back to indexRichard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229
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The following is a conversation with Richard Wrangham,
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a biological anthropologist at Harvard
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specializing in the study of primates
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and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,
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and other aspects of ape and human behavior
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at the individual and societal level.
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He began his career over four decades ago
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working with Jane Goodall
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and studying the behavior of chimps,
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and since then has done a lot of seminal work
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on human evolution and has proposed
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several theories for the roles of fire and violence
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in the evolution of us, hairless apes,
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otherwise known as homo sapiens.
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This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Richard Wrangham.
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You've said that we're much less violent
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than our close living relatives, the chimps.
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Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are
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and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?
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Well, I haven't said exactly
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that we're less violent than chimps.
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What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence.
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One stems from proactive aggression
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and the other stems from reactive aggression.
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Proactive aggression is planned aggression.
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Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.
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It's reactive because it takes place
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in seconds after the threat.
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And the thing that is really striking about humans
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compared to our close relatives is the great reduction
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in the degree of reactive aggression.
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So we are far less violent than chimps
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when prompted by some relatively minor threat
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within our own society.
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And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data
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but the study which is particularly striking
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is one of people living as hunter gatherers
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in a really upsetting kind of environment,
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namely people in Australia living in a place
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where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
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There's a lot of domestic violence.
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It's all a sort of a society that is as bad
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from the point of view of violence
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as an ordinary society can get.
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There's excellent data on the frequency
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with which people actually have physical violence
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and hit each other.
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And we can compare that to data
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from several different sites comparing,
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we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence.
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And the difference is between two and three orders
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The frequency with which chimps and bonobos hit each other,
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chase each other, charge each other, physically engage
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is somewhere between 500 and a thousand times
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higher than in humans.
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So there's something just amazing about us.
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And this has been recognized for centuries.
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Aristotle drew attention to the fact that we behave
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in many ways like domesticated animals
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because we're so unviolent.
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But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements
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of this 20th century?
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The First and Second World War and much else besides.
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And that is all proactive violence.
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All of that is gangs of people
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making deliberate decisions to go off and attack
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in circumstances which ideally the attackers
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are going to be able to make their kills
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and then get out of there.
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In other words, not face confrontation.
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That's the ordinary way that armies try and work.
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And there it turns out that humans and chimpanzees
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are in a very similar kind of state.
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That is to say, if you look at the rate of death
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from chimpanzees conducting proactive coalition violence,
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it's very similar in many ways to what you see in humans.
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So we're not down regulated with proactive violence.
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It's just this reactive violence
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that is strikingly reduced in humans.
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So chimpanzees also practiced kind of tribal warfare.
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Indeed they do, yeah.
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So this was discovered first in 1974.
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It was observed first in 1974,
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which was about the time that the first major study
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of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall
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had been going for something like five years
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during of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went.
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Until then, they'd been observed at a feeding station
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where Jane was luring them in to be observed
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by seeing bananas, which is great.
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She learned a lot, but she didn't learn
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what was happening at the edges of their ranges.
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So five years later, it became very obvious
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that there was hostile relationships between groups.
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And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form
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of the kind of hostile relationships
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that you see in many animals,
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which is a bunch of chimps in this case
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shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.
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But dramatically, in addition to that,
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there is a second kind of interaction.
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And that is when a party of chimpanzees
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makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory,
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silently, and then search for members of neighboring groups.
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And what they're searching for is a lone individual.
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So I've been with chimps when they've heard
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a lone individual under these circumstances,
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or what they think is a lone one,
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and they touch each other and look at each other
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and then charge forward, very excited.
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And then while they're charging,
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all of a sudden, the place where they heard a lone call
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erupts with a volley of calls.
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It was just one calling out of a larger party.
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And our chimps put on the brakes
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and scoot back for safety into their own territory.
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But if in fact they do find a lone individual
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and they can sneak up to them,
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then they make a deliberate attack.
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They're hunting, they're stalking and hunting,
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and then they impose terrible damage,
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which typically ends in a kill straight away,
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but it might end up with the victim so damaged
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that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.
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So that was a very dramatic discovery
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because it really made people realize for the first time
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that Conrad Lorentz had been wrong
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when in the 1960s, in his famous book, On Aggression,
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he said, warfare is restricted to humans.
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Animals do not deliberately kill each other.
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Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals
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that deliberately kill each other,
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and they always do so under essentially
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the same circumstances, which is
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when they feel safe doing it.
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So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.
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Animals feel safe when they have a coalition.
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A coalition that has overwhelming power
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compared to the victim.
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And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that,
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and hyenas will do that, and chimpanzees will do it,
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and humans do it too.
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Can they pull themselves into something
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that looks more like a symmetric war
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as opposed to an asymmetric one?
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So accidentally engaging on the lone individual
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and then getting themselves into trouble?
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Or are they more aggressive
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in avoiding these kinds of battles?
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No, they're very, very keen to avoid those kinds of battles,
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but occasionally, they can make a mistake.
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But so far, there have been no observations
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of anything like a battle
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in which both sides maintain themselves.
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And I think you can very confidently say
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that overwhelmingly what happens is
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that if they discover that there's several individuals
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on the other side, then both sides retreat.
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Nobody wants to get hurt.
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What they want to do is to hurt others.
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So you mentioned Jane Goodall.
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You've worked with her.
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What was it like working with her?
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What have you learned from her?
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Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person
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who she famously began her studies
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not as a qualified person in terms of education,
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but qualified only by enthusiasm and a considerable
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experience, even in her early 20s, with nature.
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So she's courageous in the sense
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of being able to take on challenges.
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The thing that is very impressive about her
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is her total fidelity to the observations,
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very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,
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waiting until they mount up
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and you've really got a confident picture,
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and tremendous attention to individuals.
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So that was an interesting problem from her point of view
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because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,
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this particular community of Kazakus,
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this particular community of Kazakela,
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about 60 individuals,
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so Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.
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She was there initially with her mother
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and then alone for two or three years
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of really intense observation
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and then slowly joined by other people.
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What she discovered was that there were obvious differences
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in individual personality
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and the difficulty about that was that
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when she reported this to the larger scientific world,
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initially her advisors at Cambridge,
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they said, well, we don't know how to handle that
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because you've got to treat all these animals
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as the same basically,
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because there is no research tradition
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of thinking about personalities.
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Well now, whatever it is, 60 years later,
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the study of personalities is a very rich part
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of the study of animal behavior.
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At any rate, the important point in terms of
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what was she like is that she stuck to her guns
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and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,
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describe in great detail the differences in personality
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among these individuals
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and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologists
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to think about what it means.
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So what is the process of observation like this like?
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Observing the personality but also observing in a way
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that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature
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or animal nature onto chimps,
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which is probably really tempting to project.
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So your understanding of the way the human world works,
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projecting that onto the chimp world.
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Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps
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because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior
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that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say.
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The process involves making very clear definitions
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of what a behavior is.
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Aggression can be defined in terms of a forceful hit,
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a bite, and so on,
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and writing down every time these things happen
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and then slowly totting up the numbers of times
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that they happen from individual A
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towards individuals B, C, D, and E,
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so that you build up a very concrete picture
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rather than interpreting at any point
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and stopping and saying,
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well, they seem to be rather aggressive.
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So the sort of formal system
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is that you build up a pattern of the relationships
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based on a description of the different types
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of interactions, the aggressive
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and the friendly interactions,
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and all of these are defined in concrete.
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And so from that, you extract a pattern of relationships.
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And the relationships can be defined as
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relatively friendly, relatively aggressive, competitive,
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based on the frequency of these types of interactions.
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And so one can talk in terms of individuals
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having a relationship which, on the scores of friendliness,
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is two standard deviations outside the mean.
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I mean, you know, it's...
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In which direction, sorry, both directions?
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Well, I mean, that would be, obviously,
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the friendly ones would be the ones
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who have exceptionally high rates
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of spending time close to each other,
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of touching each other in a gentle way,
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of grooming each other, and, by the way,
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finding that those things are correlated with each other.
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So it's possible to define a friendship
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with a capital F in a very systematic way,
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and to compare that between individuals,
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but also between communities of chimpanzees
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and between different species.
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So that, you know, we can say that in some species,
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individuals have friends, and others, they don't at all.
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What about just, because there's different personalities
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and because they're so fascinating,
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what about sort of falling in love
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or forming friendships with chimps, you know?
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Like really, you know, connecting with them as an observer?
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What role does that play?
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Because you're tracking these individuals
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that are full of life and intelligence
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for long periods of time.
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Plus, as a human, especially in those days for Jane,
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she's alone, observing it.
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It gets lonely as a human.
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I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human being,
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observing these other intelligent species.
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It's a very reasonable question,
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and of course, Jane, in those early years,
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I think she's willing now to talk about the fact
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that she regrets, to some extent, how close she became.
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And the problem is not just from the humans.
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The problem is from the chimpanzees as well,
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because they do things
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that are extremely affectionate, if you like.
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You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit
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to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.
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David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand,
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as if to say thank you.
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And then I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.
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Oh, it's almost like thank you
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and returning the affection by giving the fruit.
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If they did something like that.
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Yeah, no, it was a gentle squeeze.
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I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard,
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as occasionally has happened.
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Some chimps are aggressive to people,
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and others are friendly.
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And the ones that are friendly tend to be
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rather sympathetic characters,
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because they might be ones who are having problems
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in their own society.
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You know, so Joe Mio in Gombe used to come
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and sit next to me quite often,
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and he was having a hard time making it in that society,
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which I can describe to you in terms of the number
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of aggressive interactions, if you want, you know,
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but just to be informed about it.
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So all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.
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And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda
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for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress
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on all of the research students who come with us,
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that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall
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into that temptation.
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Now, you know, we heard a story of one person
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who did reach out and touch one of our chimps.
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It's a very, very bad idea.
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Not because the chimp is going to do anything violent
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at the time, but because if they learn that humans
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are as weak physically as we are compared to them,
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then they can take advantage of us.
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And that's what happened in Gombe.
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So after Jane had done the very obvious thing
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when you're first engaged in this game
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of allowing the infants to approach her
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and then tickling them and playing with them,
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some of those infants had the personality
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of wanting to take advantage of that knowledge later.
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And so, you know, you had an individual, Frodo,
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who was violent on a regular basis towards humans
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when he was an adult, and he was quite dangerous.
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I mean, he could easily have killed someone.
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In fact, he did kill one person.
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He killed a baby that he took from a mother,
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a human baby, that he took off her hip
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when he met her on the path.
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So it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species
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that are rather humanlike in the range of emotions
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they have, in the capacities they have,
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and even in the strength they have,
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they are in many ways stronger than humans.
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So you've got to be careful.
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So in the full range of friendliness and violence,
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the capacity for these very human things.
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Yes, I mean, it's very obvious with violence,
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as we talked about, that they will kill.
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They will kill not just strangers.
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They can kill other adults within their own group.
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They can kill babies that are strangers.
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They can kill babies in their own group.
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So, you know, this is a long lived individual.
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Obviously, these killings can't have very often
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because otherwise they'd all be dead.
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And we're now finding that they can live
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to 50 or 60 years in the wild
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at relatively low population density
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because they're big animals eating
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a rather specialized kind of food, the ripe fruits.
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So it doesn't happen all the time.
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With friendliness, they are very strong
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to support each other.
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They very much depend on their close friendships,
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which they express through physical contact
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and particularly through grooming.
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So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.
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I might present for grooming,
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a very common way of starting,
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turning their back or presenting an arm
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or something like that, and the other
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just riffles their fingers through the hair.
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And that's partly just soothing
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and it's partly looking for parasites,
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but mostly it's just soothing.
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And the point about this is it can go on
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for half an hour, it can go on for sometimes even an hour.
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So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.
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When did your interest in this one particular aspect
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of Chim come to be, which is violence?
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When did the study of violence in chimps
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become something you're deeply interested in?
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Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,
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I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall
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and was studying feeding behavior.
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But during that time, we were seeing,
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and I say we because there were half a dozen
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research students all in her camp,
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we were discovering that chimps
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had this capacity for violence.
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The first kill happened during that time,
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which was of an infant in a neighboring group.
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And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.
