.
01:59:32 So once they’re cooking, that problem is solved,
01:59:34 and they can eat the meat much more readily.
01:59:37 So I think that meat eating would become important
01:59:40 for two reasons with cooking.
01:59:42 So the key, not to oversimplify,
01:59:45 but the key moments in human history
01:59:48 are with Homo erectus, the discovery of fire
01:59:52 and the use of fire for cooking,
01:59:55 and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males
02:00:00 killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation
02:00:03 can exist, and cooperation leads to communication
02:00:06 and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas,
02:00:09 that kind of thing.
02:00:10 Well, yes, the only thing I would modify on that
02:00:13 is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males
02:00:17 were able to kill the alpha male?
02:00:20 Right.
02:00:21 And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males
02:00:25 within their own group sometimes,
02:00:27 it’s not a process of killing the alpha male.
02:00:31 It’s taking advantage of opportunity
02:00:32 when some male gets into a bad position,
02:00:36 but it’s not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.
02:00:39 And you can see why, because they don’t have language,
02:00:42 and without language, it’s very difficult to know
02:00:46 how confident you can be of the support of others
02:00:50 against a particular individual within your own group.
02:00:52 Yes.
02:00:53 When you’re attacking someone from another group,
02:00:55 that problem is solved.
02:00:57 We all hate those guys, but the alpha male
02:01:03 has got alliances within his group.
02:01:06 Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.
02:01:11 Some of them might be harboring deep feelings
02:01:13 of resentment, but how does anyone else know that?
02:01:17 So in other words, I think that you have to have
02:01:20 some kind of language that is pretty good
02:01:23 to solve the problems of gaining confidence
02:01:27 that five of you say, or some number,
02:01:33 can trust each other in this final attack.
02:01:38 And even nowadays, it’s difficult.
02:01:42 I mean, you mentioned Stalin.
02:01:44 It’s like, why was everybody terrified?
02:01:48 Any dictator that takes control.
02:01:50 Why is all of us as individuals terrified
02:01:53 when you know there’s millions of us?
02:01:56 That’s right.
02:01:57 And so like that, we lack the language,
02:02:00 because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.
02:02:04 Like, who can we talk to?
02:02:06 Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?
02:02:08 Exactly, that’s right.
02:02:10 But do you have this intuition that some kind of language
02:02:14 was developing along with this process
02:02:18 of beta males taking over?
02:02:20 Yes, yes, I mean, once you have sufficient language
02:02:23 to be able to have the beta males conspiring
02:02:25 to kill the alpha male, then you have selection
02:02:30 in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.
02:02:33 And at that point, there will be increased ability
02:02:38 to communicate and the language will get richer
02:02:40 and better and better.
02:02:41 So yes, absolutely, positive feedback loop
02:02:44 once you get the situation started.
02:02:48 Can you maybe comment on the full complexity
02:02:53 and richness of the human mind through this process?
02:02:55 We’ve been casually saying cooking, fire,
02:03:00 and beta males leading to cooperation.
02:03:06 But how does the beauty of the human mind
02:03:09 emerge from all of this?
02:03:10 Is there other further steps we need to understand?
02:03:13 Or is it as simple as this language emerging
02:03:16 from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?
02:03:21 Or am I also over romanticizing
02:03:23 how amazing the human mind is?
02:03:25 Is it just like one small step
02:03:27 in a long journey of evolution?
02:03:33 Well, if the beauty of the human mind
02:03:34 is the ability of us all to be creative, to explore,
02:03:48 that’s one kind of beauty.
02:03:49 Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.
02:03:56 And we think of that as beautiful
02:03:58 because it is a kind of rare and special ability
02:04:03 compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness
02:04:09 that can commonly predominate.
02:04:14 I suppose we have to think of different sources
02:04:17 for those two types.
02:04:22 I suppose a general answer is that
02:04:25 there has been selection in favor of bigger brains,
02:04:29 which probably in general has been associated
02:04:31 with increasing cognitive ability.
02:04:33 And as that has happened,
02:04:37 the complexity of life has increased
02:04:41 because people have more and more complex,
02:04:45 highly differentiated strategies
02:04:48 in response to each other’s more complex,
02:04:51 highly differentiated strategies.
