back to index

Richard Wrangham: Violence, Sex, and Fire in Human Evolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #229


small model | large model

link |
00:00:00.000
The following is a conversation with Richard Rangham,
link |
00:00:03.240
a biological anthropologist at Harvard,
link |
00:00:05.720
specializing in the study of primates
link |
00:00:08.240
and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking, culture,
link |
00:00:12.200
and other aspects of ape and human behavior
link |
00:00:15.160
at the individual and societal level.
link |
00:00:18.360
He began his career over four decades ago
link |
00:00:20.960
working with Jane Goodall
link |
00:00:22.320
and studying the behavior of chimps.
link |
00:00:24.560
And since then, has done a lot of seminal work
link |
00:00:27.320
on human evolution
link |
00:00:28.680
and has proposed several theories for the roles of fire
link |
00:00:32.320
and violence in the evolution of us,
link |
00:00:35.200
hairless apes, otherwise known as homo sapiens.
link |
00:00:39.480
This is the Lux Friedman podcast.
link |
00:00:41.700
To support it, please check out our sponsors
link |
00:00:43.520
in the description.
link |
00:00:44.880
And now here's my conversation with Richard Rangham.
link |
00:00:50.000
You've said that we're much less violent
link |
00:00:53.100
than our close living relatives, the chimps.
link |
00:00:57.000
Can you elaborate on this point of how violent we are
link |
00:01:01.000
and how violent our evolutionary relatives are?
link |
00:01:04.520
Well, I haven't said exactly
link |
00:01:06.000
that we're less violent than chimps.
link |
00:01:07.960
What I've said is that there are two kinds of violence.
link |
00:01:11.280
One stems from proactive aggression
link |
00:01:13.280
and the other stems from reactive aggression.
link |
00:01:15.600
Proactive aggression is planned aggression.
link |
00:01:17.840
Reactive aggression is impulsive, defensive.
link |
00:01:20.760
It's reactive because it takes place
link |
00:01:24.560
in seconds after the threat.
link |
00:01:28.000
And the thing that is really striking about humans
link |
00:01:30.880
compared to our close relatives
link |
00:01:33.800
is the great reduction in the degree of reactive aggression.
link |
00:01:40.280
So we are far less violent than chimps
link |
00:01:43.200
when prompted by some relatively minor threat
link |
00:01:46.720
within our own society.
link |
00:01:48.680
And the way I judge that is with not super satisfactory data
link |
00:01:53.680
but the study which is particularly striking
link |
00:01:59.420
is one of people living as hunter gatherers
link |
00:02:05.180
in a really upsetting kind of environment,
link |
00:02:09.700
namely people in Australia living in a place
link |
00:02:15.300
where they got a lot of alcohol abuse.
link |
00:02:19.180
There's a lot of domestic violence.
link |
00:02:21.420
It's all a sort of a society that is as bad
link |
00:02:29.220
from the point of view of violence
link |
00:02:30.500
as an ordinary society can get.
link |
00:02:34.160
There's excellent data on the frequency
link |
00:02:36.940
which people actually have physical violence
link |
00:02:39.180
and hit each other.
link |
00:02:40.420
And we can compare that to data from several different sites
link |
00:02:45.020
comparing, we're looking at chimpanzee and bonobo violence
link |
00:02:50.020
and the difference is between two and three orders
link |
00:02:53.940
of magnitude, the frequency which chimps and bonobos
link |
00:02:57.460
hit each other, chase each other, charge each other,
link |
00:03:00.660
physically engage is someday between 500 and 1,000 times
link |
00:03:06.300
higher than in humans.
link |
00:03:08.340
So there's something just amazing about us
link |
00:03:09.860
and this has been recognized for centuries.
link |
00:03:13.540
Aristotle drew attention to the fact
link |
00:03:15.940
that we behave in many ways like domesticated animals
link |
00:03:18.980
because we're so unviolent.
link |
00:03:21.300
But people say, well, what about the hideous engagements
link |
00:03:26.780
of this 20th century, the First and Second World War
link |
00:03:30.980
and much else besides.
link |
00:03:33.620
And that is all proactive violence.
link |
00:03:37.100
All of that is gangs of people making deliberate decisions
link |
00:03:43.420
to go off and attack in circumstances
link |
00:03:46.020
which ideally the attackers are going to be able
link |
00:03:49.580
to make their kills and then get out of there.
link |
00:03:53.260
In other words, not face confrontation.
link |
00:03:55.860
That's the ordinary way that arm is trying to work.
link |
00:03:58.740
And there it turns out that humans and chimpanzees
link |
00:04:04.820
are in a very similar kind of state.
link |
00:04:07.060
That is to say, if you look at the rate of death
link |
00:04:10.940
from chimpanzees conducting proactive
link |
00:04:13.700
of coalitionary violence, it's very similar
link |
00:04:17.180
in many ways to what you see in humans.
link |
00:04:20.300
So when not downregulated with proactive violence,
link |
00:04:23.620
it's just this reactive violence
link |
00:04:25.780
that is strikingly reduced in humans.
link |
00:04:29.180
So chimpanzees also practice kind of tribal warfare.
link |
00:04:34.100
Indeed they do, yeah.
link |
00:04:36.100
So this was discovered first in 1974.
link |
00:04:38.980
It was observed first in 1974,
link |
00:04:41.020
which was about the time that the first major study
link |
00:04:48.060
of chimpanzees in the wild by Jane Goodall
link |
00:04:51.180
had been going for something like five years
link |
00:04:55.420
during, of the chimpanzees being observed wherever they went.
link |
00:05:02.740
Until then they'd been observed at a feeding station
link |
00:05:06.980
where Jane was luring them in to be observed
link |
00:05:11.060
by seeing bananas, which is great.
link |
00:05:12.940
She learned a lot, but she didn't learn
link |
00:05:15.340
what was happening at the edges of their ranges.
link |
00:05:17.940
So five years later, it became very obvious
link |
00:05:22.500
that there was hostile relationships between groups.
link |
00:05:25.660
And those hostile relationships sometimes take the form
link |
00:05:30.580
of the kind of hostile relationships
link |
00:05:32.620
that you see in many animals,
link |
00:05:33.740
which is a bunch of chimps in this case,
link |
00:05:38.940
shouting at a bunch of other chimps on their borders.
link |
00:05:44.980
But dramatically, in addition to that,
link |
00:05:47.580
there is a second kind of interaction.
link |
00:05:49.340
And that is when a party of chimpanzees
link |
00:05:55.980
makes a deliberate venture to the edge of their territory
link |
00:06:00.980
silently and then search for members of neighboring groups.
link |
00:06:06.860
And what they're searching for is a lone individual.
link |
00:06:10.580
So I've been with chimps when they've heard
link |
00:06:14.220
a lone individual under these circumstances
link |
00:06:16.740
or what they think is a lone one,
link |
00:06:18.660
and they touch each other and look at each other
link |
00:06:21.940
and then charge forward, very excited.
link |
00:06:25.060
Very excited, and then while they're charging,
link |
00:06:30.860
all of a sudden, the place where they heard a lone call
link |
00:06:35.500
erupts with a volley of calls.
link |
00:06:37.460
It was just one calling out of a larger party.
link |
00:06:40.820
And our chimps put on the brakes
link |
00:06:43.460
and scoot back for safety into their own territory.
link |
00:06:46.660
But if in fact they do find a lone individual
link |
00:06:49.620
and they can sneak up to them,
link |
00:06:52.420
then they make a deliberate attack,
link |
00:06:54.980
they're hunting, they're stalking and hunting,
link |
00:06:57.540
and then they impose terrible damage,
link |
00:07:00.660
which typically ends in a kill straight away,
link |
00:07:03.060
but it might end up with the victim so damaged
link |
00:07:08.300
that they'll crawl away and die a few days or hours later.
link |
00:07:13.500
So that was a very dramatic discovery
link |
00:07:15.380
because it really made people realize for the first time
link |
00:07:20.500
that Conrad Lorenz had been wrong
link |
00:07:22.780
when in the 1960s, in his famous book On Aggression,
link |
00:07:26.900
he said warfare is restricted to humans,
link |
00:07:30.780
animals do not deliberately kill each other.
link |
00:07:33.060
Well, now we know that actually there's a bunch of animals
link |
00:07:35.180
that deliberately kill each other,
link |
00:07:36.420
and they always do so under essentially
link |
00:07:38.540
the same circumstances,
link |
00:07:39.700
which is when they feel safe doing it.
link |
00:07:44.220
So humans feel safe doing it when they got a weapon.
link |
00:07:48.180
Animals feel safe when they have a coalition,
link |
00:07:52.420
a coalition that has overwhelming power
link |
00:07:54.820
compared to the victim.
link |
00:07:56.700
And so wolves will do that, and lions will do that,
link |
00:07:59.420
and hyenas will do that,
link |
00:08:00.860
and chimpanzees will do it, and humans do it too.
link |
00:08:05.340
Can they pull themselves into something
link |
00:08:08.460
that looks more like a symmetric war
link |
00:08:10.580
as opposed to an asymmetric one?
link |
00:08:12.660
So accidentally engaging on the lone individual
link |
00:08:15.300
and getting themselves into trouble?
link |
00:08:17.220
Are they more aggressive in avoiding these kinds of battles?
link |
00:08:21.380
No, they're very keen to avoid those kinds of battles,
link |
00:08:24.060
but occasionally they can make a mistake.
link |
00:08:28.820
But so far, there have been no observations
link |
00:08:32.340
of anything like a battle in which
link |
00:08:34.700
both sides maintain themselves.
link |
00:08:37.260
And I think you can very confidently say
link |
00:08:40.260
that overwhelmingly what happens is that
link |
00:08:42.740
if they discover that there's several individuals
link |
00:08:45.060
on the other side, then both sides retreat.
link |
00:08:48.220
Nobody wants to get hurt.
link |
00:08:50.300
What they want to do is to hurt others.
link |
00:08:52.020
Yes.
link |
00:08:52.860
So you mentioned Jane Goodall, you've worked with her.
link |
00:08:56.660
What was it like working with her?
link |
00:08:58.140
What have you learned from her?
link |
00:09:01.100
Well, she's a wonderfully independent, courageous person,
link |
00:09:04.740
you know, who she famously began her studies
link |
00:09:09.740
not as a qualified person in terms of education,
link |
00:09:14.740
but qualified only by enthusiasm and considerable experience,
link |
00:09:20.620
even in her early 20s, with nature.
link |
00:09:24.740
So she's courageous in the sense of being able
link |
00:09:27.380
to take on challenges.
link |
00:09:30.340
The thing that is very impressive about her
link |
00:09:32.740
is her total fidelity to the observations,
link |
00:09:37.740
very unwilling to extend beyond the observations,
link |
00:09:43.500
waiting until they mount up
link |
00:09:45.500
and you've really got a confident picture,
link |
00:09:49.140
and tremendous attention to individuals.
link |
00:09:53.860
So that was an interesting problem from her point of view,
link |
00:09:57.460
because when she got to know the chimpanzees of Gombe,
link |
00:10:02.460
this particular community of Kazakia,
link |
00:10:05.380
this particular community of Kazakia,
link |
00:10:08.020
about 60 individuals.
link |
00:10:10.900
So Gombe was in Tanzania on Lake Tanganyika.
link |
00:10:14.700
She was there initially with her mother,
link |
00:10:16.500
and then alone for two or three years
link |
00:10:20.420
of really intense observation,
link |
00:10:22.620
and then slowly joined by other people.
link |
00:10:26.220
What she discovered was that there were obvious differences
link |
00:10:31.620
in individual personality,
link |
00:10:34.540
and the difficulty about that
link |
00:10:35.860
was that when she reported this
link |
00:10:38.980
to the largest scientific world,
link |
00:10:43.020
initially her advisors at Cambridge,
link |
00:10:47.460
they said, well, we don't know how to handle that,
link |
00:10:49.900
because you've got to treat all these animals
link |
00:10:53.060
as the same basically,
link |
00:10:54.380
because there is no research tradition
link |
00:11:00.460
of thinking about personalities.
link |
00:11:03.220
Well, now, whatever it is, 60 years later,
link |
00:11:07.820
the study of personalities is a very rich part
link |
00:11:11.540
of the study of animal behavior.
link |
00:11:14.660
At any rate, the important point in terms of what was she like
link |
00:11:17.980
is that she stuck to her guns,
link |
00:11:19.220
and she absolutely insisted that we have to show,
link |
00:11:23.340
describe in great detail,
link |
00:11:25.260
the differences in personality among these individuals,
link |
00:11:28.380
and then you can leave it to the evolutionary biologist
link |
00:11:30.420
to think about what it means.
link |
00:11:32.660
So what is the process of observation like this like?
link |
00:11:37.900
Observing the personality,
link |
00:11:39.260
but also observing in a way
link |
00:11:41.580
that's not projecting your beliefs about human nature
link |
00:11:45.580
or animal nature onto chimps,
link |
00:11:48.820
which is probably really tempting to project.
link |
00:11:52.580
So your understanding of the way the human world works,
link |
00:11:55.980
projecting that onto the chimp world.
link |
00:11:59.460
Yes, I mean, it's particularly difficult with chimps
link |
00:12:01.620
because chimps are so similar to humans in their behavior
link |
00:12:05.220
that it's very easy to make those projections, as you say.
link |
00:12:10.900
The process involves making very clear definitions
link |
00:12:14.860
of what a behavior is.
link |
00:12:18.460
Aggression can be defined
link |
00:12:21.420
in terms of a forceful hit, a bite, and so on.
link |
00:12:26.740
And writing down every time these things happen,
link |
00:12:30.340
and then slowly totting up the numbers of times
link |
00:12:32.700
that they happen from individual A
link |
00:12:35.780
towards individuals B, C, D, and E,
link |
00:12:39.140
so that you build up a very concrete picture
link |
00:12:41.660
rather than interpreting at any point
link |
00:12:43.820
and stopping and saying,
link |
00:12:44.940
well, they seem to be rather aggressive.
link |
00:12:48.460
So the formal system is that you build up a pattern
link |
00:12:53.380
of the relationships based on a description
link |
00:12:57.420
of the different types of interactions,
link |
00:12:59.540
the aggressive and the friendly interactions,
link |
00:13:03.140
and all of these are defined in concrete.
link |
00:13:08.500
So from that, you extract a pattern of relationships,
link |
00:13:12.340
and the relationships can be defined as
link |
00:13:18.660
relatively friendly, relatively aggressive,
link |
00:13:22.500
competitive based on the frequency
link |
00:13:25.140
of these types of interactions.
link |
00:13:27.500
And so one can talk in terms of individuals
link |
00:13:31.020
having a relationship,
link |
00:13:32.940
which on the scores of friendliness
link |
00:13:35.060
is two standard deviations outside the mean.
link |
00:13:39.340
I mean, you know, it's...
link |
00:13:41.060
In which direction, sorry, both directions?
link |
00:13:45.700
One, I mean, you know, that would be obviously,
link |
00:13:48.020
the friendly ones would be the ones
link |
00:13:49.660
who have exceptionally high rates
link |
00:13:52.060
of spending time close to each other,
link |
00:13:54.460
of touching each other in a gentle way,
link |
00:13:56.580
of grooming each other,
link |
00:13:59.020
and by the way, finding that those things
link |
00:14:01.060
are correlated with each other.
link |
00:14:03.380
So it's possible to define a friendship
link |
00:14:06.940
with a capital F in a very systematic way,
link |
00:14:10.100
and to compare that between individuals,
link |
00:14:14.740
but also between communities of chimpanzees
link |
00:14:18.740
and between different species.
link |
00:14:21.060
So that, you know, we can say that in some species,
link |
00:14:23.420
individuals have friends and others don't at all.
link |
00:14:26.860
What about just because there's different personalities
link |
00:14:29.660
and because they're so fascinating,
link |
00:14:31.900
what about sort of falling in love
link |
00:14:33.620
or forming friendships with chimps, you know?
link |
00:14:37.220
Like really, you know,
link |
00:14:40.260
connecting with them as an observer.
link |
00:14:43.900
What role does that play?
link |
00:14:46.340
Is you're tracking these individuals
link |
00:14:47.980
that are full of life and intelligence
link |
00:14:50.780
for long periods of time, plus as a human,
link |
00:14:55.620
especially in those days for Jane,
link |
00:14:58.140
she's alone observing it.
link |
00:15:00.260
It gets lonely as a human.
link |
00:15:02.060
I mean, probably deeply lonely as a human
link |
00:15:04.740
being observed these other intelligent species.
link |
00:15:07.700
It's a very reasonable question.
link |
00:15:08.860
And of course, Jane in those early years,
link |
00:15:11.580
I think she's willing now to talk about the fact
link |
00:15:15.260
that she regrets to some extent how close she became.
link |
00:15:21.420
And the problem is not just from the humans,
link |
00:15:23.580
the problem is from the chimpanzees as well,
link |
00:15:25.420
because they do things that are extremely affectionate,
link |
00:15:31.580
if you like.
link |
00:15:32.660
You know, at one point, Jane offered a ripe fruit
link |
00:15:39.660
to a chimpanzee called David Greybeard.
link |
00:15:42.260
David Greybeard took it and squeezed her hand,
link |
00:15:47.660
as if to say thank you.
link |
00:15:48.860
I think he gave it back, if I remember rightly.