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And this was the start of my interest
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because it was such chilling evidence
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of an extraordinary similarity between chimps
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and humans. Now, at that time,
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we didn't know very much about how chimpanzees
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and humans were related.
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Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three
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big black hairy things that live in the African forests
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and eat fruits and leaves when they can't find fruits
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and walk on their knuckles.
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And they all look rather similar to each other.
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So they seem as though they're very similar
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so they seem as though those three species,
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chimps and gorillas and bonobos,
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should all be each other's closest relatives
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and humans are something rather separate.
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And so any of them would be of interest to us.
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Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true
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and that there's a special relationship
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between humans and chimpanzees.
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But at the time, even without knowing that,
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it was obvious that there was something very odd
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about chimpanzees because Jane had discovered
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they were making tools.
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She had seen that they were hunting meat.
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She had seen that they were sharing the meat
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She had seen that the societies were dominated politically
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by males, coalitions of males.
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All of these things, of course,
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resonate so closely with humans.
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And then it turns out that in contrast
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to conventional wisdom at the time,
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the chimpanzees were capable of hunting
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and killing members of neighboring groups.
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Well, at that point, the similarities
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between chimps and humans become less a matter
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of sort of sheer intellectual fascination
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than something that has a really deep meaning
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about our understanding of ourselves.
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I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans
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as a species apart from the rest of nature
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because we are so peculiar.
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But when it turns out that, as it turns out,
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one of our two closest relatives
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has got these features that we share
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and that one of the features is something
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that is the most horrendous,
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as well as fascinating, aspect of human behavior,
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then how can you resist just trying
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to find out what's going on?
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So I have to say this.
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I'm not sure if you're familiar with a man,
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but fans of this podcast are.
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So we're talking about chimps, we're talking about violence.
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My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan,
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is a big fan of those things.
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I'm a big fan of these topics.
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I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.
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So as you're saying, why do we find
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the exploration of violence
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and the relations between chimps so interesting?
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What can they teach us about ourselves?
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Until we had this information about chimpanzees,
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it was possible to believe that the psychology
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behind warfare was totally the result
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of some kind of recent cultural innovation.
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It had nothing to do with our biology.
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Or if you like, that it's got something to do
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with sin and God and the devil and that sort of thing.
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But what the chimps tell us after we think carefully
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about it is that it seems undoubtedly the case
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that our evolutionary psychology has given us
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the same kind of attitude towards violence
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as has occurred in chimpanzees and in both species.
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It has evolved because of its evolutionary significance.
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In other words, because it's been helpful
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to the individuals who have practiced it.
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And now we know that, as I mentioned,
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other species do this as well.
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In fact, wolves, which this is a really kind of
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ironical observation, Conrad Lorentz, who I mentioned
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had been the person who thought that human aggression
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in the form of killing members of our own species
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was unique to our species, he was a great fan of wolves.
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He studied wolves.
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And in captivity, he noted that wolves are very unlikely
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to harm each other in spats among members of the same group.
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What happens is that one of them will roll over
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and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park
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nowadays, and the other might put their jaws on the neck
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but will not bite.
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Okay, so now it turns out that if you study wolves
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in the wild, then neighboring packs often go hunting
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for each other, they are in fierce competition,
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and as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves
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is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.
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So it's a really serious business.
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The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern
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of understanding animals in which you don't have
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an instinct for violence, what you have is an instinct,
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if you like, to use violence adaptively.
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And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive,
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if the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be.
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So some chimpanzee communities are much more violent
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than others because of things like the frequency
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with which a large party of males is likely to meet
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a lone victim, and that's going to depend
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on the local ecology.
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But, you know, so the overall answer to the question
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of what do chimps teach us is that we have to take
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very seriously the notion that in humans,
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the tendency to make war is a consequence
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of a long term evolutionary adaptation
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and not just a military ideology
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or some sort of local patriarchal phenomenon.
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And of course, you know, a reading of history,
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a judicious reading of history fits that very easily
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because war is so commonplace.
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It's not an accident, so it's not a constraint.
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It's not an accident, so it's not a construction
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of human civilization.
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It's deeply within us, violence.
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So what's the difference between violence
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on the individual level versus group is,
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it seems like with chimps and with wolves,
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there's something about the dynamic of multiple
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chimps together that increase the chance of violence.
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Or is violence still fundamentally part of the individual?
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Like would an individual be as violent
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as they might be as part of a group?
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If we're talking about killing,
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then violence in the sense of killing
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is very much associated with a group.
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And the reason is that individuals don't benefit
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by getting into a fight
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in which they risk being hurt themselves.
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So it's only when you have overwhelming power
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that the temptation to try and kill another victim
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rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.
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The average number of chimpanzee males
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that attack a single male
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in something like 50 observations
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that have accumulated in the last 50 years
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from various different study sites
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is eight, eight to one.
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Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one,
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but that's getting risky.
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But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.
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I mean, basically you have one male on one foot,
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another male on another foot, another male on an arm,
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another male on another arm.
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Now you have an immobilized victim
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with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.
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And so they can then move in and tear out his thorax
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and tear off his testicles
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and twist an arm until it breaks
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and do this appalling damage with no weapons.
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What is the way in which they prefer to commit the violence?
link |
Is there something to be said
link |
about the actual process of it?
link |
Is there an artistry to it?
link |
So if you look at human warfare,
link |
there's different parts in history
link |
prefer different kind of approaches to violence.
link |
It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.
link |
But just the nature of violence itself,
link |
sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,
link |
is it basically the same?
link |
You improvise, you immobilize the victim,
link |
and they just rip off different parts
link |
of their body kind of thing?
link |
Yeah, you have to understand
link |
that these things are happening at high speed
link |
in thick vegetation, mostly,
link |
so that they have not been filmed carefully.
link |
We have a few little glimpses of them
link |
from one or two people like David Watts,
link |
who's got some great video,
link |
but we don't know enough to be able to say that.
link |
It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles
link |
that vary between communities, cultural styles,
link |
but it is possible.
link |
It is possible, and one thing that is striking
link |
is that the number of times that an individual victim
link |
has been killed immediately has been higher
link |
in Kibale forest in Uganda
link |
than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
link |
It's conceivable that's just chance.
link |
We don't have real numbers now, but what is this?
link |
I can't remember the exact numbers,
link |
but 10 versus 15 or something.
link |
So maybe they damaged to the point
link |
of expecting a death in one place
link |
and they just finished it off in the other,
link |
but most likely that sort of difference
link |
will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.
link |
You know, human beings are able to conceive
link |
of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.
link |
Is there any of that for chimps
link |
when they're thinking about violence?
link |
Is violence, like what is the nature
link |
of their conception of violence, do you think?
link |
Do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life
link |
or is it some kind of like optimization
link |
over the use of resources or something like that?
link |
I don't think it's, I can't think of any way
link |
to get an answer to the question
link |
of what they know about that.
link |
I think that the way to think about the motivation
link |
is rather like the motivation in sex.
link |
So when males are interested in having sex with a female,
link |
whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans,
link |
they don't think about the fact
link |
that what this is going to do is to lead to a baby, mostly.
link |
Mostly what they're thinking about is,
link |
I wanna get my end away.
link |
And I think that it's a similar kind of process
link |
What they are thinking about is,
link |
I wanna kill this individual.
link |
And it's hard to imagine that taking
link |
the other individual's perspective
link |
and thinking about what it means for them to die
link |
is gonna be an important part of that.
link |
In fact, there's reasons to think
link |
it should not be an important part of it
link |
because it might inhibit them
link |
and they don't want to be inhibited.
link |
The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.
link |
But I think it's interesting to think about
link |
this whole motivational question
link |
because it does produce this rather haunting thought
link |
that there has been selection
link |
in favor of enthusiasm about killing.
link |
And in our relatively gentle
link |
and deliberately moral society that we have today,
link |
it's very difficult for us to face the thought
link |
that in all of us,
link |
there might've been residue
link |
and more than that, sort of an active potential
link |
for that thought of really enjoying killing someone else.
link |
But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously
link |
by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true
link |
that the ordinary human male would be delighted
link |
to be part of a group that was killing someone.
link |
What you've got to do is to be in a position
link |
where you're regarding the victim
link |
as dangerous and thoroughly hostile.
link |
But the pure enjoyment of violence.
link |
There's, I don't know if you know this historian,
link |
Dan Carlin, he has a podcast.
link |
He has an episode, three, four hour episode
link |
that I recommend to others.
link |
It's quite haunting.
link |
But he takes us through an entire history.
link |
It's called painfotainment.
link |
The history of humans
link |
enjoying the murder of others in a large group.
link |
So like public executions were long part of human history.
link |
And there's something that for some reason,
link |
humans seem to have been drawn to just watching others die.
link |
And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.
link |
For example, he said if it was possible to televise,
link |
to stream online for example,
link |
the execution and the murder of somebody
link |
or even the torture of somebody,
link |
that a very large fraction of the population on earth
link |
would not be able to look away.
link |
They'd be drawn to that somehow.
link |
As a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.
link |
So you think that's part of us in there somewhere.
link |
That selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing
link |
and the enjoyment of observing
link |
those in our tribe doing the killing.
link |
Yes, I mean, and that word you produced at the end
link |
is critical I think.
link |
Because it would be a little bit weird I think
link |
to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people
link |
in your own tribe being killed.
link |
I don't think we're interested in violence
link |
for violence's sake that much.
link |
It's when you get these social boundaries set up.
link |
And in today's world, happily,
link |
we kind of are already one world.
link |
You have to dehumanize someone to get to the point
link |
where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe
link |
at some level, which is the whole human species.
link |
But in ancient times, that would not have been true.
link |
Because in ancient times,
link |
there are lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers
link |
in which the appearance of a stranger
link |
would lead to an immediate response of shooting on sight.
link |
Because what was human was the people
link |
that were in your society.
link |
And the other things that actually looked like us
link |
and were human in that sense, were not regarded as human.
link |
So there was a kind of automatic dehumanization
link |
of everybody that didn't speak our language
link |
or hadn't already somehow become recognized
link |
as sufficiently like us to escape
link |
the dehumanization contact.
link |
And so hopefully the story of human history
link |
is that tribalism fades away,
link |
that our dehumanization, the natural desire to dehumanize
link |
or tendency to dehumanize groups
link |
that are not within this tribe, decreases over time.
link |
And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.
link |
Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective.
link |
And the great sort of concern, of course,
link |
is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts
link |
and then dehumanization happens
link |
and then violence is released.
link |
As Hannah Arendt says,
link |
there currently is no known alternative to war
link |
as a means of settling really important conflicts.
link |
So if we look at the big picture,
link |
what role has violence or do you think violence
link |
has played in the evolution of Homo sapiens?
link |
So we are quite an intelligent, quite a beautiful,
link |
particular little branch on the evolutionary tree.
link |
What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?
link |
Well, I think that violence was responsible
link |
for creating your Homo sapiens.
link |
And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.
link |
So nowadays people begin the concept
link |
of what Homo sapiens is by thinking about features
link |
that are very obviously different
link |
from all of the other species of Homo.
link |
And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,
link |
our relatively small face, these are characteristics
link |
which are developed in a relatively modern way
link |
by about 170,000 years ago.
link |
So that's one of the earliest skulls in Africa
link |
that really captures that.
link |
But it has been argued that that is an episode
link |
in a process that has been started substantially earlier.
link |
And there's no doubt that that's true.
link |
Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing
link |
pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there.
link |
And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,
link |
315 literally is the time, the best estimate of a date
link |
for a series of bones from Morocco
link |
that have been dated three or four years ago at that time
link |
and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.
link |
Now at that point, they are only beginning
link |
the trend of sapionization.
link |
And that trend consists basically of gracilization
link |
of making our ancestors less robust,
link |
shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,
link |
narrower face, thinner cranium,
link |
all these things that are associated with reduced violence.
link |
Okay, so that's saying what,
link |
that's Homo sapiens beginning.
link |
So it began sometime three to 400,000 years ago
link |
because by 315,000 years ago,
link |
you've already got something recognizable.
link |
So you're more on that side of things
link |
that those are this gradual process.
link |
It's not 150, 170,000 years ago.
link |
It started like 400,000 years ago and it's just.