02:04:53 We get to a point where there is deception
02:04:55 and self deception.
02:04:57 There is a manipulation of ideas
02:05:02 through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on.
02:05:09 I guess all I’m wanting to say is that
02:05:13 there is a world of the mind that evolves in response
02:05:22 to these platforms that are put there.
02:05:25 The platform of increasing brain size
02:05:28 and therefore cognitive ability
02:05:30 made possible by increased energy supply.
02:05:34 The platform of cooperation and tolerance
02:05:38 in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict
02:05:42 and therefore a need to respond to the conflict
02:05:46 and manipulate your allies appropriately.
02:05:50 I don’t see beauty as coming,
02:05:52 either kind of beauty as coming
02:05:53 sort of totally independently of these things.
02:05:56 You know, I don’t think there’s a selection
02:05:58 for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.
02:06:02 Yes.
02:06:03 You know, but I guess sexual selection,
02:06:06 you know, males wanting to impress females
02:06:09 in different ways will lead to them wanting to.
02:06:13 Write poetry?
02:06:15 Well, yes, you know, show off.
02:06:16 Yeah, in all the different ways.
02:06:18 So all of these are natural consequences
02:06:20 of just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate
02:06:24 and how to achieve certain ends.
02:06:27 So that’s just like a natural.
02:06:29 Yeah, I mean, we haven’t spoken about sexual selection,
02:06:31 but that is a really important part of it.
02:06:34 You know, they try to out compete each other
02:06:37 in, you know, normally without any physical conflict,
02:06:43 just in order to be able to be chosen
02:06:45 by mates of the opposite sex.
02:06:46 And that is certainly a major source of creativity.
02:06:53 So you’ve studied chimps.
02:06:56 You also, all the other relatives, gorillas.
02:06:59 What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps,
02:07:01 about gorillas, about humans?
02:07:03 Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary,
02:07:07 that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.
02:07:10 How are we related?
02:07:12 What is the common ancestor?
02:07:14 What are the interesting differences?
02:07:15 I know I’m asking a million questions,
02:07:17 but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas,
02:07:22 and humans, like how we’re related,
02:07:25 and what you find fascinating about each?
02:07:29 In Africa, straddling the equator,
02:07:33 there is a strip of rainforest
02:07:37 that relies on the combination of high temperatures
02:07:42 and rainfall that you get around the equator.
02:07:45 That rainforest goes into about 22 countries.
02:07:51 And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees,
02:07:54 although they’ve gone extinct in two of them.
02:07:58 In just a fraction of them,
02:08:02 but it was five countries,
02:08:04 you’ve got gorillas, where there are mountains.
02:08:09 And in one country, on the left bank
02:08:12 of the Great Congo River, you have bonobos.
02:08:17 So in the African forest,
02:08:19 you’ve got these three African apes, the only African apes,
02:08:23 all of which are very similar in much of their way of life.
02:08:30 They walk on their knuckles through the forest,
02:08:33 looking for fruit trees,
02:08:34 and eating herbs when they can’t find fruits.
02:08:41 Gorillas represent the oldest chain.
02:08:46 So about 10 million years ago,
02:08:49 maybe as recently as eight million years ago,
02:08:51 the ancestor of gorillas broke off
02:08:54 from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.
02:08:58 So they’ve probably remained very similar now
02:09:00 to what, very similar to what they were then.
02:09:04 They were probably the largest apes,
02:09:08 living in montane areas and spending more time
02:09:13 eating just herbs, stems,
02:09:19 not so vitally dependent on fruit.
02:09:22 And living in, if it was like the present,
02:09:27 groups up to about 50 stable groups,
02:09:30 with one alpha male who was in charge.
02:09:37 Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive
02:09:44 compared to chimps and bonobos.
02:09:46 And I had the privilege of spending a week or two
02:09:53 with gorillas at Dian Fossey’s camp before she was murdered.
02:09:58 And I went out with two women,
02:10:03 Kelly and Barb, to a particular group.
02:10:07 And there was a young female in the group called Simba.
02:10:12 And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.