link |
00:15:53.500
No, thank you.
link |
00:15:55.020
Right.
link |
00:15:57.340
Oh, it's almost like thank you and returning the affection
link |
00:16:01.740
by giving the fruit, if they did something.
link |
00:16:03.980
You know, it was a gentle squeeze.
link |
00:16:05.980
I mean, chimpanzees could squeeze you very hard,
link |
00:16:08.100
as that occasionally has happened.
link |
00:16:11.380
Some chimps are aggressive to people,
link |
00:16:14.620
and others are friendly.
link |
00:16:16.660
And the ones that are friendly tend
link |
00:16:18.180
to be rather sympathetic characters,
link |
00:16:20.220
because they might be ones who are having problems
link |
00:16:24.180
in their own society.
link |
00:16:26.340
So, Joe Mio in Gombe used to come and sit next to me
link |
00:16:30.100
quite often, and he was having a hard time making it
link |
00:16:34.420
in that society, which I can describe to you
link |
00:16:36.820
in terms of the number of aggressive interactions,
link |
00:16:39.020
if you want, but just to be informed about it.
link |
00:16:43.300
So, all of this is a temptation to be very firmly resisted.
link |
00:16:49.140
And in the community that I've been working with in Uganda
link |
00:16:52.260
for the last 30 years, we try extremely hard to impress
link |
00:16:56.060
on all of the research students who come with us,
link |
00:16:58.380
that it is absolutely vital that you do not fall
link |
00:17:01.700
into that temptation.
link |
00:17:02.740
Now, we heard a story of one person who did reach out
link |
00:17:07.020
and touch one of our chimps.
link |
00:17:09.340
It's a very, very bad idea, not because the chimp
link |
00:17:13.220
is going to do anything violent at the time,
link |
00:17:18.540
but because if they learn that humans are as weak physically
link |
00:17:24.380
as we are compared to them, then they
link |
00:17:26.300
can take advantage of it, us.
link |
00:17:28.780
And that's what happened in Gombe.
link |
00:17:30.780
So after Jane had done the very obvious thing
link |
00:17:35.340
when you're first engaged in this game of allowing
link |
00:17:40.180
the infants to approach her and then tickling them
link |
00:17:42.780
and playing with them, some of those infants
link |
00:17:47.420
had the personality of wanting to take advantage
link |
00:17:50.900
of that knowledge later.
link |
00:17:53.340
And so you had an individual, Frodo,
link |
00:17:56.060
who was violent on a regular basis towards humans
link |
00:17:59.940
when he was an adult, and he was quite dangerous.
link |
00:18:01.820
He could easily have killed someone.
link |
00:18:03.060
In fact, he did kill one person.
link |
00:18:05.100
He killed a baby that he took from a mother, a human baby
link |
00:18:11.060
that he took off her hip when he met her on the path.
link |
00:18:15.260
So it's a reminder that we're dealing with a species that
link |
00:18:20.860
are rather human like in the range of emotions they have,
link |
00:18:24.500
in the capacities they have, and even in the strength they
link |
00:18:28.660
have, they are, in many ways, stronger than humans.
link |
00:18:33.140
So you've got to be careful.
link |
00:18:37.220
In the full range of friendliness and violence,
link |
00:18:39.980
the capacity for these very human things.
link |
00:18:44.100
Yes.
link |
00:18:44.620
I mean, it's very obvious with violence,
link |
00:18:47.340
as we talked about, that they will kill.
link |
00:18:50.260
They will kill not just strangers.
link |
00:18:53.340
They can kill other adults within their own group.
link |
00:18:57.660
They can kill babies that are strangers.
link |
00:18:59.700
They can kill babies in their own group.
link |
00:19:01.260
So this is a long lived individual.
link |
00:19:04.420
Obviously, these killings can't have very often,
link |
00:19:06.700
because otherwise they'd all be dead.
link |
00:19:09.380
And we're now finding that they can live to 50 or 60 years
link |
00:19:13.460
in the wild at relatively low population density,
link |
00:19:16.180
because they're big animals eating a rather specialized
link |
00:19:18.620
kind of food, the ripe fruits.
link |
00:19:22.420
So it doesn't happen all the time.
link |
00:19:23.940
With friendliness, they are very strong to support each other.
link |
00:19:28.820
They very much depend on their close friendships,
link |
00:19:34.660
which they express through physical contact,
link |
00:19:38.940
and particularly through grooming.
link |
00:19:41.620
So grooming occurs when one individual approaches another.
link |
00:19:46.140
I might present for grooming, a very common way of starting,
link |
00:19:50.820
turning their back or presenting an arm or something
link |
00:19:53.500
like that, and the other just riffles their fingers
link |
00:19:56.020
through the hair.
link |
00:19:57.820
And that's partly just soothing.
link |
00:20:00.500
And it's partly looking for parasites,
link |
00:20:04.340
but mostly it's just soothing.
link |
00:20:06.380
And the point about this is it can go on for half an hour.
link |
00:20:12.020
It can go on for sometimes even an hour.
link |
00:20:15.420
So this is a major expression of interest in somebody else.
link |
00:20:21.300
When did your interest in this one particular aspect of Chim
link |
00:20:26.780
come to be, which is violence?
link |
00:20:28.900
When did the study of violence in Chim's become something
link |
00:20:32.980
you're deeply interested in?
link |
00:20:35.740
Well, for my PhD in the early 1970s,
link |
00:20:41.460
I was in Gombe with Jane Goodall and was
link |
00:20:43.980
studying feeding behavior.
link |
00:20:46.140
But during that time, we were seeing,
link |
00:20:49.060
and I say we because there were half a dozen research students
link |
00:20:53.740
all in her camp, we were discovering
link |
00:21:00.180
that Chim's had this capacity for violence.
link |
00:21:05.020
The first kill happened during that time,
link |
00:21:07.500
which was of an infant and a neighboring group.
link |
00:21:11.660
And we were starting to see these hunting expeditions.
link |
00:21:16.060
And this was the start of my interest
link |
00:21:18.820
because it was such chilling evidence
link |
00:21:21.780
of an extraordinary similarity between Chim's and humans.
link |
00:21:28.340
Now, at that time, we didn't know very much
link |
00:21:32.300
about how chimpanzees and humans were related.
link |
00:21:36.100
Chimps, gorillas, bonobos are all three big black hairy things
link |
00:21:41.460
that live in the African forests and eat fruits and leaves
link |
00:21:46.860
when they can't find fruits and walk on their knuckles.
link |
00:21:50.220
And they all look rather similar to each other.
link |
00:21:51.780
So they seem as though those three species,
link |
00:21:54.780
chimps and gorillas and bonobos,
link |
00:21:56.700
should all be each other's closest relatives.
link |
00:21:59.380
And humans are something rather separate.
link |
00:22:01.500
And so any of them would be of interest to us.
link |
00:22:04.660
Subsequently, we learn that actually that's not true
link |
00:22:08.540
and that there's a special relationship between humans
link |
00:22:11.300
and chimpanzees.
link |
00:22:13.340
But at the time, even without knowing that,
link |
00:22:15.900
it was obvious that there was something very odd about chimpanzees
link |
00:22:20.020
because Jane had discovered they were making tools.
link |
00:22:25.380
She had seen that they were hunting meat.
link |
00:22:29.020
She had seen that they were sharing the meat among each other.
link |
00:22:33.140
She had seen that the societies were dominated politically
link |
00:22:36.420
by males, coalitions of males.
link |
00:22:38.620
All of these things, of course, resonate so closely with humans.
link |
00:22:43.100
And then it turns out that in contrast
link |
00:22:47.340
to conventional wisdom at the time,
link |
00:22:50.020
the chimpanzees were capable of hunting and killing
link |
00:22:53.740
members of neighboring groups.
link |
00:22:56.620
Well, at that point, the similarities
link |
00:23:00.340
between chimps and humans become less
link |
00:23:04.020
a matter of sheer intellectual fascination
link |
00:23:09.140
than something that has a really deep meaning
link |
00:23:11.500
about our understanding of ourselves.
link |
00:23:15.580
I mean, until then, you can cheerfully think of humans
link |
00:23:19.700
as a species apart from the rest of nature
link |
00:23:22.940
because we are so peculiar.
link |
00:23:24.740
But when it turns out that, as it turns out,
link |
00:23:28.460
one of our two closest relatives has got these features
link |
00:23:33.420
that we share and that one of the features
link |
00:23:36.580
is something that is the most horrendous, as well as
link |
00:23:41.380
fascinating, aspect of human behavior,
link |
00:23:44.580
then how can you resist just trying
link |
00:23:48.060
to find out what's going on?
link |
00:23:49.940
So I have to say this.
link |
00:23:51.620
I'm not sure if you're familiar with a man,
link |
00:23:54.380
but fans of this podcast are.
link |
00:23:56.300
So we're talking about chimps.
link |
00:23:58.460
We're talking about violence.
link |
00:23:59.940
My now friend, Mr. Joe Rogan, is a big fan of those things.
link |
00:24:04.300
I'm a big fan of these topics.
link |
00:24:06.140
I think a lot of people are fascinated by these topics.
link |
00:24:10.140
So as you're saying, why do we find the exploration of violence
link |
00:24:17.540
and the relations between chimps so interesting?
link |
00:24:20.860
What can they teach us about ourselves?
link |
00:24:26.180
Until we had this information about chimpanzees,
link |
00:24:29.820
it was possible to believe that the psychology behind warfare
link |
00:24:40.100
was totally the result of some kind
link |
00:24:44.580
of recent cultural innovation that had nothing
link |
00:24:50.100
to do with our biology, or if you like,
link |
00:24:53.260
that it's got something to do with sin and God and the devil
link |
00:24:58.620
and that sort of thing.
link |
00:25:00.900
But what the chimps tell us after we think carefully about it
link |
00:25:08.100
is that it seems undoubtedly the case
link |
00:25:11.660
that our evolutionary psychology has given us
link |
00:25:18.460
the same kind of attitude towards violence
link |
00:25:22.660
as occurred in chimpanzees.
link |
00:25:26.420
And in both species, it has evolved
link |
00:25:29.340
because of its evolutionary significance.
link |
00:25:32.060
In other words, because it's been helpful to the individuals
link |
00:25:36.060
who have practiced it.
link |
00:25:37.820
And now we know that, as I mentioned,
link |
00:25:41.860
other species do this as well.
link |
00:25:44.140
In fact, wolves, which this is a really kind
link |
00:25:49.380
of an ironical observation, Conrad Lorenz, who I mentioned,
link |
00:25:54.940
had been the person who thought that human aggression
link |
00:25:59.620
in the form of killing members of our own species
link |
00:26:01.980
was unique to our species.
link |
00:26:04.100
He was a great fan of wolves.
link |
00:26:05.580
He studied wolves.
link |
00:26:06.980
And in captivity, he noted that wolves
link |
00:26:09.900
are very unlikely to harm each other in spats
link |
00:26:15.060
among members of the same group.
link |
00:26:17.420
What happens is that one of them will roll over
link |
00:26:19.140
and present their neck, much as you see in a dog park nowadays.
link |
00:26:22.380
And the other might put their jaws on the neck,
link |
00:26:25.700
but will not bite.
link |
00:26:27.780
OK, so now it turns out that if you study wolves in the wild,
link |
00:26:31.860
then neighboring packs often go hunting for each other.
link |
00:26:36.740
They are in fierce competition.
link |
00:26:39.300
And as much as 50% of the mortality of wolves
link |
00:26:43.700
is due to being killed by other wolves, adult mortality.
link |
00:26:48.300
So it's a really serious business.
link |
00:26:51.300
The chimpanzees and humans fit into a larger pattern
link |
00:26:55.500
of understanding animals in which you don't
link |
00:27:00.140
have an instinct for violence.
link |
00:27:02.020
What you have is an instinct, if you like,
link |
00:27:05.100
to use violence adaptively.
link |
00:27:07.780
And if the right circumstances come up, it'll be adaptive.
link |
00:27:11.700
If the right circumstances don't come up, it won't be.
link |
00:27:14.740
So some chimpanzee communities are much more
link |
00:27:17.940
violent than others because of things
link |
00:27:20.180
like the frequency with which a large party of males
link |
00:27:25.140
is likely to meet a lone victim.
link |
00:27:28.020
And that's going to depend on the local ecology.
link |
00:27:31.860
But the overall answer to the question of what a chimps teach
link |
00:27:37.020
us is that we have to take very seriously the notion
link |
00:27:41.540
that in humans, the tendency to make war
link |
00:27:47.780
is a consequence of a long term evolutionary adaptation
link |
00:27:52.420
and not just a military ideology or some local patriarchal
link |
00:27:58.380
phenomenon.
link |
00:28:00.420
And of course, a reading of history,
link |
00:28:03.020
a judicious reading of history, fits that very easily
link |
00:28:07.100
because war is so commonplace.
link |
00:28:10.780
It's not an accident.
link |
00:28:11.780
So it's not a construction of human civilization.
link |
00:28:15.460
It's deeply within us, violence.
link |
00:28:17.540
So what's the difference between violence
link |
00:28:20.420
on the individual level versus group?
link |
00:28:24.700
It seems like with chimps and with wolves,
link |
00:28:26.860
there's something about the dynamic of multiple chimps
link |
00:28:32.700
together that increase the chance of violence.
link |
00:28:36.260
Or is violence still fundamentally
link |
00:28:39.540
part of the individual?
link |
00:28:40.980
Like would an individual be as violent as they might
link |
00:28:45.940
be as part of a group?
link |
00:28:47.940
If we're talking about killing, then violence
link |
00:28:53.220
in the sense of killing is very much associated
link |
00:28:56.100
with a group.
link |
00:28:59.020
And the reason is that individuals
link |
00:29:02.820
don't benefit by getting into a fight in which they risk being
link |
00:29:06.860
hurt themselves.
link |
00:29:08.700
So it's only when you have overwhelming power
link |
00:29:12.660
that the temptation to try and kill another victim
link |
00:29:16.740
rises sufficiently for them to be motivated to do it.
link |
00:29:21.620
The average number of chimpanzee males
link |
00:29:27.860
that attack a single male in something like 50 observations
link |
00:29:33.140
that have accumulated in the last 50 years
link |
00:29:35.940
from various different study sites is eight.
link |
00:29:40.220
Eight to one.
link |
00:29:41.900
Now, sometimes it can go as low as three to one.
link |
00:29:46.780
But that's getting risky.
link |
00:29:49.420
But if you have eight, you can see what can happen.
link |
00:29:51.660
I mean, basically, you have one male on one foot,
link |
00:29:55.860
another male on another foot, another male on an arm,
link |
00:29:58.060
another male on another arm.
link |
00:29:59.620
Now you have an immobilized victim
link |
00:30:02.460
with four individuals capable of just doing the damage.
link |
00:30:06.260
And so they can then move in and tear out
link |
00:30:07.980
his thorax and tear off his testicles
link |
00:30:10.140
and twist an arm until it breaks.
link |
00:30:12.540
And do this appalling damage with no weapons.
link |
00:30:18.460
What is the way in which they prefer to commit the violence?
link |
00:30:23.620
Is there something to be said about the actual process of it?
link |
00:30:27.780
Is there an artistry to it?
link |
00:30:29.340
So if you look at human warfare,
link |
00:30:32.380
there's different parts in history
link |
00:30:34.140
prefer different kind of approaches to violence.
link |
00:30:37.820
It had more to do with tools, I think, on the human side.
link |
00:30:41.180
But just the nature of violence itself,
link |
00:30:44.740
sorry, the practice, the strategy of violence,
link |
00:30:47.500
is it basically the same?
link |
00:30:49.100
You improvise, you immobilize the victim,
link |
00:30:53.420
and they just rip off different parts of their body
link |
00:30:55.500
kind of thing.
link |
00:30:56.780
Yeah, you have to understand that these things are happening
link |
00:31:00.700
at high speed in thick vegetation, mostly.
link |
00:31:06.140
So they have not been filmed carefully.
link |
00:31:10.180
We have a few little glimpses of them
link |
00:31:13.660
from one or two people like David Watts.
link |
00:31:16.540
He's got some great video.
link |
00:31:17.900
But we don't know enough to be able to say that.
link |
00:31:21.340
It's hard for me to imagine that there are styles that
link |
00:31:24.020
vary between communities, cultural styles.
link |
00:31:28.420
But it is possible.
link |
00:31:30.140
And one thing that is striking is
link |
00:31:32.980
that the number of times that an individual victim has
link |
00:31:37.300
been killed immediately has been higher in Kibali
link |
00:31:43.340
forest in Uganda than in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
link |
00:31:48.620
It's conceivable that's just chance.
link |
00:31:50.140
We don't have real numbers now.
link |
00:31:51.860
But I can't remember exact numbers.
link |
00:31:55.380
But 10 versus 15 or something.
link |
00:32:00.140
So maybe they damage to the point of expecting a death
link |
00:32:06.420
in one place, and they just finish it off in the other.
link |
00:32:09.140
But most likely, that sort of difference
link |
00:32:12.060
will be due to differences in the numbers of attackers.
link |
00:32:17.100
You know, human beings are able to conceive
link |
00:32:19.860
of the philosophical notion of death, of mortality.
link |
00:32:23.380
Is there any of that for chimps when they're
link |
00:32:29.340
thinking about violence?