link |
It started three to 400,000 years ago
link |
and if you look at 170, it's got even more like us.
link |
And then if you look at 100, it's got more like us again.
link |
And if you look at 50, it's more like us again.
link |
It's all the way, it's just getting
link |
more and more like the moderns.
link |
So the question is what happened
link |
between three and 400,000 years ago
link |
to produce Homo sapiens?
link |
And I think we have a pretty good answer now.
link |
And the answer comes from violence.
link |
And the story begins by focusing on this question.
link |
Why is it that in the human species,
link |
we are unique among all primates
link |
in not having an alpha male in any group
link |
in the sense that what we don't have
link |
is an alpha male who personally beats up every other male?
link |
And the answer that has been portrayed most richly
link |
by Christopher Boehm and whose work I've elaborated on
link |
is that only in humans do you have a system
link |
by which any male who tries to bully others
link |
and become the alpha equivalent to an alpha gorilla
link |
or an alpha chimpanzee or an alpha bonobo
link |
or an alpha baboon or anything like that,
link |
any male who tries to do that in humans
link |
gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.
link |
That's a really good picture of human society, yes.
link |
Okay, and that's the way all our societies work now.
link |
Because individuals try and be alpha
link |
and then they get taken out.
link |
Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves
link |
as beta males, but yes, I suppose that's what democracy is.
link |
And that's the way we think of ourselves.
link |
I suppose that's what democracy is.
link |
Okay, so at some point alpha males get taken out.
link |
Well, what alpha males are are males
link |
who respond with high reactive violence
link |
to any challenge to their status.
link |
You see it all the time in primates.
link |
Some beta male thinks he's getting strong
link |
and maturing in wisdom and so on,
link |
and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.
link |
And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.
link |
Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes
link |
and then take an opportunity to attack him.
link |
All of these primates have got a high tendency
link |
for reactive aggression,
link |
and that enables the possibility of alpha males.
link |
We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.
link |
And the question is, when did that reduction happen?
link |
Well, cut to the famous experiments
link |
by the Russian biologist Dmitry Belyaev,
link |
who tried domesticating wild animals.
link |
When you domesticate wild animals,
link |
what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression.
link |
You are selecting those individuals to breed
link |
who are most willing to be approached by a human
link |
or by another member of their own species
link |
and are least likely to erupt in reactive aggression.
link |
And you only have to do that for a few generations
link |
to discover that there are changes in the skull.
link |
And those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth,
link |
the males become increasingly female like,
link |
and reduced brain size.
link |
Well, the changes that are characteristic
link |
of domesticated animals in general
link |
compared to wild animals are all found in Homo sapiens
link |
compared to our early ancestors.
link |
So it's a very strong signal
link |
that when we first see Homo sapiens,
link |
what we're seeing is that there's a lot of change
link |
in the shape of the animal.
link |
What we're seeing is evidence
link |
of a reduction in reactive aggression.
link |
And that suggests that what's happening with Homo sapiens
link |
is that that is the point
link |
at which there is selection against the alpha males.
link |
And therefore, the way in which the selection happened
link |
would have been the way it happens today.
link |
The beta males take them out.
link |
So I think that Homo sapiens is a species
link |
characterized by the suppression of reactive aggression
link |
as a kind of incidental consequence
link |
of the suppression of the alpha male.
link |
And the story of our species
link |
is the story of how the beta males took charge
link |
and have been responsible for the generation
link |
of a new kind of human.
link |
And incidentally, for imposing on the society
link |
a new set of values.
link |
Because when those beta males discovered
link |
that they could take out the previous alpha male
link |
and continue to do so,
link |
because in every generation there'll always be some male
link |
who says, maybe I'll become the alpha male.
link |
So they just keep chopping them down.
link |
In discovering that, they also obviously discovered
link |
that they could kill anybody in the group.
link |
Females, young males, anybody who didn't follow their values.
link |
And so this story is one in which the males of our species,
link |
and these would be the breeding males,
link |
have been able to impose their values on everybody else.
link |
And there is two kind of values.
link |
There's one kind of value is things
link |
that are good for the group.
link |
Like, thou shalt not murder.
link |
And the other kind of value is things
link |
that are good for the males.
link |
Such as, hey, guess what?
link |
When good food comes in, males get it first.
link |
I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals
link |
could outcompete the others.
link |
Do you have a sense of why,
link |
or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals
link |
and all the other early humans.
link |
Why did Homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish
link |
and all the other ones,
link |
all the other branches of evolution died out?
link |
Or got murdered out.
link |
I mean, nowadays, when Homo sapiens meets Homo sapiens,
link |
and we don't know each other initially,
link |
then conflict breaks out
link |
and the more militarily able group wins.
link |
We've seen that everywhere throughout the age
link |
of exploration and throughout history.
link |
So I'm rather surprised.
link |
The conventional wisdom that you see nowadays
link |
in contemporary anthropology is very reluctant
link |
to point to success in warfare
link |
as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals
link |
within about 3000 years of the sapiens.
link |
Coming into Europe 43,000 years ago.
link |
And people are much more inclined to say,
link |
well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,
link |
so they just couldn't survive the demographic sort of sweep
link |
or the disease came in.
link |
And maybe those things might've been important,
link |
but far and away, the most obvious possibility
link |
is that sapiens were just,
link |
sapiens were just powerful.
link |
They had, everyone agrees they had larger groups.
link |
They had better weapons.
link |
They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows,
link |
to judge from the little microlith bits of flake,
link |
which the Neanderthals didn't.
link |
Nowadays, there's evidence of interbreeding,
link |
quite extensive interbreeding
link |
between sapiens and Neanderthals,
link |
as well as with some other groups.
link |
And sometimes people say, well, you know,
link |
so they loved each other.
link |
They made love, not war.
link |
I think they made love and war.
link |
And it wouldn't necessarily mean too loving.
link |
I mean, if you just follow through
link |
from typical ethnographies nowadays
link |
of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,
link |
they didn't know each other,
link |
then you can imagine that Neanderthal females
link |
would essentially be captured
link |
and taken into sapiens groups.
link |
Maybe you can comment on this cautiously and eloquently.
link |
What's the role of sexual violence in human evolution?
link |
Because you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.
link |
You've also mentioned that some of these rules
link |
are defined by the male side of the society.
link |
What's the role of sexual violence in this story?
link |
I think you've got to distinguish
link |
between groups and within groups.
link |
And I think the world has been slowly waking up
link |
over the last several decades
link |
to the fact that sexual violence is routine in war.
link |
And that to me says that it's just another example
link |
of power corrupts because when frustrated,
link |
scared, elated soldiers come upon females
link |
in a group that has been essential dehumanization of,
link |
then they get carried away by opportunity.
link |
It is not always possible to argue
link |
that this is adaptive nowadays
link |
because you get lots and lots of stories
link |
of women being abused to the point of being killed.
link |
She'll be gang raped and then killed.
link |
There's lots of terrible cases of that reported
link |
from all sorts of different wars.
link |
But you can see that that could build on a pattern
link |
that would have been adaptive
link |
if happening under so much less extreme circumstances.
link |
The war is very extreme nowadays
link |
in the sense that you get battles
link |
in which people are sent by a military hierarchy
link |
into a war situation in which they do not feel
link |
what hunters and gatherers would typically have felt,
link |
which would have been that if we attack,
link |
we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
link |
Nowadays, you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is
link |
and there's a very high chance you will be killed.
link |
And that's totally unnatural
link |
and a novel evolutionary experience, I think.
link |
Then there's sexual coercion within groups.
link |
And so that takes various kinds of forms.
link |
But nowadays, of course,
link |
I think people recognize increasingly
link |
that the principle form of sexual intimidation
link |
and rape occurs within relationships.
link |
It's not stranger rape
link |
that is really statistically important.
link |
There's much more what happens behind the walls
link |
of a bedroom where people have been living for some time.
link |
And just two sort of thoughts and observations about this.
link |
One is that it may seem odd
link |
that males should think it a good idea, as it were,
link |
to impose themselves sexually on someone
link |
with whom they have a relationship.
link |
But what they're doing is intimidating someone
link |
in a relationship in which the relative power
link |
in the relationship has continuing significance
link |
And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.
link |
It's to do with domestic relationships,
link |
it's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.
link |
It's power dynamics and the sexual aggression
link |
is one of the tools to regain power,
link |
gain power, gain more power and that kind of thing.
link |
And in that respect, it's worth noting
link |
that although this wasn't appreciated for some time,
link |
it's emerging that in a bunch of primates
link |
you have somewhat similar, somewhat parallel
link |
kinds of sexual intimidation
link |
where males will target particular females,
link |
even in a group in which the norm is for females
link |
to mate with multiple males.
link |
But each male will target a particular female
link |
and the more he is aggressive towards her,
link |
then the more she conforms to his wishes
link |
when he wants to mate.
link |
So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation.
link |
So there's that aspect.
link |
The other aspect I would just note is that
link |
males get away with a lot compared to females
link |
in any kind of intersexual conflict.
link |
So the punishment, here's one example of this,
link |
the punishment for a husband killing a wife
link |
has always been much less than the punishment
link |
for a wife killing a husband.
link |
And you see similar sorts of things
link |
in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.
link |
I bring this up in the context of males
link |
sexually intimidating their partners,
link |
be it wives or whoever,
link |
because it's a reminder that
link |
it's basically a patriarchal world that we have come from.
link |
A patriarchal world in which male alliances
link |
tend to support males and take advantage of the fact
link |
that they have political power at the expense of females.
link |
And I would say that that all goes back
link |
to what happened three to 400,000 years ago
link |
when the beta males took charge
link |
and they started imposing their own norms
link |
on society as a whole and they've continued to do so.
link |
And we now look at ourselves and Jordan Peterson says,
link |
we are not a patriarchal society.
link |
Well, it's true that the laws try and make it even handed
link |
nowadays between males and females,
link |
but obviously we are patriarchal de facto
link |
because society still in many ways supports men
link |
better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.
link |
So beta male patriarchal.
link |
If we're looking at the evolutionary history.
link |
Okay, is there, maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,
link |
is there, so he's a psychologist, right?
link |
And what part of the picture do you think he's missing
link |
in analyzing the human relations?
link |
Like what does he need to understand
link |
about our origins in violence
link |
and the way that society has been constructed?
link |
Or I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives,
link |
but I just think that what he's doing
link |
in that particular example is focusing
link |
on the legalistic position.
link |
And that's great that you do not find formal patriarchy
link |
in the law, anything like to the extent
link |
that you could find it 100 years ago and so on.
link |
Women have got the vote now, hooray.
link |
But it took a long time for women to get the vote.
link |
And it remains the case that women suffer
link |
in various kinds of ways.
link |
I mean, a woman who has lots of sexual partners
link |
is treated much more rudely than a male
link |
who has lots of sexual partners.
link |
There are all sorts of informal ways
link |
in which it's rougher being a woman than it is a man.
link |
And if we look at the surface layer of the law,
link |
we may miss the deeper human nature,
link |
like the origins of our human nature that still operates
link |
no matter what the law says.
link |
Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward
link |
because it includes some unpleasant features
link |
that when we sit back and reflect about them,
link |
we would like them to go away.
link |
But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned
link |
to try and have sex with at least one woman,
link |
and you know, often lots of women.
link |
And so men are constantly putting pressure on women
link |
in ways that women find unpleasant.
link |
And if men sit back and reflect about it,
link |
they think, yeah, we shouldn't do this.
link |
But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.
link |
So maybe looking at particular humans in history,
link |
let's talk about Genghis Khan.
link |
So is this particular human who was one
link |
of the most famous examples of large scale violence,
link |
is he a deep representative of human nature
link |
or is he a rare exception?
link |
Well, I think that it's easy to imagine
link |
that most men could have become Genghis Khan.
link |
It's possible that he had a particular streak
link |
You know, it's striking that by the time you become
link |
immensely powerful, then your willingness
link |
to do terrible things for the interest of yourself
link |
and your group becomes very high.
link |
Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people have histories
link |
in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.
link |
But by the time they are big leaders,
link |
they are really psychopathic in the sense
link |
that they do not follow the ordinary morality
link |
of considering the harm that they are doing
link |
What kind of experiment would we need to discover
link |
whether or not anybody could fall into this position?