02:10:16 And then she came towards me
02:10:18 and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles
02:10:24 and touched me on the forehead.
02:10:26 She was watched in doing this by a young male
02:10:32 who was quite keen on her.
02:10:34 And he was called Digit.
02:10:35 And about five minutes later,
02:10:38 Digit stood in front of us on the path.
02:10:42 And Kelly was in front of me,
02:10:44 and then there was Barb, and then there was me.
02:10:48 And he came charging down the path
02:10:49 and he sidestepped around Kelly,
02:10:51 and he sidestepped around Barb,
02:10:53 and me, he just knocked with his arm
02:10:57 and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.
02:11:00 And I love the way that that was a very deliberate response.
02:11:06 And I love the way that Simba had been so interested in me
02:11:10 and held my eye.
02:11:12 Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye,
02:11:15 but gorillas really look as though
02:11:16 they’re trying to sort of figure out
02:11:18 what are you thinking about?
02:11:19 That was a species that has, goes back
02:11:24 for something like 10 million years.
02:11:26 In that situation, was there a game being played?
02:11:31 Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me,
02:11:35 I don’t want you messing with Simba.
02:11:37 But was Simba using you?
02:11:40 Oh, I see.
02:11:41 Well, that’s a fun idea.
02:11:43 I don’t see why she should be using me,
02:11:45 but you mean to use me?
02:11:46 I see why she should be using me, but you mean testing
02:11:49 how strongly Digit was prepared to intervene to?
02:11:53 Yeah, exactly.
02:11:54 Oh, that’s come straight out of a sort of adolescent
02:11:57 high school playbook.
02:11:58 All right, well, that’s all.
02:11:59 No, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with it for that.
02:12:02 Yeah, I don’t know.
02:12:04 I never thought of that, and you never know.
02:12:08 It’s possible.
02:12:09 So, yeah, so, okay, so this is an ancient branch
02:12:14 of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla
02:12:16 that led to gorillas.
02:12:17 Gorillas.
02:12:19 So then the next thing that happened
02:12:20 on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago
02:12:23 when you have the line between chimps and bonobos
02:12:30 on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.
02:12:34 And basically what happened is that at that point,
02:12:36 a chimp like ancestor leaves the forest,
02:12:41 gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts,
02:12:45 and that becomes the Australopithecines
02:12:46 and meanwhile, the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor
02:12:50 continues in the forest.
02:12:53 And later what happens is that one branch of that
02:12:57 crosses the Congo River and becomes the bonobos.
02:13:01 That was only about two million years ago,
02:13:02 maybe one million years ago.
02:13:05 Now the chimps that remained in the forest
02:13:07 throughout this time and occupied all the countries
02:13:09 across from west to east Africa now,
02:13:13 again, we assume that they’re pretty similar
02:13:16 to the ones that live nowadays,
02:13:18 where there’s some variation from west to east.
02:13:21 And these are animals that live in social communities
02:13:25 of between say 20 and 200.
02:13:29 They have a lot of them in one group,
02:13:32 but they never come together in a single unit.
02:13:35 These are, they share an area, a community territory,
02:13:39 and that area is defended by males
02:13:41 and within it, females wander
02:13:43 and bring up their young independently.
02:13:46 And the females are very scared
02:13:49 about the possibility that males
02:13:53 will be mean to their infants.
02:13:55 And in order to avoid them doing that,
02:13:58 they do their best to mate with every single male
02:14:02 in the group multiple times,
02:14:04 as if to give a memory in that male of,
02:14:07 yeah, yeah, I reminded you,
02:14:09 so I’m not gonna be mean to your baby.
02:14:11 So what’s wonderful about chimps?
02:14:12 Well, you know, as we’ve spoken about them,
02:14:15 they are creative and sort of amazingly humanlike,
02:14:20 but I love the sort of, you know, the quiet moments.
02:14:22 And here’s one.
02:14:25 I’ve got two chimps who are grooming each other
02:14:30 on a day when they are utterly exhausted.
02:14:33 They’ve walked 11 kilometers the day before,
02:14:37 up and down hills.
02:14:39 And on this particular day,
02:14:42 all they do is they get to one tree
02:14:44 and they eat from that tree.