link |
00:32:30.460
Is violence, like what is the nature
link |
00:32:33.500
of their conception of violence, do you think?
link |
00:32:36.500
Do they realize they're taking another conscious being's life?
link |
00:32:41.580
Or is it some kind of optimization
link |
00:32:45.940
over the use of resources or something like that?
link |
00:32:50.500
I don't think it's.
link |
00:32:52.380
I can't think of any way to get an answer
link |
00:32:54.220
to the question of what they know about that.
link |
00:32:58.020
I think that the way to think about the motivation
link |
00:33:03.220
is rather like the motivation in sex.
link |
00:33:09.780
So when males are interested in having sex with a female,
link |
00:33:14.540
whether it's in chimpanzees or in humans,
link |
00:33:18.780
they don't think about the fact that what this is going to do
link |
00:33:21.940
is to lead to a baby.
link |
00:33:24.060
Mostly.
link |
00:33:25.180
You're right.
link |
00:33:25.860
Mostly what they're thinking about is,
link |
00:33:27.540
I want to get my end away.
link |
00:33:29.820
And I think that it's a similar kind of process
link |
00:33:34.420
with the chimps.
link |
00:33:35.700
What they are thinking about is, I
link |
00:33:38.980
want to kill this individual.
link |
00:33:41.620
And it's hard to imagine that taking the other individual's
link |
00:33:46.780
perspective and thinking about what it means for them to die
link |
00:33:50.180
is going to be an important part of that.
link |
00:33:51.700
In fact, there's reasons to think it should not
link |
00:33:54.180
be an important part of it because it might inhibit them.
link |
00:33:56.620
They don't want to be inhibited.
link |
00:33:57.900
The more efficient they are in doing this, the better.
link |
00:34:01.500
But I think it's interesting to think
link |
00:34:03.180
about this whole motivational question
link |
00:34:04.700
because it does produce the sort of rather haunting thought
link |
00:34:09.740
that there has been selection in favor of enthusiasm
link |
00:34:14.580
about killing.
link |
00:34:16.980
And in our relatively gentle and deliberately moral society
link |
00:34:24.740
that we have today, it's very difficult for us
link |
00:34:27.940
to face the thought that in all of us,
link |
00:34:32.460
there might have been a residue and more than that,
link |
00:34:38.700
sort of an active potential for that thought
link |
00:34:43.580
of really enjoying killing someone else.
link |
00:34:47.620
But I think one can sustain that thought fairly obviously
link |
00:34:52.580
by thinking of circumstances in which it would be true
link |
00:34:57.940
that the ordinary human male would be delighted to be part
link |
00:35:04.220
of a group that was killing someone.
link |
00:35:06.620
What you've got to do is to be in a position
link |
00:35:10.380
where you're regarding the victim as dangerous
link |
00:35:14.220
and thoroughly hostile.
link |
00:35:17.580
But the pure enjoyment of violence.
link |
00:35:21.780
I don't know if you know this historian, Dan Carlin.
link |
00:35:24.700
He has a podcast.
link |
00:35:26.060
He has an episode, three, four hour episode
link |
00:35:32.020
that I recommend to others.
link |
00:35:33.180
It's quite haunting.
link |
00:35:34.860
But he takes us through an entire history.
link |
00:35:38.260
It's called pain foetainment.
link |
00:35:40.700
The history of humans enjoying the murder of others
link |
00:35:47.620
in a large group.
link |
00:35:48.820
So like public executions were part of,
link |
00:35:51.740
long part of human history.
link |
00:35:53.540
And there's something that for some reason humans seem
link |
00:35:58.980
to have been drawn to just watching others die.
link |
00:36:03.260
And he ventures to say that that may still be part of us.
link |
00:36:06.740
For example, he said if it was possible to televise,
link |
00:36:11.340
to stream online, for example, the execution and the murder
link |
00:36:15.300
of somebody or even the torture of somebody,
link |
00:36:17.940
that a very large fraction of the population
link |
00:36:22.740
on Earth would not be able to look away.
link |
00:36:24.940
They'd be drawn to that somehow.
link |
00:36:26.700
That's a very dark thought that we were drawn to that.
link |
00:36:31.660
So you think that's part of us in there somewhere.
link |
00:36:33.940
That selection that we evolved for the enjoyment of killing
link |
00:36:39.260
and the enjoyment of observing those in our tribe doing
link |
00:36:46.740
the killing.
link |
00:36:48.260
Yes.
link |
00:36:48.700
I mean, and that word you produced at the end
link |
00:36:51.100
is critical, I think, because it would be a little bit weird,
link |
00:36:56.220
I think, to imagine a lot of enjoyment about people
link |
00:37:02.020
in your own tribe being killed.
link |
00:37:03.580
Right.
link |
00:37:04.580
I don't think we're interested in violence for violence's sake
link |
00:37:07.620
that much.
link |
00:37:09.820
It's when you get these social boundaries set up.
link |
00:37:15.340
And in today's world, happily, we kind of are already one world.
link |
00:37:25.620
You have to dehumanise someone to get to the point
link |
00:37:29.140
where they are really outside our recognition of a tribe
link |
00:37:34.140
at some level, which is the whole human species.
link |
00:37:37.300
But in ancient times, that would not have been true.
link |
00:37:41.100
Because in ancient times, there are
link |
00:37:44.340
lots of accounts of hunters and gatherers
link |
00:37:47.220
in which the appearance of a stranger
link |
00:37:51.900
would lead to an immediate response of shooting on site.
link |
00:37:57.380
Because what was human was the people
link |
00:38:00.540
that were in your society.
link |
00:38:03.180
And the other things that actually looked like us
link |
00:38:06.100
and were human in that sense were not regarded as human.
link |
00:38:10.660
So there was a kind of automatic dehumanisation
link |
00:38:13.620
of everybody that didn't speak our language
link |
00:38:16.140
or hadn't already somehow become recognised as sufficiently
link |
00:38:23.300
like us to escape the dehumanisation context.
link |
00:38:27.780
And so hopefully the story of human history
link |
00:38:29.980
is that we are that tribalism fades away,
link |
00:38:35.260
that our dehumanisation, the natural desire to dehumanise
link |
00:38:39.100
or tendency to dehumanise groups that are not
link |
00:38:42.740
within this tribe decreases over time.
link |
00:38:45.820
And so then the desire for violence decreases over time.
link |
00:38:49.740
Yeah, I mean, that's the optimistic perspective.
link |
00:38:52.500
And the great sort of concern, of course,
link |
00:38:56.220
is that small conflicts can build up into bigger conflicts
link |
00:39:00.340
and then dehumanisation happens and then violence is released.
link |
00:39:04.780
As Hannah Arendt says, there currently
link |
00:39:07.220
is no known alternative to war as a means of settling
link |
00:39:12.260
really important conflicts.
link |
00:39:16.540
So if we look at the big picture, what role has violence
link |
00:39:20.820
or do you think violence has played
link |
00:39:22.500
in the evolution of Homo sapiens?
link |
00:39:25.020
So we are quite an intelligent, got a beautiful,
link |
00:39:29.660
particular little branch on the evolutionary tree.
link |
00:39:34.180
What part of that was played by our tendency to be violent?
link |
00:39:38.900
Well, I think that violence was responsible
link |
00:39:41.140
for creating your Homo sapiens.
link |
00:39:46.340
And that raises the question of what Homo sapiens is.
link |
00:39:52.220
Yes.
link |
00:39:54.220
Yeah, exactly.
link |
00:39:56.220
So nowadays people begin the concept of what Homo sapiens is
link |
00:40:05.580
by thinking about features that are very obviously different
link |
00:40:09.460
from all of the other species of Homo.
link |
00:40:12.460
And our large brain, our very rounded cranium,
link |
00:40:18.260
our relatively small face, these are characteristics
link |
00:40:21.340
which are developed in a relatively modern way
link |
00:40:24.780
by about 170,000 years ago, say, you know,
link |
00:40:28.820
it's one of the earliest skulls in Africa
link |
00:40:31.020
that really captures that.
link |
00:40:33.020
But it has been argued that that is an episode
link |
00:40:40.820
in a process that has been started substantially earlier.
link |
00:40:46.860
And there's no doubt that that's true.
link |
00:40:48.460
Homo sapiens is a species that has been changing
link |
00:40:51.700
pretty continuously throughout the length of time it's there.
link |
00:40:56.700
And it goes back to 300,000 years ago,
link |
00:40:59.700
315, naturally, is the time, the best estimate of a date
link |
00:41:05.300
for a series of bones from Morocco that have been dated
link |
00:41:11.140
three or four years ago at that time
link |
00:41:13.420
and have been characterized as earliest Homo sapiens.
link |
00:41:17.620
Now, at that point, they are only beginning
link |
00:41:22.060
the trend of sapienization.
link |
00:41:24.220
And that trend consists basically
link |
00:41:26.620
of grassanization, of making our ancestors less robust,
link |
00:41:32.940
shorter faces, smaller teeth, smaller brow ridge,
link |
00:41:36.780
narrower face, thinner cranium,
link |
00:41:41.540
all these things that are associated with reduced violence.
link |
00:41:47.860
OK, so that's saying what, that's Homo sapiens beginning.
link |
00:41:52.340
So it began sometime 300,000 to 400,000 years ago,
link |
00:41:56.660
because by 315,000 years ago, you've already
link |
00:41:58.660
got something recognizable.
link |
00:42:00.100
So you're more on that side of things
link |
00:42:02.060
that those are this gradual process.
link |
00:42:03.500
It's not 150,000, 170,000 years ago.
link |
00:42:06.100
It started like 400,000 years ago, and it's just.
link |
00:42:11.060
It started 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.
link |
00:42:13.140
And if you look at 170,000, it's got even more like us.
link |
00:42:16.700
And if you look at 100,000, it's got
link |
00:42:19.900
100,000, if you look at 100,000, it's got more like us again.
link |
00:42:23.500
And if you look at 50,000, it's more like us again.
link |
00:42:25.380
It's all the way.
link |
00:42:26.300
It's just getting more and more like the moderns.
link |
00:42:29.100
So the question is, what happened between 300,000
link |
00:42:31.220
and 400,000 years ago to produce Homo sapiens?
link |
00:42:34.660
And I think we have a pretty good answer now.
link |
00:42:38.060
And the answer comes from violence.
link |
00:42:40.100
And the story begins by focusing on this question.
link |
00:42:44.060
Why is it that in the human species,
link |
00:42:49.060
we are unique among all primates in not having
link |
00:42:53.220
an alpha male in any group in the sense
link |
00:42:57.660
that what we don't have is an alpha male who personally beats
link |
00:43:01.900
up every other male?
link |
00:43:05.220
And the answer that has been portrayed most richly
link |
00:43:13.580
by Christopher Boehm and whose work I've elaborated on
link |
00:43:18.700
is that only in humans do you have a system by which
link |
00:43:25.940
any male who tries to bully others and become the alpha
link |
00:43:31.460
equivalent to an alpha gorilla or an alpha chimpanzee
link |
00:43:34.260
or an alpha bonobo or an alpha baboon or anything like that,
link |
00:43:37.460
any male who tries to do that in humans
link |
00:43:40.540
gets taken down by a coalition of beta males.
link |
00:43:46.620
That coalition?
link |
00:43:47.820
Yes.
link |
00:43:49.220
It's a really good picture of human society, yes.
link |
00:43:52.100
I like it.
link |
00:43:52.780
OK.
link |
00:43:53.700
And that's the way all our societies work now.
link |
00:43:55.540
Yes.
link |
00:43:56.420
Because individuals try and be alpha
link |
00:43:58.620
and then they get taken out.
link |
00:43:59.980
Yeah, I mean, we don't usually think of ourselves
link |
00:44:01.940
as beta males, but yes, I suppose that's what democracy is.
link |
00:44:06.420
Exactly, yes.
link |
00:44:07.620
Exactly.
link |
00:44:09.780
OK, so at some point, alpha males get taken out.
link |
00:44:14.500
Well, what alpha males are are males
link |
00:44:16.740
who respond with high reactive violence
link |
00:44:20.580
to any challenge to their status.
link |
00:44:22.700
You see it all the time in primates.
link |
00:44:25.020
Some beta male thinks he's getting strong
link |
00:44:27.980
and maturing in wisdom and so on,
link |
00:44:31.620
and he refuses to kowtow to the alpha male.
link |
00:44:35.820
And the alpha male comes straight in and charges at him.
link |
00:44:39.300
Or maybe he'll just wait for a few minutes or over
link |
00:44:42.100
and then take an opportunity to attack him.
link |
00:44:46.260
All of these primates have got a high tendency
link |
00:44:51.260
for reactive aggression, and that
link |
00:44:53.900
enables the possibility of alpha males.
link |
00:44:56.340
We don't.
link |
00:44:57.140
We have this great reduction, as I talked about earlier.
link |
00:45:00.340
And the question is, when did that reduction happen?
link |
00:45:03.940
Well, cut to the famous experiments
link |
00:45:08.460
by the Russian biologist Dmitry Believ, who
link |
00:45:12.820
tried domesticating wild animals.
link |
00:45:17.540
When you domesticate wild animals,
link |
00:45:19.860
what you're doing is reducing reactive aggression.
link |
00:45:24.620
You are selecting those individuals
link |
00:45:26.740
to breed who are most willing to be approached by a human
link |
00:45:31.900
or by another member of their own species
link |
00:45:34.300
and are least likely to erupt in a reactive aggression.
link |
00:45:39.940
And you only have to do that for a few generations
link |
00:45:42.900
to discover that there are changes in the skull.
link |
00:45:47.020
And those changes consist of shorter face, smaller teeth,
link |
00:45:57.020
reduced maleness.
link |
00:45:59.300
The males become increasingly female like,
link |
00:46:03.100
and reduced brain size.
link |
00:46:06.300
Well, the changes that are characteristic
link |
00:46:08.380
of domesticated animals in general compared to wild animals
link |
00:46:11.860
are all found in homo sapiens compared to our early ancestors.
link |
00:46:16.620
So it's a very strong signal that when we first
link |
00:46:19.860
see homo sapiens, what we're seeing
link |
00:46:21.740
is evidence of a reduction in reactive aggression.
link |
00:46:26.220
And that suggests that what's happening with homo sapiens
link |
00:46:29.340
is that that is the point at which there is selection
link |
00:46:33.460
against the alpha males.
link |
00:46:35.460
And therefore, the way in which the selection happened
link |
00:46:39.300
would have been the way it happens today.
link |
00:46:41.460
The beta males take them out.
link |
00:46:44.180
So I think that homo sapiens is a species characterized
link |
00:46:49.020
by the suppression of reactive aggression
link |
00:46:53.260
as a kind of incidental consequence
link |
00:46:55.340
of the suppression of the alpha male.
link |
00:46:58.460
And the story of our species is the story
link |
00:47:01.780
of how the beta males took charge and have
link |
00:47:06.620
been responsible for the generation of a new kind
link |
00:47:11.300
of human and, incidentally, for imposing on the society
link |
00:47:21.140
a new set of values.
link |
00:47:24.180
Because when those beta males discovered
link |
00:47:26.700
that they could take out the previous alpha male
link |
00:47:29.900
and continue to do so, because in every generation,
link |
00:47:32.180
there'll always be some male who says,
link |
00:47:34.100
maybe I'll become the alpha male.
link |
00:47:36.180
So they just keep chopping them down.
link |
00:47:39.580
In discovering that, they also obviously discovered
link |
00:47:42.380
that they could kill anybody in the group, females,
link |
00:47:46.580
young males, anybody who didn't follow their values.
link |
00:47:52.940
And so this story is one in which the males of our species,
link |
00:47:59.580
and these would be the breeding males,
link |
00:48:02.980
have been able to impose their values on everybody else.
link |
00:48:06.740
And there is two kind of values.
link |
00:48:08.100
There's one kind of value is things
link |
00:48:09.620
that are good for the group, like thou shalt not murder.
link |
00:48:13.900
And the other kind of value is things
link |
00:48:16.060
that are good for the males, such as, hey, guess what?
link |
00:48:21.180
When good food comes in, males get it first.
link |
00:48:23.420
Yes.
link |
00:48:25.500
I mean, it's fascinating that that kind of set of ideals
link |
00:48:28.460
could outcompete the others.
link |
00:48:32.980
Do you have a sense of why?
link |
00:48:35.340
Or maybe you can comment on Neanderthals
link |
00:48:37.420
and all the other early humans.
link |
00:48:39.180
Why did homo sapiens come to succeed and flourish
link |
00:48:44.300
and all the other branches of evolution died out?
link |
00:48:50.540
Or got murdered out?
link |
00:48:51.700
Nowadays, when homo sapiens meet homo sapiens,
link |
00:48:55.980
and we don't know each other initially,
link |
00:48:59.140
then conflict breaks out, and the more militarily able group
link |
00:49:05.540
wins.
link |
00:49:06.900
We've seen that everywhere throughout the age of exploration
link |
00:49:10.900
and throughout history.
link |
00:49:14.300
So I'm rather surprised.
link |
00:49:16.100
The conventional wisdom that you see nowadays
link |
00:49:20.420
in contemporary anthropology is very
link |
00:49:23.620
reluctant to point to success in warfare
link |
00:49:28.260
as the reason why sapiens wiped out Neanderthals
link |
00:49:32.380
within about 3,000 years of the sapiens coming
link |
00:49:35.820
into Europe 43,000 years ago.