link |
I don't know, but Lord Acton's famous dictum
link |
was power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
link |
And then the point that people often forget
link |
is the next sentence that he said,
link |
which is, great men are almost always bad men.
link |
And that is right.
link |
It is very difficult to find a great man in history
link |
who was not responsible for terrible things.
link |
I think there's some aspect of it that it's not just power.
link |
I think men who have been the most destructive
link |
in human history are not psychopathic completely.
link |
They have convinced themselves of an idea.
link |
It's like the idea is psychopathic.
link |
Stalin, for example, Hitler's a complicated one.
link |
I think he was legitimately insane.
link |
But I think Stalin has convinced himself that he's doing good.
link |
So the idea of communism is the thing that's psychopathic
link |
in his mind, like it bred, you construct the worldview
link |
in which the violence is justified, the cruelty is justified.
link |
So there, in that sense, first of all,
link |
you can construct experiments, unethical experiments
link |
that could test this, but in that sense,
link |
anybody else could have been in Stalin's position.
link |
It's the idea that could overtake the mind
link |
of a human being and in so doing justify cruel acts.
link |
And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans,
link |
is the ability to hold ideas in our minds
link |
and share those ideas and use those ideas
link |
to convince ourselves that proactive violence
link |
on a large scale is a good idea.
link |
So that, I don't know if you have a comment.
link |
I suppose so, I mean, but it seems to me
link |
what really motivated Stalin was not so much communism
link |
as the retention of power.
link |
So once he became leader and in the process
link |
of becoming leader, he was absolutely desperate
link |
to get rid of anybody who was a challenger.
link |
He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,
link |
even on his side, who might possibly be showing
link |
a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.
link |
So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,
link |
Kirov was a great communist, Trotsky was a great communist,
link |
all his rivals, and I mean, when he went into the towns
link |
and murdered people by the tenths of thousands.
link |
They were all communists.
link |
A lot of them were explicit communists, that's right.
link |
But what he was worried about was that they were rivals
link |
I suppose the thought is I am the best person
link |
to bring about a global sort of embrace of communism
link |
and others are not, and so we have to get rid
link |
Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here,
link |
but I mean, maybe you know enough about Stalin to really.
link |
Yes, well, so the point I'm making, I do quite a bit,
link |
is from my understanding and sense, of course,
link |
we can't know for sure, is he believed in communism.
link |
This wasn't purely a game of power.
link |
Now, he got drunk with power pretty quickly,
link |
but he really believed for, I believe his whole life,
link |
that communism is good for the world.
link |
And that, I don't know what role that belief plays
link |
with the more natural human desire for power.
link |
I don't know, but it just seems like.
link |
As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists
link |
Hmm, but it's not, that calculus doesn't work that way.
link |
There's humans who are communists
link |
and then there's the idea of communism.
link |
So for him, in his delusional world view,
link |
killing a few people is worth the final result
link |
of bringing communism to the whole world.
link |
But it was more than that, again, because I mean,
link |
he really wanted power for the Soviet Union
link |
and so surely the reason that he orchestrated
link |
the export of wheat from Ukraine
link |
and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation
link |
was because he wanted to sell it on the market
link |
in order to be able to build up
link |
the power of the Soviet Union.
link |
Alternative view of communism might have been,
link |
well, let's just make sure everybody survives
link |
and make sure everybody has enough to eat
link |
and we'll all be mutually supportive in a communal network.
link |
But no, but he wanted the power for the country.
link |
Well, I guess exactly, so that it's not even communism,
link |
the set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that,
link |
I guess what I'm saying is it's not purely power
link |
for the individual, it's power for a vision
link |
for this great nation, the Soviet Union.
link |
And it's similar with Hitler, the guy believed
link |
that this is a great nation, Germany,
link |
and it's a nation that's been wronged throughout history
link |
and needs to be righted.
link |
And there's some dance between the individual human
link |
Yes, absolutely, yes, and so just like chimpanzees,
link |
we are fiercely tribal and the tribalism resides
link |
particularly in male psychology and it's very scary
link |
because once you assemble a set of males
link |
who share a tribal identity, then they have power
link |
that they can exert with very little concern
link |
about what they're doing to damage other people.
link |
Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power,
link |
we talked about the corrupting nature of power,
link |
do you think that's a manifestation
link |
of those early origins of violence?
link |
What's the connection of this desire for power
link |
and our proclivity for violence?
link |
You know, what we're talking about is tribal power, right?
link |
Power on behalf of a group.
link |
And yeah, that seems to me to go right back
link |
to a deep evolutionary origin
link |
because you see essentially the same thing
link |
in a whole bunch of animals.
link |
That most of the sort of cognitively complex animals
link |
live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries.
link |
And so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed
link |
in almost all of the primates.
link |
The difference between us and, you know,
link |
chimpanzees and humans on the one hand
link |
and other primates on the other
link |
is that we kill and they don't.
link |
And the reason they don't is because they never meet
link |
in the context where there are massive imbalances of power.
link |
So two groups of baboons, you know,
link |
there's 30 on this side and 50 on this side, fine.
link |
Nobody's gonna try and kill anybody else
link |
because the serious risks involved.
link |
But nevertheless, they are tribal.
link |
So, you know, they will have fairly intense
link |
intergroup interactions in which everybody knows
link |
who is on whose side.
link |
And the longterm consequences of winning those battles,
link |
nonlethal battles, is that the dominance get access
link |
to larger areas of land, more safety and so on,
link |
with chances are better record
link |
of reproductive success subsequently.
link |
Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective,
link |
is a feature or a bug?
link |
Our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?
link |
Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy,
link |
meaning like it would be more beneficial.
link |
Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes
link |
from an evolutionary perspective?
link |
Yeah, yeah, but, but, but.
link |
What does it mean?
link |
What does a bug mean?
link |
Well, yeah, like where's evolution going anyway?
link |
It's beneficial from, you know,
link |
it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved
link |
by natural selection to benefit the individuals who did it.
link |
But if by bug you mean something that,
link |
from the point of view of the species,
link |
it would be great if you could just wipe this out
link |
because the species would somehow do better as a result.
link |
Then yes, but then, you know, males are a bug.
link |
Come on now, there's some nice things to males,
link |
speaking as a male.
link |
The fact that there are some nice things to males
link |
doesn't mean that they're not bugs.
link |
You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs,
link |
but it would be much better for the species as a whole
link |
not to have to have males who impose this violence
link |
on the species as a whole.
link |
As somebody who practiced controlled violence
link |
and doing a lot of martial arts, yeah, I'm not sure.
link |
It does seem kind of fun to have this kind
link |
of controlled violence, also sports.
link |
Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general,
link |
I guess that's the deeper question.
link |
Don't you think there's some value to conflict
link |
for the improvement of society, for progress?
link |
That this tension between tribes,
link |
isn't this like a experiment,
link |
a continued experiment we conduct with each other
link |
to figure out what is a better world to build?
link |
Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas
link |
to go to war with each other.
link |
It's like the United States with the 50 states
link |
and it's the laboratory of ideas.
link |
Don't you think that is, again, feature versus bug?
link |
This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand,
link |
is actually ultimately progressive,
link |
productive for a better world.
link |
Well, what do you mean by conflict?
link |
I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of
link |
people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.
link |
And so their ideas are in conflict.
link |
They can sit down on a log and chat about it
link |
and then decide, okay, you're right,
link |
or I'm wrong or whatever.
link |
But if by conflict, you mean a great idea
link |
to build a nuclear bomb and set that off,
link |
then no, I don't see why it's a good idea
link |
to have all this violence.
link |
Yeah, there's, I wonder, I mean, it's not a good idea,
link |
but I wonder if human history would evolve
link |
the way it did without the violence.
link |
Oh, I'm sure you're right.
link |
Probably humans would not have evolved
link |
in the sense that we have.
link |
But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution
link |
will continue in the way it has.
link |
So, there's all sorts of indications
link |
that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.
link |
And this is made famous in Steven Pinker's book,
link |
but others have written about it too,
link |
that the frequency of death from violence
link |
in every country you look at,
link |
has been declining, that's just great.
link |
And so, you know, the amazing thing about this
link |
is that even when you take the deaths
link |
due to the First World War and the Second World War,
link |
the 20th century appears to have been statistically,
link |
meaning rates of death per individual,
link |
the least violent in history.
link |
So, we haven't got very far down the course
link |
to nonviolence, but we've got a long way to go.
link |
But I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it.
link |
I think it's ridiculous, frankly, excuse my frankness,
link |
to say that violence is a good thing.
link |
I think that it would be a wonderful concept
link |
if we could evolve somehow to a world
link |
3,000 years from now,
link |
where violence is really regarded as simply appalling,
link |
and that they look back on our time
link |
and can't believe what we were doing.
link |
Yeah, but of course,
link |
violence takes a lot of different shapes.
link |
As we start to think deeper and deeper
link |
about living beings on Earth,
link |
for example, the violence we commit
link |
and the torture we commit to animals,
link |
and then perhaps down the line,
link |
as we talked offline about with robots,
link |
and that kind of thing.
link |
So there's just so many ways to commit violence to others.
link |
And some people now talk about violence
link |
in the space of ideas, which of course, to me at least,
link |
is a bit of a silly notion relative
link |
to use that same V word for the space of ideas
link |
versus actual physical violence.
link |
But it may be that a long time from now,
link |
we see that even violence in the space of ideas
link |
is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.
link |
And so it is interesting where this is headed.
link |
And I think you're absolutely right.
link |
A world, a nonviolent world, does seem like a better world.
link |
I wonder if the constraints on resources
link |
somehow make that world more and more difficult,
link |
especially as we run out of resources.
link |
Well, it's got to be very, very different
link |
from what we're doing nowadays.
link |
And it's unimaginably different.
link |
If we could imagine it,
link |
then maybe we could work towards it.
link |
At the moment, nobody knows how to work towards it.
link |
Well, that's kind of the stories of humans
link |
is we don't really know the future.
link |
We're trying to ad hoc kind of develop it as we go
link |
and sometimes get into trouble.
link |
That's the violence.
link |
But George Orwell's vision in 1984
link |
was of two or three world powers each so powerful
link |
that nobody could destroy the other.
link |
But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship
link |
among heavily armed world powers
link |
just does not seem as though it's reasonable at all.
link |
That is to say, we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world
link |
dominated by a few big ones,
link |
all with arms pointing at each other.
link |
And the notion that we could just carry on
link |
having peace talks and making sure that these arms
link |
don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration
link |
seems incredibly optimistic.
link |
Some kind of major change has to happen whereby,
link |
and some people would like to see all the weapons go.
link |
I'm a member of that sort of group
link |
that tries to see that happen.
link |
It's going to be very difficult to see it happen.
link |
Another kind of concept is the nations themselves
link |
will dissolve and will become one government.
link |
That itself is a terrifying vision
link |
because the capacity for abuse by a single world power
link |
would be so problematic.
link |
And in addition, how do you get there
link |
without a war in the first place?
link |
So at the moment, we have no reasonable kind of future
link |
in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.
link |
It's just that we haven't yet to find it.
link |
And a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space
link |
argue that you can create decentralized societies
link |
if you take away the power from states
link |
to define the monetary system.
link |
So they argue like if you make the monetary system
link |
such that it's disjoint from the control
link |
of any one individual, any one government,
link |
then that might be a way to form
link |
sort of ad hoc decentralized societies.
link |
They just pop up all over the place.
link |
That's a really interesting technological solution
link |
to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.
link |
And it may well be that the future will emerge
link |
out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.
link |
Is it nevertheless surprising to you
link |
that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?
link |
So the mutually assured destruction
link |
that we've had for many decades
link |
from somebody who studies violence,
link |
how does that make sense to you?
link |
Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense
link |
that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident
link |
yet has been quite remarkable.
link |
Yeah, because all the accounts are
link |
that we've come very close to having very serious accidents
link |
where people on either side have misread intentions
link |
or apparent launches and so on.
link |
So yes, I think it is remarkable.
link |
There is a nasty generalization that can be made
link |
that the longer that powerful states go without having wars
link |
than the worst the war is afterwards.