02:14:45 And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards
02:14:48 and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up.
02:14:52 So they’re utterly exhausted
02:14:55 and they’re just eating nonstop
02:14:56 because they’re trying to recover their energy.
02:14:59 And this is Hugh and Charlie.
02:15:02 And we think they were probably brothers.
02:15:04 They’ve never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it.
02:15:08 Well, I never remember now who it is,
02:15:11 but let’s say that they both come down from the tree
02:15:17 and they’re both carrying branches of the food.
02:15:22 They’re actually seeds from these branches.
02:15:25 They’re both engaged, even in the midday sun
02:15:28 when they want to come down and unshade themselves
02:15:31 for a bit on the ground, they’re still eating.
02:15:34 But then Charlie finishes his branch
02:15:38 and he starts grooming Hugh.
02:15:42 And Hugh continues eating from his branch.
02:15:48 Charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes
02:15:53 and he reaches out and he lifts the branch
02:15:57 from which Hugh is still taking seeds
02:16:01 and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back
02:16:05 as far as possible away from Hugh.
02:16:08 Hugh doesn’t do anything.
02:16:10 He just finishes his mouthful
02:16:12 and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.
02:16:15 So this very polite way of saying,
02:16:16 will you groom me please has worked.
02:16:19 Then Hugh grooms around Charlie’s back
02:16:25 and around to the right side and then down his arm
02:16:29 to what point where he can reach the branch again.
02:16:33 And then he picks up the branch
02:16:34 and continues nonchalantly.
02:16:37 Right.
02:16:38 So in other words, a very sort of simple little strategy
02:16:42 but it just shows the courtesy
02:16:43 with which they can treat each other.
02:16:47 And the days I love with chimps
02:16:49 are when you see that sort of thing
02:16:50 or when you see mothers just lying
02:16:52 in a sunlit patch in the forest
02:16:55 with their babies bouncing on top of them,
02:16:58 just having a wonderful peaceful time.
02:17:01 And that’s what most of their lives are like.
02:17:06 So chimpanzees are the species
02:17:09 that kind of unites the rest of the apes
02:17:11 because a gorilla is in many ways
02:17:14 just a big version of a chimpanzee.
02:17:16 If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind
02:17:19 to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla.
02:17:22 And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River
02:17:26 are like a domesticated form of a chimpanzee
02:17:31 but obviously humans didn’t domesticate them.
02:17:33 So they’re self domesticated.
02:17:35 They are less aggressive
02:17:36 and they show all the marks of domestication
02:17:39 that domestication animals do
02:17:41 compared to wild animals in their bones.
02:17:44 So they have reduced differences between males and females
02:17:47 in which the males are more like females.
02:17:49 They have smaller brains, they have shorter faces,
02:17:53 smaller teeth and smaller bodies.
02:17:55 All the things that domesticated animals show.
02:17:57 And bonobos live in this environment
02:18:01 in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.
02:18:05 There’s no indication that they will have
02:18:08 these aggressive kills and enough data now to show
02:18:12 that there’s a statistical difference
02:18:13 in the frequency of which it would happen.
02:18:16 And bonobos are famously erotic.
02:18:21 The females have enlarged sexual parts
02:18:27 which swell to particularly large size
02:18:30 compared to the female chimpanzees.
02:18:33 And the females have a lot of interactions with each other
02:18:38 in which they excitedly rub their clitorises together
02:18:42 and appear to have orgasms.
02:18:45 And these occur in the context
02:18:47 of some kind of social tension.
02:18:52 And they sometimes happen before,
02:18:53 they sometimes happen after the social tension,
02:18:55 and they seem to be devices, these interactions,
02:18:59 for ensuring that everyone’s friends
02:19:02 and reducing the chances
02:19:03 that they’re actually gonna get into a fight.
02:19:05 So it’s a kind of conflict resolution through sex
02:19:10 or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.
02:19:13 Well, it’s often characterized as make love, not war.
02:19:15 Make love, not war.
02:19:18 Okay, you mentioned to me offline
02:19:22 that you have a deep love for nature.