link |
00:49:39.660
And people are much more inclined to say,
link |
00:49:42.180
well, the Neanderthals were at low population density,
link |
00:49:45.100
so they just couldn't survive the demographic sweep.
link |
00:49:51.500
Or the disease came in, and maybe those things
link |
00:49:55.540
might have been important.
link |
00:49:56.500
But far and away, the most obvious possibility
link |
00:49:59.940
is that sapiens were just powerful.
link |
00:50:07.740
Everyone agrees they had larger groups.
link |
00:50:10.300
They had better weapons.
link |
00:50:12.460
They had projectile weapons, bows and arrows
link |
00:50:15.780
to judge from the little microlyth, bits of flake,
link |
00:50:21.940
which the Neanderthals didn't.
link |
00:50:25.100
Nowadays, there's evidence of interbreeding,
link |
00:50:28.940
quite extensive interbreeding between sapiens and Neanderthals,
link |
00:50:33.060
as well as with some other groups.
link |
00:50:35.100
And sometimes people say, well, so they loved each other.
link |
00:50:38.460
They made love not war.
link |
00:50:40.380
I think they made love and war.
link |
00:50:42.740
And it wouldn't necessarily mean too loving.
link |
00:50:46.500
I mean, if you just follow through
link |
00:50:49.220
from typical ethnographies nowadays
link |
00:50:51.660
of when dominant groups meet subordinate groups,
link |
00:50:55.380
they didn't know each other, then
link |
00:50:57.980
you can imagine that Neanderthal females would essentially
link |
00:51:00.980
be captured and taken into sapiens groups.
link |
00:51:07.100
Maybe you can comment on this cautiously
link |
00:51:12.380
and eloquently, what's the role of sexual violence
link |
00:51:16.340
in human evolution?
link |
00:51:18.140
Because you mentioned taking Neanderthal females.
link |
00:51:21.460
You've also mentioned that some of these rules
link |
00:51:23.900
are defined by the male side of the society.
link |
00:51:28.780
What's the role of sexual violence in this story?
link |
00:51:33.060
I think you've got to distinguish between groups
link |
00:51:34.820
and within groups.
link |
00:51:35.620
And I think the world has been slowly waking up
link |
00:51:43.220
over the last several decades to the fact
link |
00:51:46.540
that sexual violence is routine in war.
link |
00:51:52.660
And that to me says that it's just another example of power
link |
00:51:59.060
corrupts because when frustrated, scared, elated soldiers
link |
00:52:09.300
come upon females in a group that there's
link |
00:52:13.780
been essential dehumanization of, then they get carried away
link |
00:52:19.340
by opportunity.
link |
00:52:21.860
It is not always possible to argue
link |
00:52:25.140
that this is adaptive nowadays because you get lots and lots
link |
00:52:30.540
of stories of women being abused to the point of being killed.
link |
00:52:38.780
She'll be gang raped and then killed.
link |
00:52:41.260
There's lots of terrible cases of that reported
link |
00:52:46.180
from all sorts of different wars.
link |
00:52:49.620
But you can see that that could build on a pattern
link |
00:52:54.900
that would have been adaptive if happening under much less
link |
00:52:59.860
extreme circumstances.
link |
00:53:02.940
The war is very extreme nowadays in the sense
link |
00:53:05.860
that you get battles in which people are sent by a military
link |
00:53:10.220
hierarchy into a war situation in which they do not
link |
00:53:13.500
feel what hunters and gatherers would typically
link |
00:53:15.820
have felt, which would have been that if we attack,
link |
00:53:18.660
we have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
link |
00:53:21.980
Nowadays, you're sent in across the Somme or whatever it is
link |
00:53:25.860
and there's a very high chance you will be killed.
link |
00:53:28.700
And that's totally unnatural and a novel evolutionary
link |
00:53:32.060
experience, I think.
link |
00:53:34.820
Then there's sexual coercion within groups.
link |
00:53:37.540
And so that takes various kinds of forms.
link |
00:53:43.300
But nowadays, of course, I think people
link |
00:53:45.700
recognize increasingly that the principal form
link |
00:53:49.660
of sexual intimidation and rape occurs within relationships.
link |
00:53:58.420
It's not stranger rape that is really statistically important.
link |
00:54:03.420
There's much more what happens behind the walls of a bedroom
link |
00:54:12.020
where people have been living for some time.
link |
00:54:14.900
And just two thoughts and observations about this.
link |
00:54:20.980
One is that it may seem odd that males should
link |
00:54:32.380
think it a good idea, as it were, to impose themselves
link |
00:54:37.260
sexually on someone with whom they have a relationship.
link |
00:54:41.460
But what they're doing is intimidating someone
link |
00:54:45.940
in a relationship in which the relative power in the relationship
link |
00:54:50.500
has continuing significance for a long time.
link |
00:54:54.260
And that power probably goes well beyond just the sexual.
link |
00:54:59.100
It's to do with domestic relationships.
link |
00:55:01.900
It's to do with the man getting his own way all the way.
link |
00:55:06.180
It's power dynamics and the sexual aggression
link |
00:55:09.820
as one of the tools to regain power, gain power,
link |
00:55:13.220
gain more power, and that kind of thing.
link |
00:55:14.900
Yeah, exactly.
link |
00:55:16.700
And in that respect, it's worth noting
link |
00:55:21.340
that although this wasn't appreciated for some time,
link |
00:55:25.700
it's emerging that in a bunch of primates,
link |
00:55:28.340
you have somewhat parallel kinds of sexual intimidation,
link |
00:55:35.020
where males will target particular females,
link |
00:55:37.820
even in a group in which the norm is for females
link |
00:55:41.300
to mate with multiple males.
link |
00:55:43.460
But each male will target a particular female,
link |
00:55:45.940
and the more he is aggressive towards her,
link |
00:55:49.540
then the more she conforms to his wishes when he wants to mate.
link |
00:55:55.220
So a long term pattern of sexual intimidation.
link |
00:55:58.860
So there's that aspect.
link |
00:56:00.340
The other aspect I would just note
link |
00:56:02.100
is that males get away with a lot compared
link |
00:56:09.140
to females in any kind of intersexual conflict.
link |
00:56:16.060
So the punishment, here's one example of this.
link |
00:56:19.860
The punishment for a husband killing a wife
link |
00:56:23.420
has always been much less than the punishment
link |
00:56:25.540
for a wife killing a husband.
link |
00:56:26.900
And you see similar sorts of things
link |
00:56:32.140
in terms of the punishments for adultery and so on.
link |
00:56:36.940
I bring this up in the context of males sexually intimidating
link |
00:56:44.540
their partners, be it wives or whoever,
link |
00:56:48.940
because it's a reminder that it's basically a patriarchal world
link |
00:56:55.500
that we have come from, a patriarchal world in which
link |
00:56:59.980
male alliances tend to support males and take advantage
link |
00:57:05.620
of the fact that they have political power
link |
00:57:07.660
at the expense of females.
link |
00:57:09.660
And I would say that that all goes back
link |
00:57:11.900
to what happened 300,000 to 400,000 years ago
link |
00:57:14.700
when the beta males took charge
link |
00:57:16.580
and they started imposing their own norms
link |
00:57:19.060
on society as a whole, and they've continued to do so.
link |
00:57:22.460
And we now look at ourselves and, you know,
link |
00:57:24.740
Jordan Peterson says, we are not a patriarchal society.
link |
00:57:28.700
Well, you know, it's true that the laws try and make it even
link |
00:57:32.380
handed nowadays between males and females.
link |
00:57:35.340
But obviously, we are patriarchal de facto,
link |
00:57:38.780
because society still in many ways supports men
link |
00:57:45.300
better than it supports women in these sorts of conflicts.
link |
00:57:47.980
So beta male patriarchal, if we're
link |
00:57:52.220
looking at the evolutionary history,
link |
00:57:55.260
OK, is there maybe sticking on Jordan for a second,
link |
00:57:58.820
is there, so he's a psychologist, right?
link |
00:58:04.380
And what part of the picture do you
link |
00:58:08.940
think he's missing in analyzing the human relations?
link |
00:58:16.340
What needs, what does he need to understand
link |
00:58:20.100
about our origins in violence and the way
link |
00:58:23.020
that society has been constructed?
link |
00:58:24.900
Oh, I don't want to go deep into his missing perspectives,
link |
00:58:30.100
you know, but I just think that what he's
link |
00:58:33.860
doing in that particular example is focusing
link |
00:58:37.780
on the legalistic position.
link |
00:58:41.020
And that's great that, you know, you
link |
00:58:44.180
do not find formal patriarchy in the law anything
link |
00:58:48.580
like to the extent that you could find it 100 years ago
link |
00:58:53.100
and so on.
link |
00:58:53.620
You know, women have got the vote now, hooray.
link |
00:58:56.020
But it took a long time for women to get the vote.
link |
00:58:58.620
And it remains the case that women suffer in various kinds
link |
00:59:08.020
of ways, you know, I mean, a woman who is,
link |
00:59:13.700
has lots of sexual partners, is treated much more rudely
link |
00:59:17.900
than a male who has lots of sexual partners.
link |
00:59:21.260
There are all sorts of informal ways
link |
00:59:23.100
in which it's rougher being a woman than it does a man.
link |
00:59:27.180
And if we look at the surface layer of the law,
link |
00:59:32.580
we may miss the deeper human nature,
link |
00:59:38.020
like the origins of our human nature that still operates
link |
00:59:41.180
no matter what the law says.
link |
00:59:42.620
Yeah, which is, you know, human nature is awkward
link |
00:59:47.100
because it includes some unpleasant features
link |
00:59:50.940
that when we sit back and reflect about them,
link |
00:59:54.140
we would like them to go away.
link |
00:59:57.860
But it remains the fact that men are hugely concerned
link |
01:00:04.940
to try and have sex with at least one woman
link |
01:00:11.820
and, you know, often lots of women.
link |
01:00:14.020
And so women are, men are constantly
link |
01:00:15.620
putting pressure on women in ways
link |
01:00:18.500
that women find unpleasant.
link |
01:00:19.900
And if men sit back and reflect about it,
link |
01:00:21.620
they think, yeah, we shouldn't do this.
link |
01:00:22.860
But actually, it just goes on because of human nature.
link |
01:00:26.260
So maybe looking at particular humans in history,
link |
01:00:30.860
let's talk about Genghis Khan.
link |
01:00:32.860
So is this particular human who was one
link |
01:00:37.180
of the most famous examples of large scale violence,
link |
01:00:42.260
is he a deep representative of human nature
link |
01:00:45.780
or is he a rare exception?
link |
01:00:47.940
Well, I think that it's easy to imagine
link |
01:00:53.500
that most men could have become Genghis Khan.
link |
01:00:59.460
It's possible that he had a particular streak of psychopathy.
link |
01:01:03.140
You know, it's striking that by the time
link |
01:01:10.780
you become immensely powerful, then you're a willingness
link |
01:01:18.420
to do terrible things for the interest
link |
01:01:22.460
of yourself and your group becomes very high.
link |
01:01:28.300
You know, Stalin, Mao Zedong, these sorts of people
link |
01:01:36.980
have histories in which they do not show obvious psychopathy.
link |
01:01:42.220
But by the time they are big leaders,
link |
01:01:44.140
they are really psychopathic in the sense
link |
01:01:46.100
that they do not follow the ordinary morality
link |
01:01:50.500
of considering the harm that they are doing to their victims.
link |
01:01:56.380
What kind of experiment would we need to discover
link |
01:02:03.340
whether or not anybody could fall into this position?
link |
01:02:06.660
I don't know, but Lord Acton's famous dictum
link |
01:02:11.740
was power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts,
link |
01:02:15.380
absolutely.
link |
01:02:16.700
And then the point that people often forget
link |
01:02:19.060
is the next sentence that he said,
link |
01:02:20.540
which is, great men are almost always bad men.
link |
01:02:24.740
And that is right.
link |
01:02:26.380
It is very difficult to find a great man in history
link |
01:02:29.860
who is not responsible for terrible things.
link |
01:02:34.020
I think there is some aspect of it that it's not just power.
link |
01:02:38.860
I think men who have been the most destructive
link |
01:02:43.260
in human history are not psychopathic completely.
link |
01:02:50.180
They have convinced themselves of an idea.
link |
01:02:52.940
It's like the idea of psychopathic.
link |
01:02:55.500
Stalin, for example, Hitler is a complicated one.
link |
01:02:58.180
I think he was legitimately insane.
link |
01:03:00.420
But I think Stalin has convinced himself
link |
01:03:02.980
that he's doing good.
link |
01:03:05.940
So the idea of communism is the thing
link |
01:03:08.180
that's psychopathic in his mind.
link |
01:03:10.140
Like a bread, you construct a worldview
link |
01:03:12.860
in which the violence is justified,
link |
01:03:15.620
the cruelty is justified.
link |
01:03:17.500
So in that sense, first of all, you
link |
01:03:21.420
can construct experiments, unethical experiments
link |
01:03:24.380
that could test this.
link |
01:03:25.100
But in that sense, anybody else could have been
link |
01:03:28.980
in Stalin's position.
link |
01:03:30.820
It's the idea that could overtake
link |
01:03:33.460
the mind of a human being.
link |
01:03:35.900
And in so doing, justify cruel acts.
link |
01:03:38.420
And that seems to be, at least in part, unique to humans.
link |
01:03:42.100
It's the ability to hold ideas in our minds
link |
01:03:45.540
and share those ideas and use those ideas
link |
01:03:49.380
to convince ourselves that proactive violence
link |
01:03:53.740
on a large scale is a good idea.
link |
01:03:57.420
So that, I don't know if you have a comment.
link |
01:03:59.100
I suppose so.
link |
01:03:59.860
But it seems to me what really motivated Stalin
link |
01:04:04.580
was not so much communism as the retention of power.
link |
01:04:12.740
So once he became leader, and in the process of becoming
link |
01:04:17.900
leader, he was absolutely desperate
link |
01:04:20.900
to get rid of anybody who was a challenger.
link |
01:04:24.140
He was deeply suspicious, suspicious of anybody,
link |
01:04:28.420
even on his side, who might possibly
link |
01:04:32.140
be showing a glimmerings of willingness to challenge him.
link |
01:04:36.020
So when he apparently had Kirov murdered,
link |
01:04:42.940
Kirov was a great communist.
link |
01:04:45.340
Trotsky was a great communist.
link |
01:04:47.780
All his rivals, and when he went into the towns
link |
01:04:52.340
and murdered people by the tens of thousands.
link |
01:04:55.220
They were all communists.
link |
01:04:56.220
A lot of them were explicit communists.
link |
01:04:58.700
That's right.
link |
01:05:00.100
But what he was worried about was that they were rivals to him.
link |
01:05:05.020
I suppose the thought is, I am the best person
link |
01:05:08.860
to bring about a global embrace of communism.
link |
01:05:14.980
And others are not.
link |
01:05:17.620
And so we have to get rid of those others.
link |
01:05:19.660
Well, I suspect you're being very charitable here.
link |
01:05:21.660
But maybe you know enough about Stalin to really.
link |
01:05:26.580
Yes.
link |
01:05:27.300
Also, the point I'm making, I do quite a bit,
link |
01:05:30.900
is from my understanding and sense, of course,
link |
01:05:34.740
we can't know for sure, is he believed in communism.
link |
01:05:38.660
This wasn't purely a game of power.
link |
01:05:42.740
Now, he got drunk with power pretty quickly.
link |
01:05:46.260
But he really believed for, I believe his whole life,
link |
01:05:50.620
that communism is good for the world.
link |
01:05:54.060
And that I don't know what role that belief plays
link |
01:05:59.340
with the more natural human desire for power.
link |
01:06:03.780
I don't know, but it just seems like.
link |
01:06:06.140
As we agreed, he's killing a lot of communists on his journey.
link |
01:06:12.580
But it's not that doesn't, that calculus doesn't work that way.
link |
01:06:15.540
There's humans who are communists.
link |
01:06:18.380
And then there's the idea of communism.
link |
01:06:20.860
So for him, in his delusional worldview,
link |
01:06:25.700
killing a few people is worth the final result
link |
01:06:30.260
of bringing communism to the whole world.
link |
01:06:32.700
But it was more than that again, because I mean,
link |
01:06:34.340
he really wanted power for the Soviet Union.
link |
01:06:37.580
And so surely the reason that he orchestrated the export of wheat
link |
01:06:48.260
from Ukraine and in so doing was willing to lead to mass starvation
link |
01:06:53.820
was because he wanted to sell it on the market
link |
01:06:55.940
in order to be able to build up the power of the Soviet Union.
link |
01:07:00.820
You know, alternative view of communism might have been,
link |
01:07:03.500
well, you know, let's just make sure everybody survives and make sure
link |
01:07:07.820
everybody has enough to eat and we'll all be mutually supportive
link |
01:07:11.900
in a communal network.
link |
01:07:13.540
But no, but he wanted the power for the country.
link |
01:07:16.060
Well, I guess exactly.
link |
01:07:17.260
So that it's not even communism.
link |
01:07:19.260
The set of ideas are like Marxism or something like that.
link |
01:07:21.700
It's the country.