link |
And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense
link |
because basically what's happening with these tribal groups
link |
that the nations are at the moment
link |
is that after a big war like the Second World War,
link |
they establish new kinds of dominance relationships.
link |
And then during the periods of peace,
link |
what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships
link |
change because some nations become poorer,
link |
some become richer,
link |
some become more militarily powerful and so on.
link |
Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand.
link |
So right now, China emerged from the war
link |
as a relatively low status state and is now high status.
link |
So if this were chimpanzees, what would happen
link |
is that you would predict a conflict
link |
because you need to have a readjustment
link |
of the formal dominance relationships
link |
to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships
link |
recognized by the economy and the military.
link |
So the longer that you have of a period of peace
link |
following a war, then the more these tensions
link |
of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.
link |
And the longer they take to occur,
link |
then the more challenging are gonna be the conflicts.
link |
That's a terrifying view
link |
because we've been out of conflict for quite a bit.
link |
That's right. Maybe it's building up.
link |
So it's a scary view.
link |
But on the other hand, things have changed hugely
link |
with the advent of nuclear weapons
link |
because at least that conforms to this psychology
link |
that is very clear in other animals,
link |
which is you don't want to get into a fight
link |
if you are going to get hurt.
link |
So that's the whole principle of MAD,
link |
Mutual Assured Destruction.
link |
And it's doubtless been why powerful nations
link |
like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons
link |
So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches,
link |
then maybe the fact of MAD does fit into human psychology
link |
in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions
link |
without using them.
link |
But we haven't yet really faced that challenge.
link |
I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed
link |
because of the poor economy,
link |
but with China desperate to take back Taiwan
link |
and America shifting its focus on the Pacific,
link |
the potential for something going wrong
link |
is clearly very high.
link |
So what's the hopeful case that you can make
link |
for a long term surviving and thriving human civilization
link |
given all the dangers that we face?
link |
Well, I can't really exactly make one.
link |
I would just say that,
link |
we're talking about the dangers,
link |
obviously the dangers are there.
link |
But what I would sort of think about
link |
is the notion that surprises come from all sorts
link |
of different directions.
link |
And I mean, you work in robotics
link |
and I can well imagine that you have a lot of experience
link |
and imagine that there will be advances in robotics
link |
that in some way I can't even conceive
link |
will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.
link |
Something about by the time chips have been planted
link |
in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information
link |
in a way that we never did before,
link |
will this change the nature of human existence
link |
in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?
link |
So remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic,
link |
the beauty of what it means to be human.
link |
So like still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life,
link |
the full complexity of life.
link |
Cause you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill
link |
and then they go to sleep, right?
link |
You still want life to be amazing, exciting, interesting.
link |
And so that's where you have to find the balance.
link |
Well, it's, yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff.
link |
And so how it's gonna work out, totally unclear.
link |
I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing.
link |
I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.
link |
I think you really need to get rid of males
link |
cause males are the source of a major problem,
link |
which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.
link |
But you don't think the males are also source of beauty
link |
No, I mean, I don't have anything against males
link |
as individuals and that sort of thing.
link |
And males have clearly done a lot.
link |
I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative
link |
and what they've done in art and music has been wonderful
link |
and that sort of thing.
link |
On the other hand,
link |
I'm not sure there's anything particularly special.
link |
And I think that probably females could do the same thing
link |
just as well when given the chance.
link |
Yes, including the dark stuff.
link |
I mean, a partial part of me is not understanding the,
link |
so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women,
link |
but I tend to believe both men and women,
link |
if you look out into the future, can be destructive,
link |
can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.
link |
So if you move males from the picture,
link |
which are historically connected to this evolution
link |
that we've been talking about, that women are gonna fill
link |
that role quite nicely.
link |
And then it'll be just the same kind of process.
link |
Not the same, but it'll be new and interesting.
link |
There's a sense that the will to power, craving power,
link |
committing violence is somehow coupled
link |
with all of the things that are beautiful about life.
link |
That if you remove conflict completely,
link |
if you remove all of the evil in the world,
link |
it seems like you're going to,
link |
you're not going to have a stable place
link |
for the beauty, for the goodness.
link |
Like there's always has to be a dragon to fight for the way.
link |
If you look at human history, now you can say,
link |
the reason I'm nervous about a sort of utopia
link |
where everything is great is every time you look
link |
through human history when utopia has been chased,
link |
you run into a lot of trouble or again,
link |
sneaks into this evil, this craving for power.
link |
Now you could say that's a male problem,
link |
but I just think it's a human problem.
link |
And it's not even a human problem, it's a chimp problem too.
link |
It's life on earth problem,
link |
intelligent life on earth problem.
link |
So like it's better to not necessarily get rid
link |
of the sources of the darker sides of human nature,
link |
but more create mechanisms that the kindness,
link |
the goodness as the goodness paradox, your book,
link |
that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.
link |
Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia
link |
if you got rid of the males.
link |
And certainly females are capable of conflict.
link |
I just think it's a gamble worth taking
link |
if you could actually do it.
link |
You can certainly find females in history
link |
who've done unpleasant things, but nevertheless,
link |
we have a very strong evolutionary theory
link |
which explains why males benefit more
link |
by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.
link |
And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict,
link |
then it would reduce it to get rid of males.
link |
Now I understand this is a fantasy,
link |
and I think it's a fantasy that people would be able
link |
to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology
link |
is getting to the point where it's quite likely
link |
that human females could breed without the use of males.
link |
And so there would be a sort of a potential dynamic
link |
if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.
link |
It's a really interesting thought experiment.
link |
I will agree with you that if given two buttons,
link |
one is get rid of all women,
link |
and the other button is get rid of all men,
link |
realizing that I have a stake in this choice,
link |
you're probably getting rid of all men
link |
if I wanted to preserve earth
link |
and the richness of life on earth,
link |
I would probably get rid of all men.
link |
I don't think you have a stake in it.
link |
You know, I mean, you're saying that because you're a man.
link |
But I don't see why being a man should make you
link |
any more interested in having a male future for the world
link |
than a female future.
link |
You know, you've got just as many ancestors
link |
who were male as were female.
link |
Well, my problem is I'll have to die.
link |
Well, that's gonna happen anyway.
link |
I know, but like, I prefer to die tomorrow, not today.
link |
You know, I prefer to hit the snooze button
link |
on the whole mortality thing, but it's interesting.
link |
But this is not suggesting that males have to die
link |
in order to make room for females.
link |
It's just, you know, all you have to do is just say,
link |
don't let's have any more males born.
link |
Of course, you know, the difficulty is that
link |
because we're tribal, you know, some country somewhere
link |
would say, well, we're not gonna do that.
link |
And then guess what?
link |
They'd take over, you know, because they're male.
link |
So that's why it's impossible to imagine actually happening.
link |
You know what, I'm gonna take that
link |
and actually think about it.
link |
I don't know, I'm uncomfortable.
link |
There's a certain kind of woke culture
link |
that I've been kind of uncomfortable with
link |
because it's not women necessarily.
link |
It's more just, there's a lot of bullying I see.
link |
There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness
link |
towards others that's created by that culture.
link |
So, but you're speaking about something else.
link |
You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world
link |
and looking at the basics of our human nature
link |
and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens
link |
and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature
link |
if we get rid of them will make for a better world.
link |
It's an interesting thought experiment worth thinking about.
link |
But it is only a thought experiment.
link |
I mean, you know, it's got no practical meaning right now.
link |
And I take your point that, you know,
link |
males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways
link |
because the balance of social power
link |
is moving against,
link |
I mean, you know, quite rightly
link |
and in a strong sense, of course,
link |
against all the nasty things that males do.
link |
But what people sometimes fail to remember
link |
is that life is very hard for males
link |
who don't have the power,
link |
who don't have money,
link |
who don't have access to women.
link |
And, you know, I'm sympathetic to incels.
link |
I'm not sympathetic to them using violence
link |
to solve their problems.
link |
But I am very sympathetic to the fact that
link |
it's not easy simply to be told by
link |
well off, feminist, middle class people
link |
that you shouldn't behave like this
link |
or you shouldn't feel like this because you do.
link |
Yes, it's who you are.
link |
I mean, in general, just empathy and kindness,
link |
I believe will be the thing that builds a better world.
link |
And that's practiced in different ways
link |
from different backgrounds.
link |
But ultimately, you should listen to others
link |
and empathize with the experience of others
link |
and put more love out there in the world.
link |
Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict,
link |
and reduce that whole psychological experience
link |
of being powerless in this world,
link |
powerless to become the best version of yourself.
link |
And that, you know.
link |
Well, no one's gonna disagree
link |
with all those fine sentiments, right?
link |
But that's an actionable thing
link |
is actually practice empathy, right?
link |
Like saying that somebody should be silenced
link |
or just like this group is bad and this group is good.
link |
I just feel like that's not empathy.
link |
Empathy is understanding the experience of others
link |
and like respecting it.
link |
Like, I mean, that's what a better world looks like.
link |
That's what the reduction of conflict looks like.
link |
It's like, as opposed to saying my tribe is right,
link |
your tribe is wrong.
link |
Forget the violence and nonviolence part.
link |
That's just that act of saying my tribe is right,
link |
that tribe is wrong.
link |
Removing that from the picture,
link |
that's the way to make a better world.
link |
Like that's the way to reduce the violence, I think.
link |
Not necessarily removing the people
link |
who are causing the violence.
link |
You have to get to the source of the problem.
link |
I don't mean the evolutionary source,
link |
but just the mindset that creates the violence
link |
is usually just the lack of empathy for others.
link |
Yeah, but you know, I mean, you can't just teach that
link |
because our evolutionary psychology
link |
puts us in particular directions.
link |
So you don't think, do you think it's possible
link |
to learn through practice to resist the basics
link |
of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?
link |
Yeah, I mean, lots and lots of training.
link |
Lots and lots of education can do it.
link |
The famously most peaceful society
link |
that anthropologists have recorded
link |
involves tremendous amount of teaching,
link |
including some punishment.
link |
You know, it's a society in Thailand.
link |
You have to beat it out of children to make them nice.
link |
There's carrot and steak.
link |
You know, the point is that you do not find societies
link |
in which people are spontaneously
link |
showing the kinds of behaviors
link |
that we would all love them to show.
link |
What is your book titled, Goodness Paradox?
link |
What are the main ideas in this book?
link |
Well, the paradox is the fact that humans show extremes
link |
in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.
link |
And the violence is that we are one of these few animals
link |
in which we use coalitionary proactive violence
link |
to kill members of our own species.
link |
And we do it in large numbers,
link |
just like a few other species.
link |
And the nonviolence is we're particularly extreme
link |
in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.
link |
And I told you the story of how we get there.
link |
So what's so extraordinary about it is that
link |
most animals are either high on both
link |
or relatively low on both.
link |
So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence
link |
and reactive violence.
link |
Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those,
link |
but still hundreds of times more
link |
reactively aggressive than humans are.
link |
What we've done is retain proactive violence being high
link |
and got reactive violence really being low.
link |
And so we have these wonderful societies
link |
in which we're all so incredibly nice to each other
link |
and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers
link |
and have no problem about
link |
leading to any kind of conflict
link |
at the same time as we are one of the worst
link |
killing machine species that's ever existed.
link |
So what's so extraordinary about this is that
link |
if you look at the political philosophers
link |
of the last few hundred years,
link |
you've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes
link |
and Jean Jacques Rousseau,
link |
or literally you've got the fight between their followers.
link |
So the followers of Hobbes say,
link |
well, Hobbes was right,
link |
because he says that we are naturally violent
link |
and you need a Leviathan,
link |
a sort of central government or a king
link |
to be able to suppress the violence.
link |
So we're naturally horrid
link |
and we can learn to be good.
link |
Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseau is interpreted
link |
as saying the opposite,
link |
that we are naturally good
link |
and it's only when culture intervenes
link |
and horrid ideologies come in
link |
that we become uncivilized.
link |
And so people have had this endless fight
link |
between are we naturally corrupt
link |
or are we naturally kind?
link |
And that has gone on for years
link |
and it's only in the last two or three decades
link |
that anthropologists like Christopher Boehm
link |
and Bruce Naft have said,
link |
look, it's obvious what the answer is,
link |
we are both of these things.