02:19:26 If we look at the world today,
02:19:29 how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature
02:19:35 remain a big part of our lives as human beings
02:19:39 in the way we think about it,
02:19:41 in the way we also keep it around, preserve it?
02:19:46 You know, we keep it part of our minds
02:19:47 and part of our world.
02:19:51 It’s a very difficult question
02:19:55 because every time there was a conflict
02:19:58 between conservation of a natural habitat
02:20:02 and allowing people to get that little bit of extra food
02:20:07 for their babies,
02:20:08 then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.
02:20:13 And so we have this steady erosion
02:20:17 in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.
02:20:22 We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats
02:20:25 and all the species,
02:20:27 and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.
02:20:31 Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples
02:20:34 of something being saved,
02:20:36 but the overall trend is clear.
02:20:40 And it’s very difficult to see how one can ever escape that
02:20:43 because it’s not human.
02:20:46 Now that we are essentially a single tribe,
02:20:50 to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans.
02:20:57 So I think the only way in which we can really conserve
02:21:02 is if we put tremendous effort
02:21:06 into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.
02:21:15 Often this will be the national parks that already exist.
02:21:18 And what we have to do is to make them so valuable
02:21:22 that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival
02:21:26 to be able to keep those sorts of places.
02:21:29 And that’s the attitude that my colleagues and I
02:21:32 have taken in Uganda,
02:21:33 where we want to keep the Kibale National Park alive,
02:21:39 which has got the largest population chimpanzees
02:21:41 in Uganda,
02:21:42 and it’s got elephants and wonderful birds
02:21:44 and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on,
02:21:46 and visitors, and lots and lots of visitors.
02:21:51 It may be that we’re going to have to have huge increases
02:21:54 in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism.
02:21:58 And you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right.
02:22:02 In other places, you will keep nature there
02:22:06 because it’s useful for maintaining the climate,
02:22:12 bringing rain.
02:22:15 Maybe you can in some places convince people
02:22:20 of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature
02:22:25 that even over the long term,
02:22:28 presidents whose job it is to look for the future
02:22:34 of the country will be persuaded
02:22:36 that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.
02:22:39 But overall, what is required is for people
02:22:47 in the rich countries to do much more investment
02:22:50 than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places
02:22:56 in their own countries and in the tropics.
02:23:01 And if you look at Africa,
02:23:02 I mean, the population trends are that Nigeria
02:23:08 may become the most populous country in the world, I think,
02:23:12 or within a century.
02:23:16 The future of African habitats,
02:23:19 you know, it’s clear what’s gonna happen in general.
02:23:21 There’s gonna be a huge conversion
02:23:23 towards agricultural land.
02:23:28 I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago
02:23:32 about the prospect of the entire globe
02:23:36 being turned into a single human feedlot.
02:23:42 It’s gonna take a lot to avoid that.
02:23:44 He is out there calling for half the earth
02:23:50 to be devoted to nature.
02:23:53 It’s incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic.
02:23:56 But unless you have really exciting goals,
02:24:00 probably nothing will be achieved.
02:24:02 Yeah, I mean, there’s something to me,
02:24:06 like when I visit New York and I see Central Park
02:24:08 and then somehow constructed a situation
02:24:10 where you preserve this park in the middle of the park,
02:24:14 probably some of the most expensive land in the world.
02:24:17 The fact that that’s possible gives me hope
02:24:19 that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale,
02:24:23 perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons
02:24:25 of just valuing the beauty
02:24:28 and just respecting our origins
02:24:33 of having come from the earth.
02:24:35 We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees,
02:24:39 bonobos and gorillas as our close relatives
02:24:43 still living on the earth.
02:24:44 We’re unlucky that we don’t have Australopithecines
02:24:46 and other species of homo,
02:24:48 but we’re still lucky to have those
02:24:49 because they are incredibly closely related to us
02:24:51 compared to what most animals have.
02:24:54 There are many animals that don’t have any close relatives
02:24:56 to them on the earth.
02:24:58 But not only are they relatively close,
02:25:01 but they teach us so much about ourselves.
02:25:04 The similarities between them and ourselves
02:25:06 raise questions that we can then test
02:25:09 about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities
02:25:13 are derived from the same evolutionary stock
02:25:16 as in those great apes.