link |
01:07:22.980
I guess what I'm saying is it's not purely power for the individual.
link |
01:07:29.700
It's power for a vision for this great nation.
link |
01:07:33.340
The Soviet Union and similar with Hitler,
link |
01:07:37.300
the guy believed that this is a great nation, Germany.
link |
01:07:42.220
And like they, it's a nation that's been wronged throughout history
link |
01:07:47.380
and needs to be righted.
link |
01:07:49.860
And there's some dance between the individual human and the tribe.
link |
01:07:55.460
Yes, no, absolutely.
link |
01:07:56.940
Yes. And so just like chimpanzees, you know, we are fiercely tribal
link |
01:08:02.100
and the tribalism resides particularly in male psychology.
link |
01:08:06.860
And it's very scary because once you assemble a set of males
link |
01:08:14.500
who share tribal identity, then they have power that they can exert
link |
01:08:22.140
with very little concern about what they're doing to damage other people.
link |
01:08:29.060
Do you think this, so Nietzschean will to power?
link |
01:08:33.860
We talked about the corrupting nature of power.
link |
01:08:36.060
Do you think that's a manifestation of those early origins of violence?
link |
01:08:42.860
What's the connection of this desire for power and our proclivity for violence?
link |
01:08:50.060
You know, what we're talking about is tribal power, right?
link |
01:08:54.420
Power on behalf of a group.
link |
01:08:56.860
Yes.
link |
01:08:57.620
And yeah, that seems to me to go right back to a deep evolutionary origin
link |
01:09:04.460
because you see essentially the same thing in a whole bunch of animals.
link |
01:09:10.420
You know, that most of the sort of cognitively complex animals
link |
01:09:16.660
live in social groups in which they have tribal boundaries.
link |
01:09:21.900
And so what you see in chimpanzees is echoed in almost all of the primates.
link |
01:09:28.740
The difference between us and chimpanzees and humans on the one hand
link |
01:09:34.460
and other primates on the other is that we kill and they don't.
link |
01:09:39.220
And the reason they don't is because they never meet in the context
link |
01:09:43.700
where there are massive imbalances of power.
link |
01:09:46.820
So two groups of baboons, you know, the study on this side and 50 on this side, fine.
link |
01:09:52.540
Nobody's going to try and kill anybody else because the serious risks involved.
link |
01:09:59.500
But nevertheless, they are tribal.
link |
01:10:02.140
So, you know, they will have fairly intense intergroup interactions
link |
01:10:08.100
in which everybody knows whose side is on, who is on whose side.
link |
01:10:12.500
And the long term consequences of winning those battles, nonlethal battles,
link |
01:10:21.020
is that the dominance get access to larger areas of land,
link |
01:10:27.180
more safety and so on, with chances are better record of reproductive success subsequently.
link |
01:10:40.140
Do you think this, from an evolutionary perspective, is a feature or a bug,
link |
01:10:44.180
our natural sort of tendency to form tribes?
link |
01:10:50.700
So what's a bug?
link |
01:10:52.860
Oh, sorry, this is a computer programming analogy,
link |
01:10:57.620
meaning like it would be more beneficial.
link |
01:11:03.180
Is it beneficial or detrimental to form tribes from an evolutionary perspective?
link |
01:11:09.140
Yeah, yeah, but what does it mean, what does a bug mean?
link |
01:11:13.180
Yes, right.
link |
01:11:15.180
Well, yeah, like where's evolution going anyway?
link |
01:11:17.420
It's beneficial from, you know, it's beneficial in the sense that it evolved by natural selection
link |
01:11:22.460
to benefit the individuals who did it.
link |
01:11:25.380
But if by bug you mean something that from the point of view of the species,
link |
01:11:30.180
it would be great if you could just wipe this out,
link |
01:11:32.500
because the species would somehow do better as a result.
link |
01:11:35.980
Then yes, but then you know, males are a bug.
link |
01:11:40.860
Come on now, there's some nice things to males, speaking as a male.
link |
01:11:48.020
The fact that there are some nice things to males doesn't mean that they're not bugs.
link |
01:11:51.860
You know, maybe they're quite nice bugs, but it would be much better for the species as a whole
link |
01:11:56.300
not to have to have males who impose this violence on the species as a whole.
link |
01:12:02.940
As somebody who practiced controlled violence and doing a lot of martial arts,
link |
01:12:07.060
yeah, it, I'm not sure.
link |
01:12:09.900
It does seem kind of fun to have this kind of controlled violence, also sports.
link |
01:12:15.180
Also, I mean, the question of conflict in general, I guess that's the deeper question.
link |
01:12:20.460
Don't you think there's some value to conflict for the improvement of society for progress,
link |
01:12:27.620
that this tension between tribes?
link |
01:12:30.980
Isn't this like experiment, a continued experiment,
link |
01:12:36.500
we conduct with each other and to figure out what is a better world to build?
link |
01:12:40.140
Like you need that conflict of good ideas and bad ideas to go to war with each other.
link |
01:12:47.380
It's like the United States with the 50 states and the, it's the laboratory of ideas.
link |
01:12:53.540
Don't you think that is, again, feature versus bug?
link |
01:12:59.300
This kind of conflict, when it doesn't get out of hand,
link |
01:13:02.860
is actually ultimately progressive, productive for a better world.
link |
01:13:07.940
Well, what do you mean by conflict?
link |
01:13:09.940
I mean, you can have conflict in the sense of people have different ideas about the solution to a problem.
link |
01:13:16.380
And so their ideas are in conflict, they can sit down with it and on a log and chat about it
link |
01:13:23.340
and then decide, okay, you're right or I'm wrong or whatever.
link |
01:13:28.900
But if my conflict, you mean a great idea to build a nuclear bomb and set that off, then no,
link |
01:13:37.820
I don't see why it's a good idea to have all this violence.
link |
01:13:43.420
Yeah, there's...
link |
01:13:46.820
I wonder, it's not a good idea, but I wonder if human history would evolve the way it did without the violence.
link |
01:13:54.980
Oh, I'm sure you're right, probably humans were not evolved in the sense that we have.
link |
01:14:00.620
But I would hope that the course of violence in evolution will continue in the way it has.
link |
01:14:10.900
So there's all sorts of indications that the importance of violence has been reduced over time.
link |
01:14:21.780
And this is made famous in Stephen Pinker's book, but others have written about it too.
link |
01:14:28.940
That the frequency of death from violence in every country you look at has been declining.
link |
01:14:38.340
That's just great.
link |
01:14:39.140
And so the amazing thing about this is that even when you take the death due to the First World War and the Second World War,
link |
01:14:45.940
the 20th century appears to have been statistically, meaning rates of death per individual,
link |
01:14:53.980
the least violent in history.
link |
01:14:59.580
So we haven't got very far down the course to nonviolence, but I don't see why we shouldn't just carry on doing it.
link |
01:15:05.660
I think it's ridiculous, frankly, excuse my frankness, to say that violence is a good thing.
link |
01:15:14.220
I think that it would be a wonderful concept if we could evolve somehow to a world three thousand years from now
link |
01:15:21.940
where violence is really regarded as simply appalling and that they look back on our time and can't believe what we were doing.
link |
01:15:32.460
Yeah. But of course, violence takes a lot of different shapes as we start to think deeper and deeper about living beings on Earth.
link |
01:15:40.220
For example, the violence we commit and the torture we commit to animals and then perhaps on the line as we talked offline about with robots and that kind of thing.
link |
01:15:49.340
So there's just so many ways to commit violence to others.
link |
01:15:52.620
And some people now talk about violence in the space of ideas, which, of course, to me, at least, is a bit of a silly notion relative to use that same V word for the space of ideas versus actual physical violence.
link |
01:16:06.380
But it may be that long time from now, we see that even violence in the space of ideas is quite a manifestation of that same kind of violence.
link |
01:16:16.660
And so it is interesting where this is headed.
link |
01:16:20.260
And I think you're absolutely right.
link |
01:16:22.940
A world, a nonviolent world does seem like a better world.
link |
01:16:27.500
I wonder if the constraints on resources somehow make that world more and more difficult, especially as we run out of resources.
link |
01:16:36.060
It's got to be very, very different from what we're doing nowadays.
link |
01:16:38.860
And it's unimaginably different.
link |
01:16:40.860
If we could imagine it, then maybe we could work towards it at the moment.
link |
01:16:43.620
Nobody knows how to work towards it.
link |
01:16:45.420
Well, that's kind of the stories of humans is we don't really know the future.
link |
01:16:48.620
We're trying to try to ad hoc, kind of develop it as we go and sometimes get into trouble as to violence.
link |
01:16:56.980
But you know, George Orwell's vision in 1984 was of two or three world powers, each so powerful that nobody could could diminish the could destroy the other.
link |
01:17:11.740
But the notion of an evolutionarily stable relationship among heavily armed world powers just does not seem.
link |
01:17:23.740
So it's reasonable at all.
link |
01:17:27.260
There's to say, you know, we've we've now got 170 or 190 nations in the world dominated by a few big ones, all with arms pointing at each other.
link |
01:17:42.060
And the notion that we could just carry on having peace talks and making sure that these arms don't get involved in some kind of massive conflagration.
link |
01:17:53.540
It seems incredibly optimistic, some kind of major change has to happen, whereby, you know, and some people would like to see all the weapons go.
link |
01:18:04.060
That'd be great. You know, I'm a member of that sort of group that tries to see that happen.
link |
01:18:10.540
It's going to be very difficult to see it happen.
link |
01:18:12.980
Another kind of concept is the nations themselves will dissolve and will become one one government.
link |
01:18:21.740
That itself is a terrifying vision because the capacity for abuse by a single world power would be so problematic.
link |
01:18:30.620
And in addition, how do you get there without a war in the first place?
link |
01:18:35.100
So, you know, at the moment, we have no reasonable kind of future in mind, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.
link |
01:18:41.940
It's just that we haven't yet to find it.
link |
01:18:43.460
And a lot of people like in the cryptocurrency space argue that you can create decentralized societies.
link |
01:18:49.540
If you take away the power from states to define the monetary system, so they argue like if you make the monetary system such that is disjoint from the control of any one individual, any one government,
link |
01:19:03.820
then that might be a way to form sort of ad hoc decentralized societies, they just pop up all over the place.
link |
01:19:10.700
That's a really interesting technological solution to how to remove the overreach of power from governments.
link |
01:19:17.860
Yes, right. Absolutely.
link |
01:19:19.900
And it may well be that the future will emerge out of some sort of quite surprising direction like that.
link |
01:19:28.540
Is it nevertheless surprising to you that we have not destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons?
link |
01:19:34.300
So the mutually assured destruction that we've had for many decades from somebody who studies violence, how does that make sense to you?
link |
01:19:43.140
Well, I mean, I'm surprised only in the sense that accidental, the fact that we have not had an accident yet has been quite remarkable.
link |
01:19:54.220
Because all the accounts are that we've come very close to having very serious accidents where people are either side of misread intentions or apparent launches and so on.
link |
01:20:06.820
So yes, I think it is remarkable. There is a nasty generalization that can be made that the longer that powerful states go without having wars, then the worse the war is afterwards.
link |
01:20:25.300
And you can sort of see that that kind of makes sense because basically what's happening with these tribal groups that the nations are at the moment
link |
01:20:34.740
is that after a big war, like the Second World War, they established new kinds of dominance relationships.
link |
01:20:42.100
And then during the periods of peace, what happens is that the de facto dominance relationships change because some nations become poorer, some become richer, some become more militarily powerful and so on.
link |
01:20:58.500
Generally, economy and military goes hand in hand. So right now China emerged from the war as a relatively low status state and is now high status.
link |
01:21:09.460
So if this was chimpanzees, what would happen is that you would predict a conflict because you need to have a readjustment of the formal dominance relationships to recognize the new in practice dominance relationships recognized by the economy and the military.
link |
01:21:25.940
So the longer that you have of a period of peace following a war, then the more these tensions of unresolved changed dominance relationships build up.
link |
01:21:37.060
And the longer they take to occur, then the more challenging are going to be the conflicts.
link |
01:21:46.180
That's a terrifying view because we've been out of conflict for quite a bit.
link |
01:21:50.420
That's right.
link |
01:21:50.980
Maybe it's building up.
link |
01:21:52.340
So it's a scary view. But on the other hand, things have changed hugely with the advent of nuclear weapons because at least that conforms to this psychology that is very clear in other animals, which is you don't want to get into a fight if you are going to get hurt.
link |
01:22:10.980
So that's the whole principle of mad mutual assured destruction. And it's doubtless being why powerful nations like America and Russia have not used their nuclear weapons since 1945.
link |
01:22:26.340
So if we can overcome the problem of accidental launches, then maybe the fact of mad does fit into human psychology in a way that means that we really will resolve our tensions without using them.
link |
01:22:42.420
But we haven't yet really faced that challenge. I mean, the Soviet Union collapsed because of the poor economy, but with China desperate to take back Taiwan and America shifting its focus on the Pacific, the potential for something going wrong is clearly very high.
link |
01:23:08.020
So what's the hopeful case that you can make for a long term surviving and thriving human civilization given all the dangers that we face?
link |
01:23:19.700
Well, I can't really exactly make one. I would just say that we're talking about the dangers. Obviously, the dangers are there.
link |
01:23:29.940
But what I would think about is the notion that surprises come from all sorts of different directions. And I mean, you work in robotics and I can well imagine that there will be advances in robotics that in some way I can't even conceive will somehow undermine the motivation for conflict.
link |
01:23:57.700
Something about, you know, by the time chips have been planted in human brains and we're all instantly sharing information in a way that we never did before, will this change the nature of human existence in such a way that these conflicts get resolved?
link |
01:24:15.380
You can remove the conflicts, but keep some of the magic, the beauty of what it means to be human. So like still be able to enjoy life, the richness of life, the full complexity of life, because you can remove conflict by giving everybody a pill and then they go to sleep, right?
link |
01:24:30.740
You still want life to be amazing, exciting, you know, interesting. And so that's where you have to find the balance.
link |
01:24:40.180
Yes, I mean, it's all science fiction stuff. And so how it's going to work out totally unclear. I don't see any worry about the magic of life disappearing. I mean, first of all, you somehow get rid of males.
link |
01:24:57.860
I think you really need to get rid of males, because males are the source of a major problem, which is the lust for power and the resulting conflict.
link |
01:25:10.900
But you don't think the males are also a source of beauty and creation?
link |
01:25:14.980
No, I mean, I don't have anything against males as, you know, as individuals and that sort of thing. And males have clearly done a lot. I mean, they've been incredibly exploratory and creative. And what they've done in art and music has been wonderful and that sort of thing.
link |
01:25:31.700
On the other hand, I'm not sure there's anything particularly special. And I think that probably females could do the same thing just as well when given the chance.
link |
01:25:40.980
Yes, including the dark stuff. I mean, a part of me is not understanding the, so there is evolutionary distinction between men and women. But I tend to believe both men and women, if you look out into the future, can be destructive, can be evil, can be greedy, can be corrupted by power.
link |
01:26:01.460
So if you move males from the picture, which are historically connected to this evolution that we've been talking about, that women are going to fill that role quite nicely. And then it'll be just the same kind of process, not the same, but it'll be new and interesting.
link |
01:26:19.460
There's a sense that the will to power, craving power, committing violence is somehow coupled with all the things that are beautiful about life. That if you remove conflict completely, if you remove all the evil in the world, it seems like you're not going to have a stable place for the beauty, for the goodness.
link |
01:26:48.460
Like, there's always has to be a dragon to fight for the way, if you look at human history, now you can say, the reason I'm nervous about a sort of utopia where everything is great is every time you look through human history when utopia has been chased, you run into a lot of trouble, where again,
link |
01:27:09.460
it sneaks into this evil, this craving for power. Now you can say that's a male problem, but I just think it's a human problem, and it's not even a human problem, it's a chimp problem too. It's life on earth problem, intelligent life on earth problem.
link |
01:27:25.460
So like, it's better to not necessarily get rid of the sources of the darker sides of human nature, but more create mechanisms that the kindness, the goodness paradox, your book, that that is incentivized and encouraged, empowered.
link |
01:27:49.460
Well, look, I don't think it would be utopia if you got rid of the males.
link |
01:27:55.460
Right.
link |
01:27:57.460
And certainly females capable of conflict. I just think it's a gamble worth taking if you could actually do it. You can certainly find females in history who done unpleasant things.
link |
01:28:08.460
But nevertheless, you know, we have a very strong evolutionary theory which explains why males benefit more by having conflict and winning conflicts than females do.
link |
01:28:21.460
And so if we want to talk about reducing conflict, then it would reduce it to get rid of males. Now I understand this is a fantasy.
link |
01:28:33.460
And I think it's a fantasy that people would be able to talk about fairly soon because reproductive technology is getting to the point where it's quite likely that human females could breed without the use of males.
link |
01:28:49.460
And so there would be a sort of potential dynamic if everybody just agreed not to have any male babies.
link |
01:29:01.460
It's a really interesting thought experiment.
link |
01:29:03.460
I will agree with you that if given two buttons, one is get rid of all women and the other buttons get rid of all men,
link |
01:29:13.460
realizing that I have a stake in this choice, you're probably getting rid of all men.
link |
01:29:20.460
If I wanted to preserve Earth and the richness of life on Earth, I would probably get rid of all men.