link |
And what is so exciting now
link |
is I think we can understand why we are both.
link |
And the answer is we come from ancestors
link |
that were elevated on proactive aggression,
link |
that were hunters and killers,
link |
both of animals and of each other.
link |
And you've got to include that
link |
as almost certain from the past.
link |
And then now we've taken our reactive aggression
link |
and we've down regulated it
link |
and that's given us power.
link |
It's given us power because
link |
once you get rid of the alpha male,
link |
once the beta males take over
link |
and force selection in favor of a more tolerant,
link |
less reactively aggressive individual,
link |
the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable
link |
of focusing on things other than conflict.
link |
And so we have social groups
link |
in which individuals, instead of constantly being on edge
link |
in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,
link |
are able to interact in ways that enable them to share
link |
looking at a tool together or share their food together
link |
or pass ideas from one to the other
link |
or support each other when they're ill
link |
or whatever the issue is.
link |
Cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.
link |
So you asked earlier, what did I think about
link |
why sapiens were able to expand
link |
at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically
link |
around 40,000 years ago?
link |
And the answer is that whatever it was,
link |
it had something to do
link |
with the sapiens ability to cooperate.
link |
That was what gave them bigger groups.
link |
That's what enabled them to have
link |
a far more effective way of living.
link |
And I suspect it was to do with the weapons
link |
and military aspects.
link |
But even if it wasn't that,
link |
the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing
link |
would have been hugely important.
link |
So sapiens then had groups of,
link |
who knows exactly how big they were,
link |
but scores of people to judge from their remains.
link |
Whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated,
link |
small groups of maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes,
link |
where they saw others so rarely
link |
that they were inbreeding at high levels.
link |
Fathers having babies with their daughters.
link |
Very different world.
link |
Very different world.
link |
And that's probably what our world was like
link |
before we got sapiens.
link |
Before we got sapiens.
link |
And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence
link |
against, once you get rid of the alpha males,
link |
you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta.
link |
Not kindness, but collaboration, that's the better word.
link |
Yes, right, much more corruption.
link |
Not just among the males, among the beta males,
link |
but also among the gamma males and the females.
link |
Yeah, I don't know what a gamma male is,
link |
but I imagine there's a whole alphabet.
link |
Well, I don't know about a whole alphabet,
link |
but I think the big layers are the married men
link |
and the unmarried men.
link |
Because the married men had a problem
link |
with the unmarried men, right?
link |
I mean, you see it in ethnographies
link |
of hunters and gatherers recently,
link |
where the unmarried men would be given rules,
link |
such as, I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia
link |
was you cannot come to the camp for months.
link |
You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush.
link |
Because we don't want you anywhere near our wives.
link |
And then another kind of rule is,
link |
if you are in the camp,
link |
you must be in the firelight all the time.
link |
Otherwise, we don't know what you're doing out in the dark.
link |
You really have to control them
link |
because the men who had lots of wives
link |
did not want those horrid bachelors
link |
sneaking around the place.
link |
You also wrote the book titled Catching Fire,
link |
How Cooking Made Us Human.
link |
What's the central idea in this book?
link |
The subtitle How Cooking Made Us Human
link |
refers not to Homo sapiens, but to Homo erectus.
link |
So human there means the genus Homo.
link |
And Homo erectus is the first full member
link |
of the genus Homo in the sense that it looked like us,
link |
just with a sort of slightly more robust build
link |
and a smaller brain.
link |
And the central idea of Catching Fire
link |
is that it was the control of fire
link |
that was responsible for the emergence of Homo erectus
link |
and therefore the genus Homo,
link |
which happened two million years ago.
link |
And it was an evolution from a line of Australopithecines.
link |
And Australopithecines are the creatures
link |
from whom we evolved.
link |
They were present in Africa
link |
from something like six or seven million years ago,
link |
up to actually up to one million years ago.
link |
And then a branch led off to Homo
link |
around two million years ago.
link |
And the way to think of Australopithecines
link |
is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.
link |
So they were erect bipedal walkers.
link |
They were like chimpanzees in the sense
link |
that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.
link |
They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee,
link |
a little bit smaller actually.
link |
And they had big jaws
link |
because they were still eating raw food.
link |
They had big teeth and big jaws.
link |
And then around two million years ago,
link |
the line of Australopithecines,
link |
which ended with an intermediate species,
link |
a kind of missing link area,
link |
because it is not missing, called habilis,
link |
sometimes called Homo habilis,
link |
but more properly, in my view,
link |
called Australopithecus habilis.
link |
That gave rise to Homo erectus.
link |
And Homo erectus, here's how different it was.
link |
It had a smaller mouth,
link |
a smaller jaw, smaller teeth,
link |
and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.
link |
In addition, it had lost what Australopithecines all had,
link |
which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.
link |
And that meant that Homo erectus must have slept
link |
And since it slept on the ground,
link |
it should have been able to defend itself somehow
link |
against predators.
link |
And I can't think of any way they could have done that
link |
unless they had fire.
link |
So there are two major clues to why it was
link |
with Homo erectus that our ancestors
link |
first acquired the control of fire.
link |
One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees
link |
in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos
link |
and all the other primates do.
link |
And the other is that there was this striking reduction
link |
throughout the gut,
link |
reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus
link |
and in the gut itself.
link |
And that conforms to what we have today,
link |
that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans,
link |
which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size
link |
of what they would be if we ate raw food
link |
to judge by the great apes.
link |
So at some point in our evolution,
link |
we acquired the skill of cooking
link |
and skill of controlling fire.
link |
At no time between two million years ago and the present,
link |
do we see any changes in our anatomy
link |
that can, as it were, justify the enormous change
link |
that happens when you are an animal
link |
that learns to control fire.
link |
But at two million years ago,
link |
we have exactly what you'd expect,
link |
namely the guts becoming smaller
link |
because the food is becoming softer
link |
and much more easy to digest
link |
so you don't have to work so hard in the kitchen
link |
or so hard in your body to digest it.
link |
And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground,
link |
which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays
link |
on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti
link |
unless you had fire.
link |
I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa
link |
in the bush and you will not catch me
link |
just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators
link |
unless I got a fire with me.
link |
I'm going to get eaten.
link |
You're gonna get terrified and you're gonna get eaten.
link |
Okay, so there's a million questions I wanna ask.
link |
So one, is it very naturally coupled,
link |
the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire?
link |
Is that an obvious leap?
link |
Well, here's what we know.
link |
We know that all the animals that we've tested
link |
like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.
link |
So this is true for all the great apes.
link |
We've tested them.
link |
That's fascinating, by the way.
link |
That's just like a property of food, I suppose.
link |
Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking
link |
for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.
link |
And there are various signals in the food
link |
such as the amount of sugar there,
link |
the amount of free amino acids
link |
because the amino acids can be tasted.
link |
And the physical qualities of the food
link |
be particularly important, how tough the food is.
link |
Always prefer softer food, provided it feels safe,
link |
And these kinds of sensory cues
link |
are all there in cooked food.
link |
It's soft, it doesn't have so many toxins.
link |
It's not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.
link |
So everyone loves it spontaneously.
link |
Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food to raw food.
link |
Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence
link |
of domestication, but even, as I say,
link |
all of the great apes, you test naive ones
link |
and they prefer it cooked if they can.
link |
So then obvious, once you have fire,
link |
you're going to accidentally discover
link |
that food changes when you apply fire to it
link |
and then it's going to be the big, crazy new fad.
link |
You took the words out of my mouth.
link |
I mean, if they have fire at all
link |
and their food rolls into it,
link |
five minutes later it tastes better than it did before.
link |
How big of an invention from an engineering perspective
link |
do you think is the discovery of fire?
link |
Do you think for homo erectus, homo sapiens,
link |
do you think it's the greatest invention ever?
link |
Yeah, I think that the control of fire
link |
has been ultimately responsible for essentially
link |
how grandiose do I want to be here,
link |
the entire human story, going back to homo.
link |
It is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.
link |
And perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely
link |
to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty
link |
of making a large brain.
link |
So the story here is that the constraints
link |
on brain size are energetic.
link |
You and I have brains that are something
link |
like 2.5% of our body weight.
link |
It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.
link |
So it's disproportionate.
link |
There are other expensive organs in our body as well,
link |
such as the heart.
link |
And what's different about the brain is that in addition
link |
to us being able to fuel it in a way
link |
that other animals can't, we also have reasons
link |
for wanting to have an even bigger brain,
link |
whereas we don't want an even bigger heart.
link |
So what those reasons are is unclear.
link |
But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain,
link |
cooking makes it possible
link |
because it's supplying more calories
link |
and it is enormously reducing the amount of time
link |
that it takes to chew your food.
link |
So if you were a gorilla and you wanted
link |
to have a bigger brain, you might say, okay,
link |
well, let's just eat some more.
link |
But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day
link |
in the sense that they are eating
link |
for maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.
link |
That's just chewing.
link |
And then they've got to sit around and digest their food
link |
because they can't just eat all the time.
link |
They've got to take a break while the food is digested
link |
in the stomach and then passed into the gut.
link |
So the stomach is already full.
link |
So basically gorillas are eating
link |
about the maximum rate already.
link |
So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?
link |
It doesn't, it's actually got a smaller brain
link |
relative to its body size than a chimpanzee does.
link |
And that's the basic problem for our ancestors.
link |
Then you come along and cook and all of a sudden
link |
you can get an increased amount of energy from your food.
link |
You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.
link |
You know, there are 25 bodily processes or more
link |
that are involved in digesting your food,
link |
making the acid that takes the proteins apart,
link |
maintaining the brush border where the molecules
link |
are taken across the gut wall and so on.
link |
It costs you to digest your food.
link |
It costs less if you cook your food.
link |
So you get a net gain in the amount of energy
link |
and you are reducing the amount of time
link |
from in our case, our ancestors,
link |
probably around 50% of the day chewing
link |
to nowadays one hour a day chewing.
link |
So all of a sudden you've got hours a day
link |
in which to do other things and to use those brains
link |
that you've now enabled to grow.
link |
So with Homo erectus, you start the process
link |
of getting a bigger brain and famously,
link |
throughout the whole period of the evolution
link |
of the genus Homo, you have a steadily increasing
link |
size of brain until right at the end
link |
when it actually gets smaller, but that's a different story.
link |
Which end is this?
link |
Which, are we talking about Homo sapiens?
link |
Yeah, with Homo sapiens, you've got a smaller brain
link |
from, people haven't got it exactly down,
link |
but at least 30,000 years ago, it starts declining.
link |
And so the fascinating thing about that
link |
is that all domesticated animals have smaller brains
link |
than their wild ancestors.
link |
The domestication is intricately connected
link |
to this brain size, you think?
link |
And exactly, so I think what we're seeing in humans
link |
is that same manifestation.
link |
And then the fascinating question is why?
link |
And the only point I would want to make about this
link |
is that there's no evidence that in the small brain
link |
domesticates, they're losing say an average
link |
about 15% of brain size.
link |
In the small brain domesticates compared
link |
to their wild ancestors, there's no indication
link |
of a loss of cognitive ability.
link |
So I think what's going on is that it's a younger brain.
link |
It's a more pedomorphic brain,
link |
looking like the juveniles of the ancestor.
link |
But just as our kids are very smart
link |
and can learn amazing things compared to adults,
link |
all they lack is wisdom and maturity,
link |
but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.
link |
And I think that's the same with domesticated animals
link |
compared to their wild ancestors,
link |
and probably therefore with Homo sapiens,
link |
say 30,000 years ago, compared to their ancestors.
link |
So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.
link |
Size, Richard, isn't everything.
link |
What's the connection between fire, cooking,
link |
and the eating of meat?
link |
Which came first, do you think?
link |
Humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat
link |
or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?
link |
I think that fire increased the using of meat.
link |
But the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt
link |
and kill meat, as do bonobos, certainly puts us in,
link |
so those two species have a common ancestor with us
link |
going six, seven million years ago,
link |
and it was from that common ancestor
link |
that you get the Australopithecine line.
link |
It's very likely therefore Australopithecines
link |
were eating meat when they could get it,
link |
which wouldn't be very often
link |
because they wouldn't be very good sprinters.