02:25:18 Well, how much is that worth?
02:25:21 I mean, we could spend billions going to the Mars
02:25:24 to find evidence of bacteria there,
02:25:28 and that’s fascinating too.
02:25:30 But we should be spending billions on this earth
02:25:33 in order to make sure that we have,
02:25:36 I don’t know how to say it,
02:25:40 substantial representative populations
02:25:43 of these close relatives.
02:25:45 Yeah, that we can meet.
02:25:47 There’s something like space tourism
02:25:49 when you go out into space and you look back down on earth.
02:25:53 That’s to a lot of people, including myself,
02:25:56 is worth a lot.
02:25:58 But why is that worth a lot?
02:25:59 Is because it’s humbling and beautiful
02:26:04 in the same way that meeting
02:26:07 our close evolutionary relatives is humbling and beautiful.
02:26:13 Just to know that this is what we come from.
02:26:17 This is who we are.
02:26:19 Not just for the understanding or the science of it,
02:26:21 but just something about just the beauty of witnessing this.
02:26:26 And again, it’s both humbling and empowering
02:26:30 that this place is fragile and we’re damn lucky to be here.
02:26:36 Yes, and unfortunately,
02:26:37 the problems are incredibly difficult to solve
02:26:40 and there is no one solver.
02:26:42 It has to happen from a network
02:26:44 of potentially cooperating people.
02:26:47 But I mean, you’re so right about it being daunting
02:26:49 to think about what it looks like from space.
02:26:52 And I love the view that Herman Muller expressed
02:26:56 of being able to go out from space.
02:26:59 And he said the whole of life
02:27:01 would look like a kind of rust on the planet.
02:27:06 Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.
02:27:08 I’m not sure they would notice the life.
02:27:10 They would probably notice the trees or ocean.
02:27:15 It’s a kind of rust.
02:27:17 But let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical question.
02:27:21 What is the meaning of this rust?
02:27:23 What do you think is the meaning of life on Earth?
02:27:26 What is the meaning of our human intelligent life?
02:27:31 Well, I think it’s very clear
02:27:32 that we have an evolutionary story
02:27:35 that is only getting challenged around the edges.
02:27:41 We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.
02:27:44 And the meaning is we are here
02:27:48 as a consequence of materialistic processes that began,
02:27:58 in our sense, with the establishment of the Earth
02:28:03 four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was,
02:28:04 and then water and oxygen and so on.
02:28:09 And we are the astonishing consequence
02:28:12 of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.
02:28:18 The word random is the wrong word to use
02:28:22 unless you understand what it means.
02:28:24 You know, it didn’t happen by chance,
02:28:28 but a lot of random events had to happen
02:28:30 to make this possible.
02:28:32 And those random events, of course,
02:28:33 are the production of appropriate mutations.
02:28:37 But the meaning of life is there is no meaning.
02:28:43 The really big mystery of life is why is there a universe?
02:28:49 And that same why propagates itself through the whole of it,
02:28:53 through the whole process of it,
02:28:55 for the emergence of planets, the emergence,
02:28:58 first of all, of galaxies, of star systems.
02:29:02 Of planets, of the proteins required
02:29:09 to construct the single cell organisms
02:29:11 and the single cell organism becoming complex organisms
02:29:14 and some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land
02:29:19 and the whole of it.
02:29:20 And then there’s fire,
02:29:21 some clever guy or lady invented fire,
02:29:25 and then now here we are.
02:29:28 It just does seem, speaking as a human,
02:29:32 kind of special that we’re able to reflect on the whole thing
02:29:35 or the whole…
02:29:36 Wonderful story.
02:29:37 So much more interesting than the stories produced by religion.
02:29:40 Yeah, it is beautiful,
02:29:42 but it just seems special that us humans
02:29:44 are able to write religions and construct stories
02:29:49 and also do science.
02:29:51 That seems kind of amazing.
02:29:56 It seems like the universe is such that it creates beings like us
02:30:06 that are able to investigate it.
02:30:10 And that’s why there’s this longing for why.