link |
01:29:30.460
I don't think you have a stake in it. You're saying that because you're a man.
link |
01:29:35.460
But I don't see why being a man should make you any more interested in having a male future for the world than a female future.
link |
01:29:43.460
You've got just as many ancestors who were male as were female.
link |
01:29:47.460
Well, my problem is I'll have to die.
link |
01:29:50.460
Well, that's going to happen anyway. I prefer to die tomorrow not today. I prefer to hit the snooze button on the whole mortality thing.
link |
01:30:02.460
But this is not suggesting that males have to die in order to make room for females.
link |
01:30:08.460
All you have to do is just say, don't have any more males born.
link |
01:30:13.460
Interesting.
link |
01:30:14.460
Of course, the difficulty is that because we're tribal, some country somewhere would say, well, we're not going to do that.
link |
01:30:21.460
And then guess what? They'd take over because they're male.
link |
01:30:24.460
So that's why it's impossible to imagine it actually happening.
link |
01:30:28.460
You know what? I'm going to take that and actually think about it. I don't know. I'm uncomfortable.
link |
01:30:34.460
There's a certain kind of woke culture that I've been kind of uncomfortable with because it's not women necessarily.
link |
01:30:44.460
There's a lot of bullying I see.
link |
01:30:47.460
There's a lack of empathy and a lack of kindness towards others that's created by that culture.
link |
01:30:53.460
But you're speaking about something else. You're speaking about reducing conflict in this world
link |
01:30:59.460
and looking at the basics of our human nature and its origins in the evolution of Homo sapiens
link |
01:31:09.460
and thinking about which kind of aspects of human nature, if we get rid of them, will make for a better world.
link |
01:31:17.460
It's an interesting thought experiment.
link |
01:31:19.460
But it is only a thought experiment. It's got no practical meaning right now.
link |
01:31:24.460
And I take your point that males get a hard rap nowadays in some ways
link |
01:31:32.460
because the balance of social power is moving against, quite rightly in a strong sense,
link |
01:31:46.460
of course, against all the nasty things that males do.
link |
01:31:50.460
But what people sometimes fail to remember is that life is very hard for males who don't have the power,
link |
01:32:03.460
who don't have money, who don't have access to women.
link |
01:32:09.460
You know, I'm sympathetic to in cells.
link |
01:32:14.460
I'm not sympathetic to them using violence to solve their problems.
link |
01:32:19.460
But I am very sympathetic to the fact that it's not easy simply to be told by well off feminist middle class people
link |
01:32:35.460
that you shouldn't behave like this or you shouldn't feel like this because you do.
link |
01:32:40.460
In general, just empathy and kindness, male or female, I believe will be the thing that builds a better world.
link |
01:32:54.460
And that's practiced in different ways from different backgrounds.
link |
01:32:58.460
But ultimately, you should listen to others and empathize with the experience of others and put more love out there in the world.
link |
01:33:06.460
Now, that hopefully is the way to reduce conflict, reduce violence and reduce that whole psychological experience of being powerless in this world,
link |
01:33:19.460
powerless to become the best version of yourself.
link |
01:33:22.460
When no one's going to disagree with all those fine sentiments, right?
link |
01:33:27.460
Yes, but that's an actionable thing is actually practice empathy.
link |
01:33:34.460
Like saying that somebody should be silenced or just like this group is bad and this group is good.
link |
01:33:43.460
I just feel like that's not empathy.
link |
01:33:45.460
Empathy is understanding the experience of others and respecting it.
link |
01:33:52.460
That's what a better world looks like.
link |
01:33:56.460
That's what the reduction of conflict looks like.
link |
01:33:59.460
It's like as opposed to saying my tribe is right, your tribe is wrong, forget the violence and nonviolence part.
link |
01:34:08.460
That's just that act of saying my tribe is right, that tribe is wrong, removing that from the picture.
link |
01:34:13.460
That's the way to make a better world.
link |
01:34:15.460
That's the way to reduce the violence, I think.
link |
01:34:19.460
Not necessarily removing the people who are causing the violence.
link |
01:34:23.460
You have to get to the source of the problem.
link |
01:34:25.460
I don't mean the evolutionary source, but just the mindset that creates the violence is usually just a lack of empathy for others.
link |
01:34:37.460
Yeah, but you can't just teach that because our evolutionary psychology puts us in particular directions.
link |
01:34:45.460
Do you think it's possible to learn through practice to resist the basics of our evolutionary psychology, the basic forces?
link |
01:34:58.460
Yeah, lots and lots of training, lots and lots of education can do it.
link |
01:35:05.460
The famously most peaceful society that anthropologists have recorded involves a tremendous amount of teaching, including some punishment.
link |
01:35:18.460
It's a society in Thailand.
link |
01:35:21.460
You have to beat it out of children to make them nice.
link |
01:35:25.460
This is carrot and steak.
link |
01:35:27.460
The point is that you do not find societies in which people are spontaneously showing the kinds of behaviors that we would all love them to show.
link |
01:35:41.460
It requires work.
link |
01:35:43.460
It requires work.
link |
01:35:44.460
What is your book titled, Goodness Paradox?
link |
01:35:47.460
What are the main ideas in this book?
link |
01:35:49.460
The paradox is the fact that humans show extremes in relationship to both violence and nonviolence.
link |
01:35:59.460
The violence is that we are one of these few animals in which we use coalitionary proactive violence to kill members of our own species.
link |
01:36:10.460
We do it in large numbers, just like a few other species.
link |
01:36:13.460
The nonviolence is where particularly extreme in how repressed we are in terms of reactive violence.
link |
01:36:23.460
I told you the story of how we get there.
link |
01:36:26.460
What's so extraordinary about it is that most animals are either high on both or relatively low on both.
link |
01:36:34.460
So chimpanzees are high on proactive violence and reactive violence.
link |
01:36:39.460
Bonobos are less than chimpanzees on both of those, but still hundreds of times more reactively aggressive than humans are.
link |
01:36:50.460
What we've done is retain proactive violence being high and got reactive violence really being low.
link |
01:36:58.460
And so we have these wonderful societies in which we're also incredibly nice to each other and tolerant and calm and can meet strangers and have no problem about leading to any kind of conflict.
link |
01:37:14.460
At the same time as we are one of the worst killing machine species that's ever existed.
link |
01:37:21.460
So what's so extraordinary about this is that if you look at the political philosophers of the last few hundred years,
link |
01:37:29.460
you've got this fight famously between Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau,
link |
01:37:35.460
or literally you've got the fight between their followers.
link |
01:37:38.460
So the followers of Hobbes say,
link |
01:37:40.460
well, Hobbes was right because he says that we are naturally violent and you need a Leviathan, a central government or a king to be able to suppress the violence.
link |
01:37:51.460
So we're naturally horrid and we can learn to be good.
link |
01:37:55.460
Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseau is interpreted as saying the opposite, that we are naturally good and it's only when culture intervenes and horrid ideologies come in that we become uncivilized.
link |
01:38:08.460
And so people have had this endless fight between are we naturally corrupt or are we naturally kind.
link |
01:38:16.460
And that has gone on for years and it's only in the last two or three decades that anthropologists like Christopher Bohm and Bruce Naft have said,
link |
01:38:26.460
look, you know, it's obvious what the answer is we are both of these things.
link |
01:38:30.460
And what is so exciting now is I think we can understand why we are both.
link |
01:38:34.460
And the answer is we come from ancestors that were elevated on proactive aggression that were hunters and killers, both of animals and of each other.
link |
01:38:46.460
And you've got to include that as almost certain from the past.
link |
01:38:52.460
And then now we've taken our reactive aggression and we've downregulated it and that's given us power.
link |
01:39:02.460
It's given us power because once you get rid of the alpha male, once the beta males take over and force selection in favor of a more tolerant, less reactively aggressive individual,
link |
01:39:16.460
the effect is that our cultures suddenly become capable of focusing on things other than conflict.
link |
01:39:24.460
And so we have social groups in which individuals instead of constantly being on edge in the way that chimpanzees are with each other,
link |
01:39:33.460
are able to interact in ways that enable them to share looking at a tool together or share their food together or pass ideas from one to the other,
link |
01:39:46.460
or support each other when they're ill or whatever the issue is, cooperate in ways that make the group far more effective.
link |
01:39:55.460
So you asked earlier, you know, what did I think about why sapiens were able to expand at the expense of Neanderthals so dramatically around 40,000 years ago?
link |
01:40:06.460
And the answer is that whatever it was, it had something to do with the sapiens ability to cooperate.
link |
01:40:15.460
That was what gave them bigger groups.
link |
01:40:17.460
That's what enabled them to have a far more effective way of living.
link |
01:40:23.460
And I suspect it was to do with the weapons and military aspects.
link |
01:40:27.460
But even if it wasn't that, the greater cooperation that sapiens were showing would have been hugely important.
link |
01:40:36.460
So sapiens then had groups of, you know, who knows exactly how big they were, but scores of people to judge from their remains.
link |
01:40:47.460
Whereas Neanderthals were living in widely separated small groups of, you know, maybe as many as 15 or 20 people sometimes,
link |
01:40:57.460
where they saw others so rarely that they were in breeding at high levels.
link |
01:41:03.460
You know, fathers having babies with their daughters.
link |
01:41:07.460
Very different world.
link |
01:41:09.460
Very different world.
link |
01:41:10.460
And that's probably what our world was like before we got sapiens.
link |
01:41:13.460
Before we got sapiens.
link |
01:41:14.460
And it's fascinating that there was that kind of violence against...
link |
01:41:19.460
Once you get rid of the alpha males, you have now the freedom to have kindness amongst the beta males.
link |
01:41:30.460
Like not kindness, but collaboration, that's the better word.
link |
01:41:34.460
Yes.
link |
01:41:35.460
Much more corruption, not just among the males, but among the beta males, but also among the gamma males and the females.
link |
01:41:42.460
Yeah.
link |
01:41:43.460
I don't know what a gamma male is, but I imagine there's a whole alphabet.
link |
01:41:47.460
Well, I don't know about a hell of an alphabet, but I think the big layers are the married men and the unmarried men.
link |
01:41:54.460
Because the married men had a problem with the unmarried men.
link |
01:41:58.460
Right? I mean, you see it in ethnographies of hunters and gatherers recently.
link |
01:42:02.460
Where the unmarried men would be given rules, such as...
link |
01:42:06.460
I mean, a very extreme rule in Northern Australia was you cannot come to the camp for months.
link |
01:42:13.460
You have to go away and live somewhere out in the bush.
link |
01:42:16.460
Yes.
link |
01:42:17.460
Because we don't want you anywhere near our wives.
link |
01:42:19.460
And then another kind of rule is if you are in the camp, you must be in the firelight all the time.
link |
01:42:27.460
Otherwise, we don't know what you're doing out in the dark.
link |
01:42:31.460
You really have us to control them because the men who had lots of wives did not want those horrid bachelors sneaking around the place.
link |
01:42:39.460
I love this.
link |
01:42:41.460
You also wrote the book titled Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human.
link |
01:42:47.460
What's the central idea in this book?
link |
01:42:50.460
There's some title, How Cooking Made Us Human refers not to homo sapiens, but to homo erectus.
link |
01:42:56.460
A human there means the genus homo.
link |
01:42:59.460
And homo erectus is the first full member of the genus homo in the sense that it looked like us,
link |
01:43:08.460
just with a sort of slightly more robust build and a smaller brain.
link |
01:43:14.460
And the central idea of catching fire is that it was the control of fire that was responsible for the emergence of homo erectus and therefore the genus homo,
link |
01:43:30.460
which happened two million years ago.
link |
01:43:32.460
And it was an evolution from a line of Australopithecines.
link |
01:43:42.460
And Australopithecines are the creatures from whom we evolved.
link |
01:43:49.460
They were present in Africa from something like six or seven million years ago up to actually up to one million years ago.
link |
01:44:01.460
And then a branch led off to homo around two million years ago.
link |
01:44:07.460
And the way to think of Australopithecines is that they were like chimpanzees standing upright.
link |
01:44:13.460
So they were erect bipedal walkers.
link |
01:44:18.460
They were like chimpanzees in the sense that they had brains about the size of a chimpanzee.
link |
01:44:25.460
They were literally about the body size of a chimpanzee, a little bit smaller actually.
link |
01:44:30.460
And they had big jaws because they were still eating raw food.
link |
01:44:36.460
They had big teeth and big jaws.
link |
01:44:39.460
And then around two million years ago, the line of Australopithecines, which ended with an intermediate species, a kind of missing link area,
link |
01:44:48.460
because it is not missing, called habilis, sometimes called homo habilis,
link |
01:44:54.460
but more properly, in my view, called Australopithecus habilis.
link |
01:44:58.460
That gave rise to homo erectus and homo erectus, here's how different it was.
link |
01:45:05.460
It had a smaller mouth, a smaller jaw, smaller teeth, and to judge from its ribs and pelvis, smaller gut.
link |
01:45:18.460
In addition, it had lost what Australopithecines all had, which was adaptations for climbing in the trees.
link |
01:45:26.460
And that meant that homo erectus must have slept on the ground.
link |
01:45:31.460
And since it slept on the ground, it should have been able to defend itself somehow against predators.
link |
01:45:37.460
And I can't think of any way they could have done that unless they had fire.
link |
01:45:42.460
So there are two major clues to why it was with homo erectus that our ancestors first acquired the control of fire.
link |
01:45:54.460
One is the fact that they were clearly not sleeping in trees in the way that chimpanzees and gorillas and bonobos and all the other primates do.
link |
01:46:04.460
And the other is that there was this striking reduction throughout the gut,
link |
01:46:12.460
reduction in size of the mouth and the chewing apparatus and in the gut itself.
link |
01:46:18.460
And that conforms to what we see nowadays about humans, which is that our guts are about two thirds of the size of what they would be if we at raw food to judge by the great apes.
link |
01:46:34.460
So at some point in our evolution, we acquired the skill of cooking and skill of controlling fire.
link |
01:46:44.460
At no time between two million years ago and the present do we see any changes in our anatomy that can, as it were, justify the enormous change that happens when you are an animal that learns to control fire.
link |
01:47:03.460
But at two million years ago, we have exactly what you'd expect, namely the guts becoming smaller because the food is becoming softer and much more easy to digest.
link |
01:47:13.460
So you don't have to work so hard in your body to digest it.
link |
01:47:16.460
And as I say, a commitment to sleeping on the ground, which I think you'd be absolutely crazy to do nowadays on a moonless night in the middle of Serengeti unless you had fire.
link |
01:47:30.460
I've slept out quite a lot in various parts of Africa in the bush and you will not catch me just lying on the ground in an area with lots of predators unless I got a fire with me.
link |
01:47:43.460
You're going to get eaten.
link |
01:47:45.460
You're going to get terrified and you're going to get eaten.
link |
01:47:48.460
Okay, so there's a million questions I want to ask. So one, is it very naturally coupled the discovery of controlled fire and cooking with fire? Is that an obvious leap?
link |
01:48:01.460
Well, here's what we know. We know that all the animals that we've tested like to eat their food cooked more than they like it raw.
link |
01:48:10.460
So this is true for all the great apes. We've tested them.
link |
01:48:15.460
That's fascinating, by the way.
link |
01:48:17.460
Why is that? That's just like a property of food, I suppose.
link |
01:48:21.460
Yes, I think what it is is that animals are always looking for any kind of way to get food that is easier to digest.
link |
01:48:31.460
And there are various signals in the food, such as the amount of sugar there, the amount of free amino acids, because the amino acids can be tasted.
link |
01:48:42.460
And the physical qualities of the food be particularly important, how tough the food is.
link |
01:48:47.460
Always prefer softer food provided it feels safe, tastes safe.
link |
01:48:53.460
And these kinds of sensory cues are all there in cooked food.
link |
01:49:00.460
It's soft. It doesn't have so many toxins. It's not so noxious to taste, easier to chew.
link |
01:49:08.460
And so everyone loves it spontaneously. Your dogs and your cats prefer cooked food or raw food.
link |
01:49:14.460
Well, maybe you can say that's a consequence of domestication.
link |
01:49:17.460
But even, you know, as I say, all of the great apes, you test naive ones and they prefer it cooked if they can.
link |
01:49:25.460
So then obvious once you have fire, you're going to accidentally discover that food changes when you apply fire to it.
link |
01:49:32.460
And then it's going to be the big crazy new fad.
link |
01:49:37.460
You took the words out of my mouth. I mean, if they have fire at all and, you know, their food rolls into it,
link |
01:49:43.460
five minutes later, it tastes better than before.
link |
01:49:46.460
How big of an invention from an engineering perspective do you think is the discovery of fire?
link |
01:49:52.460
Do you think for the, for Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, do you think it's the greatest invention ever?
link |
01:50:03.460
Yeah, I think that the control of fire has been ultimately responsible for essentially how grandiose do I want to be here.
link |
01:50:17.460
You know, the entire human story going back to Homo is what changed us from being a regular kind of animal.
link |
01:50:25.460
And perhaps the biggest way in which it is likely to have changed us is it reduced the difficulty of making a large brain.
link |
01:50:37.460
So, you know, the story here is that the constraints on brain size are energetic.
link |
01:50:47.460
You and I have brains that are something like 2.5% of our body weight.