link |
But nevertheless, they would occasionally be able
link |
to get some meat, and I bet they loved it all the time,
link |
and basically all primates like meat
link |
if they can get it, almost all of them.
link |
But I think fire would have been very important
link |
for a couple of reasons.
link |
One is that once you eat your food cooked,
link |
then you're saving yourself time.
link |
By saving yourself time, you can free up
link |
the opportunity to go and hunt more.
link |
Because hunting is a high risk, high gain activity.
link |
There's every risk that you will get nothing
link |
on one particular afternoon that you go off
link |
looking for opportunities to kill.
link |
But it's high gain because when you do get something,
link |
you bring down a kudu,
link |
then you've got a serious amount of meat.
link |
What did males and females do
link |
with the time they were saving
link |
from not having to chew their food?
link |
I think that in the case of males,
link |
it's very reasonable to think they spent
link |
a greatly increased amount of time hunting.
link |
So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month,
link |
and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.
link |
With humans, they're hunting maybe 20 times a month,
link |
and the average hunt length is six hours.
link |
It's a huge difference.
link |
So, and that's possible because the time was available,
link |
because they were cooking.
link |
Less chewing, more hunting.
link |
The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.
link |
So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,
link |
and I mean, they are so excited about killing a monkey.
link |
They're so excited about going into the hunt,
link |
and when they make the kill,
link |
then there's screams everywhere,
link |
and some don't like to seize it and capture it
link |
and take it away from the others,
link |
and eventually the strongest one has it,
link |
and the others sit around begging
link |
and trying to get some and tear it off,
link |
and so they all love it.
link |
There are others who, he often goes to the top of a tree
link |
in order to be able to get away
link |
from all of these beggars and scavengers,
link |
and while he's there, drops of blood
link |
or little scraps will fall down to the bottom,
link |
and the junior members of society,
link |
you know, the females and young and that sort of thing,
link |
they are racing through to find a particular leaf
link |
that's got a drop of blood on it so they can lick it.
link |
I mean, they love it, but it takes them a lot of time
link |
I mean, it's the same thing as for cooked food in general.
link |
So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies,
link |
and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,
link |
I've had enough of this, I need real food,
link |
and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again
link |
because they can get fruit into their bodies
link |
so much faster than they can get meat.
link |
So once they're cooking, that problem is solved,
link |
and they can eat the meat much more readily.
link |
So I think that meat eating would become important
link |
for two reasons with cooking.
link |
So the key, not to oversimplify,
link |
but the key moments in human history
link |
are with Homo erectus, the discovery of fire
link |
and the use of fire for cooking,
link |
and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males
link |
killing off the alpha males so that the cooperation
link |
can exist, and cooperation leads to communication
link |
and language and ideas, the sharing of ideas,
link |
that kind of thing.
link |
Well, yes, the only thing I would modify on that
link |
is that you have to ask, how is it that the beta males
link |
were able to kill the alpha male?
link |
And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males
link |
within their own group sometimes,
link |
it's not a process of killing the alpha male.
link |
It's taking advantage of opportunity
link |
when some male gets into a bad position,
link |
but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.
link |
And you can see why, because they don't have language,
link |
and without language, it's very difficult to know
link |
how confident you can be of the support of others
link |
against a particular individual within your own group.
link |
When you're attacking someone from another group,
link |
that problem is solved.
link |
We all hate those guys, but the alpha male
link |
has got alliances within his group.
link |
Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.
link |
Some of them might be harboring deep feelings
link |
of resentment, but how does anyone else know that?
link |
So in other words, I think that you have to have
link |
some kind of language that is pretty good
link |
to solve the problems of gaining confidence
link |
that five of you say, or some number,
link |
can trust each other in this final attack.
link |
And even nowadays, it's difficult.
link |
I mean, you mentioned Stalin.
link |
It's like, why was everybody terrified?
link |
Any dictator that takes control.
link |
Why is all of us as individuals terrified
link |
when you know there's millions of us?
link |
And so like that, we lack the language,
link |
because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.
link |
Like, who can we talk to?
link |
Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?
link |
Exactly, that's right.
link |
But do you have this intuition that some kind of language
link |
was developing along with this process
link |
of beta males taking over?
link |
Yes, yes, I mean, once you have sufficient language
link |
to be able to have the beta males conspiring
link |
to kill the alpha male, then you have selection
link |
in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.
link |
And at that point, there will be increased ability
link |
to communicate and the language will get richer
link |
and better and better.
link |
So yes, absolutely, positive feedback loop
link |
once you get the situation started.
link |
Can you maybe comment on the full complexity
link |
and richness of the human mind through this process?
link |
We've been casually saying cooking, fire,
link |
and beta males leading to cooperation.
link |
But how does the beauty of the human mind
link |
emerge from all of this?
link |
Is there other further steps we need to understand?
link |
Or is it as simple as this language emerging
link |
from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?
link |
Or am I also over romanticizing
link |
how amazing the human mind is?
link |
Is it just like one small step
link |
in a long journey of evolution?
link |
Well, if the beauty of the human mind
link |
is the ability of us all to be creative, to explore,
link |
that's one kind of beauty.
link |
Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.
link |
And we think of that as beautiful
link |
because it is a kind of rare and special ability
link |
compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness
link |
that can commonly predominate.
link |
I suppose we have to think of different sources
link |
for those two types.
link |
I suppose a general answer is that
link |
there has been selection in favor of bigger brains,
link |
which probably in general has been associated
link |
with increasing cognitive ability.
link |
And as that has happened,
link |
the complexity of life has increased
link |
because people have more and more complex,
link |
highly differentiated strategies
link |
in response to each other's more complex,
link |
highly differentiated strategies.
link |
We get to a point where there is deception
link |
and self deception.
link |
There is a manipulation of ideas
link |
through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on.
link |
I guess all I'm wanting to say is that
link |
there is a world of the mind that evolves in response
link |
to these platforms that are put there.
link |
The platform of increasing brain size
link |
and therefore cognitive ability
link |
made possible by increased energy supply.
link |
The platform of cooperation and tolerance
link |
in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict
link |
and therefore a need to respond to the conflict
link |
and manipulate your allies appropriately.
link |
I don't see beauty as coming,
link |
either kind of beauty as coming
link |
sort of totally independently of these things.
link |
You know, I don't think there's a selection
link |
for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.
link |
You know, but I guess sexual selection,
link |
you know, males wanting to impress females
link |
in different ways will lead to them wanting to.
link |
Well, yes, you know, show off.
link |
Yeah, in all the different ways.
link |
So all of these are natural consequences
link |
of just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate
link |
and how to achieve certain ends.
link |
So that's just like a natural.
link |
Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection,
link |
but that is a really important part of it.
link |
You know, they try to out compete each other
link |
in, you know, normally without any physical conflict,
link |
just in order to be able to be chosen
link |
by mates of the opposite sex.
link |
And that is certainly a major source of creativity.
link |
So you've studied chimps.
link |
You also, all the other relatives, gorillas.
link |
What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps,
link |
about gorillas, about humans?
link |
Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary,
link |
that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.
link |
How are we related?
link |
What is the common ancestor?
link |
What are the interesting differences?
link |
I know I'm asking a million questions,
link |
but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas,
link |
and humans, like how we're related,
link |
and what you find fascinating about each?
link |
In Africa, straddling the equator,
link |
there is a strip of rainforest
link |
that relies on the combination of high temperatures
link |
and rainfall that you get around the equator.
link |
That rainforest goes into about 22 countries.
link |
And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees,
link |
although they've gone extinct in two of them.
link |
In just a fraction of them,
link |
but it was five countries,
link |
you've got gorillas, where there are mountains.
link |
And in one country, on the left bank
link |
of the Great Congo River, you have bonobos.
link |
So in the African forest,
link |
you've got these three African apes, the only African apes,
link |
all of which are very similar in much of their way of life.
link |
They walk on their knuckles through the forest,
link |
looking for fruit trees,
link |
and eating herbs when they can't find fruits.
link |
Gorillas represent the oldest chain.
link |
So about 10 million years ago,
link |
maybe as recently as eight million years ago,
link |
the ancestor of gorillas broke off
link |
from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.
link |
So they've probably remained very similar now
link |
to what, very similar to what they were then.
link |
They were probably the largest apes,
link |
living in montane areas and spending more time
link |
eating just herbs, stems,
link |
not so vitally dependent on fruit.
link |
And living in, if it was like the present,
link |
groups up to about 50 stable groups,
link |
with one alpha male who was in charge.
link |
Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive
link |
compared to chimps and bonobos.
link |
And I had the privilege of spending a week or two
link |
with gorillas at Dian Fossey's camp before she was murdered.
link |
And I went out with two women,
link |
Kelly and Barb, to a particular group.
link |
And there was a young female in the group called Simba.
link |
And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.
link |
And then she came towards me
link |
and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles
link |
and touched me on the forehead.
link |
She was watched in doing this by a young male
link |
who was quite keen on her.
link |
And he was called Digit.
link |
And about five minutes later,
link |
Digit stood in front of us on the path.
link |
And Kelly was in front of me,
link |
and then there was Barb, and then there was me.
link |
And he came charging down the path
link |
and he sidestepped around Kelly,
link |
and he sidestepped around Barb,
link |
and me, he just knocked with his arm
link |
and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.
link |
And I love the way that that was a very deliberate response.
link |
And I love the way that Simba had been so interested in me
link |
Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye,
link |
but gorillas really look as though
link |
they're trying to sort of figure out
link |
what are you thinking about?
link |
That was a species that has, goes back
link |
for something like 10 million years.
link |
In that situation, was there a game being played?
link |
Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me,
link |
I don't want you messing with Simba.
link |
But was Simba using you?
link |
Well, that's a fun idea.
link |
I don't see why she should be using me,
link |
but you mean to use me?
link |
I see why she should be using me, but you mean testing
link |
how strongly Digit was prepared to intervene to?
link |
Oh, that's come straight out of a sort of adolescent
link |
high school playbook.
link |
All right, well, that's all.
link |
No, no, no, there's nothing wrong with it for that.
link |
Yeah, I don't know.
link |
I never thought of that, and you never know.
link |
So, yeah, so, okay, so this is an ancient branch
link |
of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla
link |
that led to gorillas.
link |
So then the next thing that happened
link |
on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago
link |
when you have the line between chimps and bonobos
link |
on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.
link |
And basically what happened is that at that point,
link |
a chimp like ancestor leaves the forest,
link |
gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts,
link |
and that becomes the Australopithecines
link |
and meanwhile, the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor
link |
continues in the forest.
link |
And later what happens is that one branch of that
link |
crosses the Congo River and becomes the bonobos.
link |
That was only about two million years ago,
link |
maybe one million years ago.
link |
Now the chimps that remained in the forest
link |
throughout this time and occupied all the countries
link |
across from west to east Africa now,
link |
again, we assume that they're pretty similar
link |
to the ones that live nowadays,
link |
where there's some variation from west to east.
link |
And these are animals that live in social communities
link |
of between say 20 and 200.
link |
They have a lot of them in one group,
link |
but they never come together in a single unit.
link |
These are, they share an area, a community territory,
link |
and that area is defended by males
link |
and within it, females wander
link |
and bring up their young independently.
link |
And the females are very scared
link |
about the possibility that males
link |
will be mean to their infants.
link |
And in order to avoid them doing that,
link |
they do their best to mate with every single male
link |
in the group multiple times,
link |
as if to give a memory in that male of,
link |
yeah, yeah, I reminded you,
link |
so I'm not gonna be mean to your baby.
link |
So what's wonderful about chimps?
link |
Well, you know, as we've spoken about them,
link |
they are creative and sort of amazingly humanlike,
link |
but I love the sort of, you know, the quiet moments.
link |
I've got two chimps who are grooming each other
link |
on a day when they are utterly exhausted.
link |
They've walked 11 kilometers the day before,
link |
up and down hills.
link |
And on this particular day,
link |
all they do is they get to one tree
link |
and they eat from that tree.
link |
And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards
link |
and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up.
link |
So they're utterly exhausted
link |
and they're just eating nonstop
link |
because they're trying to recover their energy.
link |
And this is Hugh and Charlie.