02:30:14 That’s just such a beautiful little pocket of complexity
02:30:20 created by the universe.
02:30:21 It seems like there should be a why,
02:30:26 but maybe there’s just an infinite number of universes
02:30:28 and this is the one that led to this particular set of humans.
02:30:33 Even without an infinite number of universes,
02:30:35 I bet there’s an infinite number of intelligent beings.
02:30:37 Throughout this universe.
02:30:39 Yeah, now that we know how many planets
02:30:41 have the right sort of conditions,
02:30:43 which is what, I can’t remember, a lot.
02:30:46 It’s some significant percentage of all planets.
02:30:49 Then there are apparently billions of planets.
02:30:54 Things happen so quickly on Earth.
02:30:59 Once you’ve got water, then you’ve got life.
02:31:02 It did not take long for life to evolve
02:31:07 in the big scheme of things.
02:31:09 And if you think, you look out there,
02:31:11 say there’s a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations,
02:31:15 one dimension you can look at is the proclivity to violence they have.
02:31:21 It’s interesting to think what level of violence is useful
02:31:26 for extending the life of a civilization.
02:31:30 So we have a particular set of violence in our history.
02:31:33 Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.
02:31:37 Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.
02:31:41 So you look at viruses.
02:31:42 What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed?
02:31:46 If you’re too deadly, that’s a big problem.
02:31:49 If you’re not deadly enough, that’s also a problem.
02:31:52 So that is a fascinating exploration of…
02:31:55 I don’t see any evidence.
02:31:57 I don’t see where you’re coming from
02:31:58 when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.
02:32:01 Well, because, I’ll say it this way,
02:32:05 death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.
02:32:11 So violence…
02:32:13 But there’s lots of ways to die without violence.
02:32:15 Right. To me, death in itself is violence.
02:32:18 And you can…
02:32:21 I mean, a lot of people that talk about, for example,
02:32:23 longevity and disease and all that kind of stuff,
02:32:26 they see death as a…
02:32:28 This is the way they talk about it.
02:32:30 And it’s interesting to philosophically think of it that way.
02:32:33 Death is like mass murder that’s happening.
02:32:37 People that try to, from a biological perspective, help extend life,
02:32:42 they see that you’re helping…
02:32:46 The biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization,
02:32:50 from their perspective,
02:32:52 is not allocating all our resources to solving death.
02:32:58 Right. Because death is a kind of violence.
02:33:01 It is the kind of murder that we’re allowing
02:33:04 to be committed on us by nature.
02:33:06 And so the flip side of that is death makes way for new life,
02:33:11 for new ideas.
02:33:14 Yes. But that’s got nothing to do with peace versus war.
02:33:18 You have animals that are very, very peaceful,
02:33:21 but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.
02:33:24 They just don’t do it with death caused by violence.
02:33:28 And violent death is premature death, surely.
02:33:31 I don’t mind about people dying.
02:33:34 What I mind about is people dying in their youth, middle age.
02:33:40 Prematurely.
02:33:41 But some people would say all death is premature.
02:33:44 It certainly feels that way.
02:33:46 It’s died too soon.
02:33:49 Anyone who’s ever died, died too soon.
02:33:51 Yeah. Well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias
02:33:54 and live for hundreds of years or thousands of years,
02:33:57 that would be great.
02:33:59 Do you ponder your own mortality?
02:34:01 Are you afraid of death?
02:34:03 I don’t think I’m afraid of it.
02:34:05 I’m reconciled to the fact it’s going to happen.
02:34:09 I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life,
02:34:13 and I don’t want to leave the party.
02:34:18 Yeah. It’s kind of a fun party.
02:34:22 I don’t want to leave the party either.
02:34:24 So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party.
02:34:27 And you’re right.
02:34:30 Having a party with a little bit less violence in it
02:34:33 is an even more fun party.
02:34:35 Richard, I’m deeply honored that you spent time with me today.
02:34:38 Your work is amazing.
02:34:40 It includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history
02:34:45 and the nature of human civilization.
02:34:47 So again, thank you so much for talking today.
02:34:50 It’s an honor.
02:34:51 Well, thanks for your great questions.
02:34:52 It was a fun conversation.