link |
01:50:56.460
It consumes around 25% of all of our calories.
link |
01:51:03.460
So it's disproportionate.
link |
01:51:05.460
There are other expensive organs in our body as well, such as the heart.
link |
01:51:11.460
And what's different about their brain is that in addition to us being able to fuel it in a way that other animals can't,
link |
01:51:20.460
we also have reasons for wanting to have an even bigger brain, whereas we don't want an even bigger heart.
link |
01:51:28.460
So what those reasons are is unclear.
link |
01:51:30.460
But with regard to the costs of maintaining a brain, cooking makes it possible because it's supplying more calories.
link |
01:51:41.460
And it is enormously reducing the amount of time that it takes to chew your food.
link |
01:51:47.460
So if you were a gorilla and you wanted to have a bigger brain, you might say, OK, well, let's just eat some more.
link |
01:51:55.460
But gorillas are eating for pretty much the entire day in the sense that they are eating for maybe seven or eight hours a day in some seasons.
link |
01:52:09.460
That's just chewing.
link |
01:52:11.460
And then they've got to sit around and digest their food because they can't just eat all the time.
link |
01:52:15.460
They've got to take a break while the food is digested in the stomach and then passed into the gut.
link |
01:52:23.460
So the stomach is already full.
link |
01:52:26.460
So basically gorillas are eating about the maximum rate already.
link |
01:52:30.460
So how does a gorilla get a bigger brain?
link |
01:52:32.460
It doesn't.
link |
01:52:34.460
It's actually got a smaller brain relative to his body size than chimpanzee does.
link |
01:52:38.460
And that's the basic problem for our ancestors.
link |
01:52:43.460
Then you come along and cook.
link |
01:52:45.460
And all of a sudden you can get an increased amount of energy from your food.
link |
01:52:51.460
You are spending much less energy on digesting your food.
link |
01:52:56.460
There are 25 bodily processes or more that are involved in digesting your food, making the acid that takes the proteins apart,
link |
01:53:07.460
maintaining the brush border where the molecules are taken across the gut wall, and so on.
link |
01:53:14.460
That all costs.
link |
01:53:16.460
It costs you to digest your food.
link |
01:53:18.460
It costs less if you cook your food.
link |
01:53:20.460
It costs you to gain in the amount of energy.
link |
01:53:23.460
And you are reducing the amount of time from, in our case of our ancestors,
link |
01:53:29.460
probably around 50% of the day chewing to nowadays one hour a day chewing.
link |
01:53:36.460
So all of a sudden you've got hours a day in which to do other things,
link |
01:53:40.460
to use those brains that you've now enabled to grow.
link |
01:53:44.460
So with Homo erectus, you start the process of getting a bigger brain
link |
01:53:48.460
famously throughout the whole period of the evolution of the genus Homo,
link |
01:53:52.460
you have a steadily increasing size of brain.
link |
01:53:56.460
Until right at the end when it actually gets smaller, but that's a different story.
link |
01:54:02.460
Which end is this?
link |
01:54:04.460
We're talking about Homo sapiens?
link |
01:54:06.460
Yeah, with Homo sapiens you've got a smaller brain from,
link |
01:54:11.460
people haven't got it exactly down, but at least 30,000 years ago it starts declining.
link |
01:54:17.460
And so the fascinating thing about that is that all domesticated animals
link |
01:54:22.460
have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.
link |
01:54:30.460
The domestication is intricately connected to this brain size, you think.
link |
01:54:34.460
Exactly.
link |
01:54:35.460
So I think what we're seeing in humans is that same manifestation.
link |
01:54:39.460
And then the fascinating question is why.
link |
01:54:43.460
And the only point I would want to make about this is that there is no evidence
link |
01:54:48.460
that in the small brain domesticates, they're losing say an average about 15% of brain size,
link |
01:54:55.460
in the small brain domesticates compared to their wild ancestors,
link |
01:54:58.460
there's no indication of a loss of cognitive ability.
link |
01:55:03.460
So I think what's going on is that it's a younger brain,
link |
01:55:08.460
it's a more pedomorphic brain looking like the juveniles of the ancestor,
link |
01:55:13.460
but just as our kids are very smart and can learn amazing things compared to adults,
link |
01:55:19.460
all they lack is wisdom and maturity, but in terms of sheer cognitive ability, they got it.
link |
01:55:25.460
And I think that's the same with domesticated animals compared to their wild ancestors,
link |
01:55:28.460
and probably therefore with Homo sapiens say 30,000 years ago compared to their ancestors.
link |
01:55:36.460
So we have smaller brains than Neanderthals.
link |
01:55:39.460
Size, Richard, isn't everything.
link |
01:55:43.460
Exactly.
link |
01:55:44.460
What's the connection between fire, cooking, and the eating of meat?
link |
01:55:49.460
Which came first, do you think, humans starting to enjoy the eating of meat
link |
01:55:56.460
or the invention of fire and the use of fire for cooking?
link |
01:56:01.460
I think that fire increased the use of meat.
link |
01:56:04.460
But the fact that chimpanzees really like to hunt and kill meat, as do bonobos,
link |
01:56:12.460
certainly puts us in...
link |
01:56:14.460
So those two species have a common ancestor with us going six, seven million years ago,
link |
01:56:20.460
and it was from that common ancestor that you get the Australopithecine line.
link |
01:56:24.460
It's very likely therefore Australopithecines were eating meat when they could get it,
link |
01:56:28.460
which wouldn't be very often because they wouldn't be very good sprinters,
link |
01:56:31.460
but nevertheless they would occasionally be able to get some meat
link |
01:56:34.460
and I bet they loved it all the time.
link |
01:56:36.460
And basically all primates like meat if they can get it, almost all of them.
link |
01:56:41.460
But I think fire would have been very important for a couple of reasons.
link |
01:56:47.460
One is that once you eat your food cooked, then you're saving yourself time.
link |
01:56:54.460
By saving yourself time, you can free up
link |
01:57:00.460
the opportunity to go and hunt more because hunting is a high risk, high gain activity.
link |
01:57:07.460
There's every risk that you will get nothing on one particular afternoon that you go off
link |
01:57:13.460
looking for opportunities to kill.
link |
01:57:16.460
But it's high gain because when you do get something, you bring down a kudu,
link |
01:57:21.460
then you've got a serious amount of meat.
link |
01:57:26.460
What did males and females do with the time they were saving from not having to chew their food?
link |
01:57:32.460
I think that in the case of males, it's very reasonable to think,
link |
01:57:36.460
they spent a greatly increased amount of time hunting.
link |
01:57:39.460
So chimpanzees, they hunt maybe two or three times a month
link |
01:57:44.460
and the average hunt length is 20 minutes.
link |
01:57:47.460
With humans, they're hunting maybe 20 times a month
link |
01:57:53.460
and the average hunt length is six hours. So it's a huge difference.
link |
01:57:57.460
And that's possible because the time was available because they were cooking.
link |
01:58:01.460
Less chewing, more hunting.
link |
01:58:03.460
You got it.
link |
01:58:04.460
The other thing is that the meat is so much nicer.
link |
01:58:10.460
So when a chimpanzee kills a monkey,
link |
01:58:14.460
and I mean they are so excited about killing a monkey,
link |
01:58:17.460
they are so excited about going into the hunt
link |
01:58:19.460
and when they make the kill, then the screams everywhere
link |
01:58:23.460
and some try to seize it and capture it and take it away from the others
link |
01:58:28.460
and eventually the strongest one has it
link |
01:58:31.460
and the others sit around begging and trying to get some and tear it off
link |
01:58:35.460
and so they all love it.
link |
01:58:37.460
There are others who he often goes to the top of a tree
link |
01:58:40.460
in order to be able to get away from all of these beggars and scavengers
link |
01:58:44.460
and while he's there, drops of blood or little scraps fall down to the bottom
link |
01:58:50.460
and the junior members of society, you know, the females and young and that sort of thing,
link |
01:58:55.460
they are racing through to find a particular leaf that's got to drop a blood on it
link |
01:58:59.460
so they can lick it. I mean, they love it.
link |
01:59:03.460
But it takes them a lot of time to chew it.
link |
01:59:08.460
I mean, it's the same thing as for cooked food in general.
link |
01:59:11.460
So they are getting meat very slowly into their bodies
link |
01:59:16.460
and there sometimes comes a time when they just say,
link |
01:59:19.460
I've had enough of this, I need real food and they'll drop the meat and go off and eat fruit again
link |
01:59:25.460
because they can get fruit into their bodies so much faster than they can get meat.
link |
01:59:31.460
So once they're cooking, that problem is solved
link |
01:59:34.460
and they can eat the meat so just much more readily.
link |
01:59:37.460
And I think that mediating would become important for two reasons with cooking.
link |
01:59:42.460
So the key, not to oversimplify, but the key moments in human history
link |
01:59:48.460
are with the Homo erectus, the discovery of fire and the use of fire for cooking
link |
01:59:55.460
and then with Homo sapiens, the beta males killing off the alpha males
link |
02:00:02.460
and the cooperation can exist and cooperation leads to communication and language
link |
02:00:07.460
and ideas and sharing of ideas, that kind of thing.
link |
02:00:10.460
Well, yes. The only thing I modify on that is that you have to ask,
link |
02:00:15.460
how is it that the beta males were able to kill the alpha male?
link |
02:00:20.460
Right.
link |
02:00:21.460
And we now know that although chimpanzees do kill males within their own group sometimes,
link |
02:00:27.460
it's not a process of killing the alpha male.
link |
02:00:31.460
It's taking advantage of opportunity when some male gets into a bad position
link |
02:00:36.460
but it's not a systematic ability to kill the alpha male.
link |
02:00:39.460
And you can see why, because they don't have language.
link |
02:00:42.460
And without language, it's very difficult to know how confident you can be
link |
02:00:48.460
of the support of others against a particular individual within your own group.
link |
02:00:53.460
When you're attacking someone from another group, that problem is solved.
link |
02:00:57.460
They all hate the, you know, those guys.
link |
02:01:01.460
But the alpha male has got alliances within his group.
link |
02:01:06.460
Some of those allies might be willing to turn against him.
link |
02:01:11.460
Some of them might be harboring deep feelings of resentment.
link |
02:01:15.460
But how does anyone else know that?
link |
02:01:17.460
So in other words, I think that you have to have some kind of language that is pretty good
link |
02:01:23.460
to solve the problems of gaining confidence that five of you say, you know,
link |
02:01:31.460
or some number can trust each other in this final attack.
link |
02:01:38.460
And, you know, even nowadays it's difficult, you know.
link |
02:01:42.460
You mentioned Stalin.
link |
02:01:44.460
It's like, why was everybody terrified?
link |
02:01:48.460
Any dictator that takes control?
link |
02:01:50.460
Why is all of us as individuals terrified when you know there's millions of us?
link |
02:01:55.460
That's right.
link |
02:01:57.460
And so like that, we lack the language because our basic psychology of fear overtakes us.
link |
02:02:04.460
Like, who can we talk to?
link |
02:02:06.460
Who can we talk to and not get killed ourselves?
link |
02:02:08.460
Exactly. That's right.
link |
02:02:10.460
But do you have this intuition that some kind of language was developing
link |
02:02:16.460
along with this process of beta males taking over?
link |
02:02:19.460
Yes. Yes. I mean, once you have sufficient language to be able to have the beta males conspiring to kill the alpha male,
link |
02:02:27.460
then you have selection in favor of cooperation and tolerance, as we spoke about.
link |
02:02:33.460
And at that point, there will be increased ability to communicate
link |
02:02:38.460
and the language will get richer and better and better.
link |
02:02:41.460
So yes, absolutely. Positive feedback loop once you get the situation started.
link |
02:02:47.460
Can you maybe comment on the full complexity and richness of the human mind through this process?
link |
02:02:55.460
We've been casually saying cooking fire and beta males leading to cooperation.
link |
02:03:05.460
But how does the beauty of the human mind emerge from all of this?
link |
02:03:10.460
Is there other further steps we need to understand or is it as simple as this language emerging from taking over the alpha male and the cooperation?
link |
02:03:20.460
Or am I also over romanticizing how amazing the human mind is?
link |
02:03:25.460
Is it just like one small step in a long journey of evolution?
link |
02:03:32.460
Well, if the beauty of the human mind is the ability of us all to be creative, to explore, that's one kind of beauty.
link |
02:03:49.460
Another kind of beauty is the empathy that we can show.
link |
02:03:56.460
And we think of that as beautiful because it is a kind of rare and special ability compared to the sort of ordinary selfishness that can commonly predominate.
link |
02:04:14.460
I suppose we have to think of different sources for those two types.
link |
02:04:22.460
I suppose a general answer is that there has been selection in favor of bigger brains which probably in general has been associated with increasing cognitive ability.
link |
02:04:33.460
And as that has happened, the complexity of life has increased because people have more and more complex, highly differentiated strategies
link |
02:04:48.460
in response to each other's more complex, highly differentiated strategies.
link |
02:04:53.460
We get to a point where there is deception and self deception.
link |
02:04:57.460
There is a manipulation of ideas through stories that we invent and stories that we pass on.
link |
02:05:09.460
I guess all I'm wanting to say is that there is a world of the mind that evolves in response to these platforms that are put there.
link |
02:05:25.460
The platform of increasing brain size and therefore cognitive ability made possible by increased energy supply.
link |
02:05:33.460
The platform of cooperation and tolerance in a world in which there remains a lot of conflict and therefore a need to respond to the conflict and manipulate your allies appropriately.
link |
02:05:49.460
I don't see beauty as coming totally independently of these things. I don't think there is a selection for staring into the sunset and creating poetry.
link |
02:06:03.460
But I guess sexual selection, males wanting to impress females in different ways will lead to them wanting to show off.
link |
02:06:16.460
Yeah, in all the different ways. So all of these are natural consequences of just coming up with strategies of how to cooperate and how to achieve certain ends.
link |
02:06:26.460
So that's just like a natural question.
link |
02:06:29.460
Yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken about sexual selection, but that is a really important part of it.
link |
02:06:33.460
You know, they try to outcompete each other in normally without any physical conflict just in order to be able to be chosen by mates of the opposite sex.
link |
02:06:46.460
And that is certainly a major source of creativity.
link |
02:06:52.460
So you've studied chimps. You also are the other relatives, gorillas.
link |
02:06:58.460
What do you find beautiful and fascinating about chimps, about gorillas, about humans?
link |
02:07:03.460
Maybe you can paint the whole picture of that evolutionary, that little local pocket of the evolutionary tree.
link |
02:07:10.460
How are we related? What is the common ancestor? What are the interesting differences?
link |
02:07:15.460
I know I'm asking a million questions, but can you paint a map of what are chimps, gorillas and humans, like how we're related and what you find fascinating about each?
link |
02:07:27.460
In Africa, straddling the equator, there is a strip of rainforest that relies on the combination of high temperatures and rainfall that you get around the equator.
link |
02:07:45.460
That rainforest goes into about 22 countries. And throughout those countries, you have chimpanzees, although they've gone extinct in two of them.
link |
02:07:57.460
In just a fraction of them, five countries, you've got gorillas where there are mountains.
link |
02:08:09.460
And in one country, on the left bank of the Great Congo River, you have bonobos.
link |
02:08:16.460
So in the African forest, you've got these three African apes, the only African apes, all of which are very similar in much of their way of life.
link |
02:08:29.460
They walk on their knuckles through the forest, looking for fruit trees and eating herbs when they can't find fruits.
link |
02:08:40.460
Gorillas represent the oldest chain. So about 10 million years ago, maybe as recently as 8 million years ago, the ancestor of gorillas broke off from the ancestor leading to chimps and bonobos and humans.
link |
02:08:57.460
So they've probably remained very similar now to what they were then. They were probably the largest apes living in montane areas and spending more time eating just herbs, stems, not so vitally dependent on fruit.
link |
02:09:21.460
And living in, if it was like the present, groups up to about 50 stable groups with one alpha male who was in charge.
link |
02:09:34.460
Gorillas are wonderfully slow and inquisitive compared to chimps and bonobos.
link |
02:09:46.460
And I had the privilege of spending a week or two with gorillas at Diane Fossey's camp before she was murdered.
link |
02:09:59.460
And I went out with two women, Kelly and Barb, to a particular group. And there was a young female in the group called Simba. And Simba approached us and stared at the two women.
link |
02:10:17.460
And then she came towards me and she very deliberately reached out her knuckles and touched me on the forehead.
link |
02:10:30.460
She was watched in doing this by a young male who was quite keen on her. And he was called Digit.
link |
02:10:37.460
And about five minutes later, Digit stood in front of us on the path and Kelly was in front of me. And then there was Barb and then there was me.
link |
02:10:49.460
And he came charging down the path and he sidestepped around Kelly and he sidestepped around Barb.
link |
02:10:55.460
And me, he just knocked with his arm and sent me flying about five yards into the bushes.
link |
02:11:04.460
And I loved the way that that was a very deliberate response. And I loved the way that Simba had been so interested in me and held my eye.
link |
02:11:13.460
Chimps and bonobos never hold your eye. But gorillas really look as though they're trying to sort of figure out, what are you thinking about?
link |
02:11:23.460
That was a species that goes back for something like 10 million years.
link |
02:11:29.460
In that situation, was there a game being played?