link |
And we think they were probably brothers.
link |
They've never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it.
link |
Well, I never remember now who it is,
link |
but let's say that they both come down from the tree
link |
and they're both carrying branches of the food.
link |
They're actually seeds from these branches.
link |
They're both engaged, even in the midday sun
link |
when they want to come down and unshade themselves
link |
for a bit on the ground, they're still eating.
link |
But then Charlie finishes his branch
link |
and he starts grooming Hugh.
link |
And Hugh continues eating from his branch.
link |
Charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes
link |
and he reaches out and he lifts the branch
link |
from which Hugh is still taking seeds
link |
and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back
link |
as far as possible away from Hugh.
link |
Hugh doesn't do anything.
link |
He just finishes his mouthful
link |
and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.
link |
So this very polite way of saying,
link |
will you groom me please has worked.
link |
Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back
link |
and around to the right side and then down his arm
link |
to what point where he can reach the branch again.
link |
And then he picks up the branch
link |
and continues nonchalantly.
link |
So in other words, a very sort of simple little strategy
link |
but it just shows the courtesy
link |
with which they can treat each other.
link |
And the days I love with chimps
link |
are when you see that sort of thing
link |
or when you see mothers just lying
link |
in a sunlit patch in the forest
link |
with their babies bouncing on top of them,
link |
just having a wonderful peaceful time.
link |
And that's what most of their lives are like.
link |
So chimpanzees are the species
link |
that kind of unites the rest of the apes
link |
because a gorilla is in many ways
link |
just a big version of a chimpanzee.
link |
If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind
link |
to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla.
link |
And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River
link |
are like a domesticated form of a chimpanzee
link |
but obviously humans didn't domesticate them.
link |
So they're self domesticated.
link |
They are less aggressive
link |
and they show all the marks of domestication
link |
that domestication animals do
link |
compared to wild animals in their bones.
link |
So they have reduced differences between males and females
link |
in which the males are more like females.
link |
They have smaller brains, they have shorter faces,
link |
smaller teeth and smaller bodies.
link |
All the things that domesticated animals show.
link |
And bonobos live in this environment
link |
in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.
link |
There's no indication that they will have
link |
these aggressive kills and enough data now to show
link |
that there's a statistical difference
link |
in the frequency of which it would happen.
link |
And bonobos are famously erotic.
link |
The females have enlarged sexual parts
link |
which swell to particularly large size
link |
compared to the female chimpanzees.
link |
And the females have a lot of interactions with each other
link |
in which they excitedly rub their clitorises together
link |
and appear to have orgasms.
link |
And these occur in the context
link |
of some kind of social tension.
link |
And they sometimes happen before,
link |
they sometimes happen after the social tension,
link |
and they seem to be devices, these interactions,
link |
for ensuring that everyone's friends
link |
and reducing the chances
link |
that they're actually gonna get into a fight.
link |
So it's a kind of conflict resolution through sex
link |
or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.
link |
Well, it's often characterized as make love, not war.
link |
Make love, not war.
link |
Okay, you mentioned to me offline
link |
that you have a deep love for nature.
link |
If we look at the world today,
link |
how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature
link |
remain a big part of our lives as human beings
link |
in the way we think about it,
link |
in the way we also keep it around, preserve it?
link |
You know, we keep it part of our minds
link |
and part of our world.
link |
It's a very difficult question
link |
because every time there was a conflict
link |
between conservation of a natural habitat
link |
and allowing people to get that little bit of extra food
link |
then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.
link |
And so we have this steady erosion
link |
in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.
link |
We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats
link |
and all the species,
link |
and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.
link |
Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples
link |
of something being saved,
link |
but the overall trend is clear.
link |
And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that
link |
because it's not human.
link |
Now that we are essentially a single tribe,
link |
to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans.
link |
So I think the only way in which we can really conserve
link |
is if we put tremendous effort
link |
into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.
link |
Often this will be the national parks that already exist.
link |
And what we have to do is to make them so valuable
link |
that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival
link |
to be able to keep those sorts of places.
link |
And that's the attitude that my colleagues and I
link |
have taken in Uganda,
link |
where we want to keep the Kibale National Park alive,
link |
which has got the largest population chimpanzees
link |
and it's got elephants and wonderful birds
link |
and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on,
link |
and visitors, and lots and lots of visitors.
link |
It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases
link |
in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism.
link |
And you need to make sure that ecotourism is done right.
link |
In other places, you will keep nature there
link |
because it's useful for maintaining the climate,
link |
Maybe you can in some places convince people
link |
of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature
link |
that even over the long term,
link |
presidents whose job it is to look for the future
link |
of the country will be persuaded
link |
that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.
link |
But overall, what is required is for people
link |
in the rich countries to do much more investment
link |
than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places
link |
in their own countries and in the tropics.
link |
And if you look at Africa,
link |
I mean, the population trends are that Nigeria
link |
may become the most populous country in the world, I think,
link |
or within a century.
link |
The future of African habitats,
link |
you know, it's clear what's gonna happen in general.
link |
There's gonna be a huge conversion
link |
towards agricultural land.
link |
I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago
link |
about the prospect of the entire globe
link |
being turned into a single human feedlot.
link |
It's gonna take a lot to avoid that.
link |
He is out there calling for half the earth
link |
to be devoted to nature.
link |
It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic.
link |
But unless you have really exciting goals,
link |
probably nothing will be achieved.
link |
Yeah, I mean, there's something to me,
link |
like when I visit New York and I see Central Park
link |
and then somehow constructed a situation
link |
where you preserve this park in the middle of the park,
link |
probably some of the most expensive land in the world.
link |
The fact that that's possible gives me hope
link |
that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale,
link |
perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons
link |
of just valuing the beauty
link |
and just respecting our origins
link |
of having come from the earth.
link |
We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees,
link |
bonobos and gorillas as our close relatives
link |
still living on the earth.
link |
We're unlucky that we don't have Australopithecines
link |
and other species of homo,
link |
but we're still lucky to have those
link |
because they are incredibly closely related to us
link |
compared to what most animals have.
link |
There are many animals that don't have any close relatives
link |
to them on the earth.
link |
But not only are they relatively close,
link |
but they teach us so much about ourselves.
link |
The similarities between them and ourselves
link |
raise questions that we can then test
link |
about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities
link |
are derived from the same evolutionary stock
link |
as in those great apes.
link |
Well, how much is that worth?
link |
I mean, we could spend billions going to the Mars
link |
to find evidence of bacteria there,
link |
and that's fascinating too.
link |
But we should be spending billions on this earth
link |
in order to make sure that we have,
link |
I don't know how to say it,
link |
substantial representative populations
link |
of these close relatives.
link |
Yeah, that we can meet.
link |
There's something like space tourism
link |
when you go out into space and you look back down on earth.
link |
That's to a lot of people, including myself,
link |
But why is that worth a lot?
link |
Is because it's humbling and beautiful
link |
in the same way that meeting
link |
our close evolutionary relatives is humbling and beautiful.
link |
Just to know that this is what we come from.
link |
This is who we are.
link |
Not just for the understanding or the science of it,
link |
but just something about just the beauty of witnessing this.
link |
And again, it's both humbling and empowering
link |
that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here.
link |
Yes, and unfortunately,
link |
the problems are incredibly difficult to solve
link |
and there is no one solver.
link |
It has to happen from a network
link |
of potentially cooperating people.
link |
But I mean, you're so right about it being daunting
link |
to think about what it looks like from space.
link |
And I love the view that Herman Muller expressed
link |
of being able to go out from space.
link |
And he said the whole of life
link |
would look like a kind of rust on the planet.
link |
Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.
link |
I'm not sure they would notice the life.
link |
They would probably notice the trees or ocean.
link |
It's a kind of rust.
link |
But let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical question.
link |
What is the meaning of this rust?
link |
What do you think is the meaning of life on Earth?
link |
What is the meaning of our human intelligent life?
link |
Well, I think it's very clear
link |
that we have an evolutionary story
link |
that is only getting challenged around the edges.
link |
We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.
link |
And the meaning is we are here
link |
as a consequence of materialistic processes that began,
link |
in our sense, with the establishment of the Earth
link |
four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was,
link |
and then water and oxygen and so on.
link |
And we are the astonishing consequence
link |
of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.
link |
The word random is the wrong word to use
link |
unless you understand what it means.
link |
You know, it didn't happen by chance,
link |
but a lot of random events had to happen
link |
to make this possible.
link |
And those random events, of course,
link |
are the production of appropriate mutations.
link |
But the meaning of life is there is no meaning.
link |
The really big mystery of life is why is there a universe?
link |
And that same why propagates itself through the whole of it,
link |
through the whole process of it,
link |
for the emergence of planets, the emergence,
link |
first of all, of galaxies, of star systems.
link |
Of planets, of the proteins required
link |
to construct the single cell organisms
link |
and the single cell organism becoming complex organisms
link |
and some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land
link |
and the whole of it.
link |
And then there's fire,
link |
some clever guy or lady invented fire,
link |
and then now here we are.
link |
It just does seem, speaking as a human,
link |
kind of special that we're able to reflect on the whole thing
link |
So much more interesting than the stories produced by religion.
link |
Yeah, it is beautiful,
link |
but it just seems special that us humans
link |
are able to write religions and construct stories
link |
and also do science.
link |
That seems kind of amazing.
link |
It seems like the universe is such that it creates beings like us
link |
that are able to investigate it.
link |
And that's why there's this longing for why.
link |
That's just such a beautiful little pocket of complexity
link |
created by the universe.
link |
It seems like there should be a why,
link |
but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes
link |
and this is the one that led to this particular set of humans.
link |
Even without an infinite number of universes,
link |
I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.
link |
Throughout this universe.
link |
Yeah, now that we know how many planets
link |
have the right sort of conditions,
link |
which is what, I can't remember, a lot.
link |
It's some significant percentage of all planets.
link |
Then there are apparently billions of planets.
link |
Things happen so quickly on Earth.
link |
Once you've got water, then you've got life.
link |
It did not take long for life to evolve
link |
in the big scheme of things.
link |
And if you think, you look out there,
link |
say there's a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations,
link |
one dimension you can look at is the proclivity to violence they have.
link |
It's interesting to think what level of violence is useful
link |
for extending the life of a civilization.
link |
So we have a particular set of violence in our history.
link |
Maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.
link |
Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.
link |
So you look at viruses.
link |
What kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed?
link |
If you're too deadly, that's a big problem.
link |
If you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem.
link |
So that is a fascinating exploration of...
link |
I don't see any evidence.
link |
I don't see where you're coming from
link |
when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.
link |
Well, because, I'll say it this way,
link |
death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.
link |
But there's lots of ways to die without violence.
link |
Right. To me, death in itself is violence.
link |
I mean, a lot of people that talk about, for example,
link |
longevity and disease and all that kind of stuff,
link |
they see death as a...
link |
This is the way they talk about it.
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And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way.
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Death is like mass murder that's happening.
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People that try to, from a biological perspective, help extend life,
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they see that you're helping...
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The biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization,
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from their perspective,
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is not allocating all our resources to solving death.
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Right. Because death is a kind of violence.
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It is the kind of murder that we're allowing
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to be committed on us by nature.
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And so the flip side of that is death makes way for new life,
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Yes. But that's got nothing to do with peace versus war.
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You have animals that are very, very peaceful,
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but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.
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They just don't do it with death caused by violence.
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And violent death is premature death, surely.
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I don't mind about people dying.
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What I mind about is people dying in their youth, middle age.
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But some people would say all death is premature.
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It certainly feels that way.
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It's died too soon.
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Anyone who's ever died, died too soon.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias
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and live for hundreds of years or thousands of years,
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that would be great.
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Do you ponder your own mortality?
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Are you afraid of death?
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I don't think I'm afraid of it.
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I'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen.
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I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life,
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and I don't want to leave the party.
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Yeah. It's kind of a fun party.
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I don't want to leave the party either.
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So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party.
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Having a party with a little bit less violence in it
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is an even more fun party.
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Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time with me today.
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Your work is amazing.
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It includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history
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and the nature of human civilization.
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So again, thank you so much for talking today.
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Well, thanks for your great questions.
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It was a fun conversation.