link |
02:11:34.460
Well, I mean, I felt that Digit was telling me, I don't want you messing with Simba.
link |
02:11:40.460
But was Simba using you?
link |
02:11:43.460
Oh, I see. Well, that's a fun idea. I don't see why she should be using me, but you mean testing how strongly Digit was prepared to interview.
link |
02:11:53.460
Exactly. Well, that's come straight out of a sort of adolescent to high school playbook.
link |
02:11:59.460
No, it's nothing wrong with it for that. I never thought of that and you never know.
link |
02:12:08.460
So this is an ancient branch of the evolutionary tree, this gorilla that led to gorillas.
link |
02:12:18.460
So then the next thing that happened on the evolutionary tree was six or seven million years ago when you have the line between chimps and bonobos on the one hand and humans on the other splitting.
link |
02:12:33.460
And basically what happened is that at that point, a chimplike ancestor leaves the forest, gets isolated in an area outside the forest and adapts and that becomes the Australopithecines.
link |
02:12:46.460
And meanwhile the chimpanzees and bonobo ancestor continues in the forest.
link |
02:12:52.460
And later what happens is that one branch of that crosses the Congo River and becomes the bonobos.
link |
02:13:00.460
That was only about two million years ago, maybe one million years ago.
link |
02:13:04.460
Now the chimps that remained in the forest for this time and occupied all the countries across from West to East Africa now.
link |
02:13:12.460
Again, we assume that they're pretty similar to the ones that live nowadays, whether some variation from West to East.
link |
02:13:21.460
And these are animals that live in social communities of between say 20 and 200.
link |
02:13:29.460
They have a lot of them in one group, but they never come together in a single unit.
link |
02:13:34.460
They share an area, a community territory, and that area is defended by males and within it females wander and bring up their young independently.
link |
02:13:45.460
And the females are very scared about the possibility that males will be mean to their infants.
link |
02:13:55.460
And in order to avoid them doing that, they do their best to mate with every single male in the group multiple times.
link |
02:14:04.460
As if to give a memory in that male of, yeah, yeah, I reminded you, so I'm not going to be mean to your baby.
link |
02:14:10.460
So what's wonderful about chimps?
link |
02:14:12.460
Well, you know, as we've spoken about them, you know, they are creative and sort of amazingly human like.
link |
02:14:19.460
But I love the sort of, you know, the quiet moments and here's one.
link |
02:14:25.460
I've got two chimps who are grooming each other on a day when they are utterly exhausted.
link |
02:14:33.460
They've walked 11 kilometers the day before up and down hills.
link |
02:14:39.460
And on this particular day, all they do is they get to one tree and they eat from that tree.
link |
02:14:45.460
And other than that, they only walk about 100 yards and they go back to sleep in the nest in which they woke up.
link |
02:14:52.460
So they're utterly exhausted.
link |
02:14:54.460
And they're just eating nonstop because they're trying to recover their energy.
link |
02:14:59.460
And this is Hugh and Charlie.
link |
02:15:02.460
And we think they're probably brothers that we never actually got the genetic evidence to prove it.
link |
02:15:08.460
Well, I never remember now who it is, but let's say that they both come down from the tree and they're both carrying branches of the food.
link |
02:15:22.460
They're actually seeds from these branches.
link |
02:15:24.460
They're both engaged even in the midday sun when they want to come down and shade themselves for a bit on the ground.
link |
02:15:33.460
They're still eating.
link |
02:15:34.460
But then Charlie finishes his branch and he starts grooming Hugh and Hugh continues eating from his branch.
link |
02:15:48.460
Charlie eventually gets bored of this after a few minutes and he reaches out and he lifts the branch from which Hugh is still taking seeds
link |
02:16:00.460
and puts it over his head and puts it behind his back as far as possible away from Hugh.
link |
02:16:08.460
Hugh doesn't do anything.
link |
02:16:10.460
He just finishes his mouthful and then he turns to Charlie and grooms him.
link |
02:16:14.460
So this very polite way of saying, will you groom me please has worked.
link |
02:16:19.460
Then Hugh grooms around Charlie's back and around to the right side and then down his arm to what point where he can reach the branch again.
link |
02:16:32.460
And then he picks up the branch and continues.
link |
02:16:35.460
Not sure, aren't they?
link |
02:16:36.460
Right.
link |
02:16:37.460
Yeah.
link |
02:16:38.460
So in other words, they have a very sort of simple little strategy, but it just shows the courtesy with which they can treat each other.
link |
02:16:46.460
And the days I love with chimps are when you see that sort of thing or when you see mothers just lying in a sunlit patch in the forest with their babies bouncing on top of them just having a wonderful peaceful time.
link |
02:17:01.460
And that's what most of their lives are like.
link |
02:17:05.460
So chimpanzees are the species that kind of unites the rest of the apes because a gorilla is in many ways just a big version of a chimpanzee.
link |
02:17:16.460
If you can sort of engineer a chimpanzee in your mind to be bigger, it basically turns into a gorilla.
link |
02:17:22.460
And then bonobos on the left bank of the Congo River are like a domesticated form of chimpanzee, but obviously humans didn't domesticate them, so they're self domesticated.
link |
02:17:35.460
They are less aggressive and they show all the marks of domestication that domestication animals do compared to wild animals in their bones.
link |
02:17:44.460
So they have reduced differences between males and females in which the males are more like females, they have smaller brains, they have shorter faces, smaller teeth and smaller bodies.
link |
02:17:55.460
All the things the domesticated animals show.
link |
02:17:57.460
And bonobos live in this environment in a strikingly peaceful way compared to the chimpanzees.
link |
02:18:05.460
There's no indication that they will have these aggressive kills and enough data now to show that there's a statistical difference in the frequency of which it would happen.
link |
02:18:16.460
And bonobos are famously erotic.
link |
02:18:21.460
The females have enlarged sexual parts which swell to a particularly large size compared to the female chimpanzees.
link |
02:18:33.460
And the females have a lot of interactions with each other in which they excitedly rubbed their clitorises together and appeared to have orgasms.
link |
02:18:44.460
And these occur in the context of some kind of social tension.
link |
02:18:51.460
And they sometimes happen before, sometimes happen after the social tension, and they seem to be devices, these interactions for ensuring that everyone's friends
link |
02:19:02.460
and reducing the chances that they're actually going to get into a fight.
link |
02:19:05.460
So it's a kind of conflict resolution through sex or some kind of pleasurable sexual experience.
link |
02:19:13.460
Well, it's often characterized as make love not war, that's right.
link |
02:19:16.460
Make love not war.
link |
02:19:18.460
Okay, you mentioned to me offline that you have a deep love for nature.
link |
02:19:26.460
If we look at the world today, how can we ensure that the beautiful parts of nature remain a big part of our lives?
link |
02:19:37.460
Assuming beings, in the way we think about it, in the way we also keep it around, preserve it.
link |
02:19:45.460
You know, we keep it part of our minds and part of our world.
link |
02:19:51.460
It's a very difficult question because every time there is a conflict between conservation of a natural habitat and allowing people to get a little bit of extra food for their babies,
link |
02:20:08.460
then naturally the tendency is for the humans to win.
link |
02:20:13.460
And so we have this steady erosion in the face of tremendous efforts to conserve nature.
link |
02:20:21.460
We have a continuing steady erosion of habitats and all the species, and the numbers are always in the wrong direction.
link |
02:20:31.460
Occasionally you get sort of wonderful little examples of something being saved, but the overall trend is clear.
link |
02:20:39.460
And it's very difficult to see how one can ever escape that because it's not human.
link |
02:20:45.460
Now that we are essentially a single tribe to want to save an elephant if it means killing 20 humans.
link |
02:20:56.460
So I think the only way in which we can really conserve is if we put tremendous effort into conserving the very best representative areas of nature.
link |
02:21:14.460
Often this will be the national parks that already exist.
link |
02:21:18.460
And what we have to do is to make them so valuable that actually it is worth it in terms of human survival to be able to keep those sorts of places.
link |
02:21:29.460
And that's the attitude that my colleagues and I have taken in Uganda where we want to keep the Kibali National Park alive,
link |
02:21:40.460
which has got the largest population in chimpanzees in Uganda and it's got elephants and wonderful birds and wonderful butterflies and wonderful plants and so on.
link |
02:21:47.460
And visitors and lots and lots of visitors.
link |
02:21:52.460
It may be that we're going to have to have huge increases in the amount of charges that you pay for ecotourism and you need to make sure ecotourism is done right.
link |
02:22:02.460
In other places you will keep nature there because it's useful for maintaining the climate, bringing rain.
link |
02:22:14.460
Maybe you can in some places convince people of the sheer sort of aesthetics of keeping nature that even over the long term,
link |
02:22:29.460
presidents whose job it is to look for the future of the country will be persuaded that you can do it for purely aesthetic reasons.
link |
02:22:40.460
But overall, what is required is for people in the rich countries to do much more investment than they have so far in maintaining both the natural places in their own countries and in the tropics.
link |
02:23:02.460
And if you look at Africa, the population trends are that Nigeria may become the most populous country in the world, I think, within a century.
link |
02:23:16.460
The future of African habitats, it's clear what's going to happen in general.
link |
02:23:23.460
There's going to be a huge conversion towards agricultural land.
link |
02:23:29.460
I heard Ed Wilson speak years ago about the prospect of the entire globe being turned into a single human feedlot.
link |
02:23:43.460
It's going to take a lot to avoid that.
link |
02:23:46.460
He is out there calling for half the earth to be devoted to nature.
link |
02:23:54.460
It's incredibly ambitious and incredibly optimistic, but unless you have really exciting goals, probably nothing will be achieved.
link |
02:24:03.460
Yeah.
link |
02:24:04.460
I mean, there's something to me like when I visit New York and I see Central Park and somehow constructed a situation where you preserve this park in the middle,
link |
02:24:14.460
probably some of the most expensive land in the world.
link |
02:24:17.460
The fact that that's possible gives me hope that you can do this kind of preservation at a global scale.
link |
02:24:23.460
Perhaps for just the aesthetic reasons of just valuing the beauty and disrespecting our origins of having come from the earth.
link |
02:24:35.460
We are so incredibly lucky to have chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas as our close relatives still living on the earth.
link |
02:24:44.460
We're unlucky that we don't have Australopithecines and other species of homo, but we're still lucky to have those because they are incredibly closely related to us compared to what most animals have.
link |
02:24:54.460
There are many animals that don't have any close relatives to them on the earth, but not only are they relatively close, but they teach us so much about ourselves.
link |
02:25:03.460
The similarities between them and ourselves raise questions that we can then test about the extent to which our own behavioral propensities are derived from the same evolutionary stock as in those great apes.
link |
02:25:18.460
Well, how much is that worth?
link |
02:25:20.460
I mean, we could spend billions going to the Mars to find evidence of bacteria there, and that's fascinating too.
link |
02:25:29.460
But we should be spending billions on this earth in order to make sure that we have, I don't know how to say it, substantial representative populations of these close relatives.
link |
02:25:44.460
Yeah, that we can meet.
link |
02:25:46.460
There's something like space tourism, when you go out into space and you look back down on earth, that's to a lot of people, including myself, is worth a lot.
link |
02:25:57.460
But why is that worth a lot?
link |
02:25:59.460
It's because it's humbling and beautiful in the same way that meeting our close evolutionary relatives is humbling and beautiful.
link |
02:26:12.460
Just to know that this is what we come from.
link |
02:26:17.460
This is who we are, not just for the understanding or the science of it, but just like something about just the beauty of witnessing this.
link |
02:26:25.460
And again, it's both humbling and empowering that this place is fragile and we're damn lucky to be here.
link |
02:26:35.460
Yes, unfortunately, the problems are incredibly difficult to solve and there is no one solver.
link |
02:26:42.460
It has to happen from a network of potentially cooperating people.
link |
02:26:47.460
But you're so right about it being daunting to think about what it looks like from space and I love the view that Herman Muller expressed of being able to go out from space.
link |
02:26:58.460
And he said, the whole of life would look like a kind of rust on the planet.
link |
02:27:06.460
Yeah, so the aliens were to visit.
link |
02:27:08.460
I'm not sure they would notice the life.
link |
02:27:10.460
They would probably notice the trees or ocean.
link |
02:27:15.460
It's a kind of rust.
link |
02:27:17.460
But let me ask the big ridiculous philosophical question of what is the meaning of this rust?
link |
02:27:23.460
What do you think is the meaning of life on earth?
link |
02:27:25.460
What is the meaning of our human intelligent life?
link |
02:27:30.460
Well, I think it's very clear that we have an evolutionary story that is only getting challenged around the edges.
link |
02:27:40.460
We have a very clear understanding of the evolution of life.
link |
02:27:45.460
And the meaning is we are here as a consequence of materialistic processes that began in our sense with the establishment of the earth four and a half billion years ago, whatever it was, and then water and oxygen and so on.
link |
02:28:09.460
And we are the astonishing consequence of the evolution of cells and multicellular organisms.
link |
02:28:23.460
The word random is the wrong word to use unless you understand what it means.
link |
02:28:30.460
It didn't happen by chance, but a lot of random events had to happen to make this possible.
link |
02:28:37.460
And those random events, of course, are the production of appropriate mutations.
link |
02:28:42.460
But the meaning of life is there is no meaning.
link |
02:28:49.460
The really big mystery of life is why is there a universe?
link |
02:28:54.460
And that's saying why propagates itself through the whole process of it, for the emergence of planets, the origins, first of all, of galaxies, of star systems, of planets, of the proteins required to construct the single cell organisms and the single cell organism becoming complex organisms,
link |
02:29:16.460
and some of the clever fish crawling out onto the land and the whole of it, and then there's fire, some clever guy or lady invented fire, and then now here we are.
link |
02:29:30.460
It just does seem, speaking as a human, kind of special that we're able to reflect on the whole thing.
link |
02:29:37.460
Wonderful story, so much more interesting than the stories produced by religion.
link |
02:29:42.460
It is beautiful, but it just seems special that us humans are able to write religions and construct stories and also do science.
link |
02:29:53.460
That seems kind of amazing.
link |
02:29:58.460
It seems like the universe is such that it creates beings like us that are able to investigate it.
link |
02:30:12.460
And that's why there's this longing for why.
link |
02:30:16.460
It's just such a beautiful little pocket of complexity created by the universe.
link |
02:30:23.460
It seems like there should be a why, but maybe there's just an infinite number of universes, and this is the one that led to this particular set of humans.
link |
02:30:34.460
Even without an infinite number of universes, I bet there's an infinite number of intelligent beings.
link |
02:30:38.460
Throughout this universe.
link |
02:30:40.460
Yeah, now that we know how many planets have the right sort of conditions, which is what, I can't remember, a lot.
link |
02:30:47.460
It's some significant percentage of all planets.
link |
02:30:51.460
Then there are apparently billions of planets, and things happen so quickly on Earth.
link |
02:31:00.460
Once you've got water, then you've got life, and it did not take long for life to evolve in the big scheme of things.
link |
02:31:09.460
And if you think, you look out there, say there's a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations.
link |
02:31:16.460
One dimension you can look at is the proclivity to violence they have.
link |
02:31:21.460
And it's interesting to think what level of violence is useful for extending the life of a civilization.
link |
02:31:30.460
So we have a particular set of violence in our history, maybe being too peaceful is a problem in the early days.
link |
02:31:37.460
Maybe being too violent, quite obviously, is a problem.
link |
02:31:41.460
So you look at viruses, what kind of viruses on Earth propagate and succeed.
link |
02:31:46.460
If you're too deadly, that's a big problem.
link |
02:31:49.460
If you're not deadly enough, that's also a problem.
link |
02:31:52.460
So that is a fascinating exploration of...
link |
02:31:55.460
I don't see any evidence.
link |
02:31:57.460
There's no way you're coming from when you say that being too peaceful is a problem.
link |
02:32:01.460
Well, because I'll say it this way, death is a way to get rid of suboptimal solutions.
link |
02:32:12.460
So violence...
link |
02:32:13.460
But there's lots of ways to die without violence.
link |
02:32:15.460
Right.
link |
02:32:16.460
To me, death in itself is violence.
link |
02:32:19.460
And you can...
link |
02:32:21.460
I mean, a lot of people that talk about, for example, longevity and disease and all that kind of stuff,
link |
02:32:26.460
they see death is the way they talk about it.
link |
02:32:31.460
And it's interesting to philosophically think of it that way.
link |
02:32:33.460
So death is like mass murder that's happening.
link |
02:32:37.460
And people that try to, from a biological perspective, help extend life,
link |
02:32:42.460
they see that you're helping the most...
link |
02:32:47.460
The biggest atrocity in the history of human civilization from their perspective
link |
02:32:52.460
is not allocating all our resources to solving death.
link |
02:32:59.460
Because death is a kind of violence.
link |
02:33:02.460
It is a kind of murder that we're allowing to be committed on us by nature.
link |
02:33:07.460
So the flip side of that is death makes way for new life, for new ideas.
link |
02:33:14.460
Yes, but that's got nothing to do with peace versus war.
link |
02:33:19.460
You have animals that are very, very peaceful, but they evolve just in the same way as other animals do.
link |
02:33:24.460
They just don't do it with death caused by violence.
link |
02:33:28.460
And violent death is premature death, surely.
link |
02:33:31.460
I mean, I don't mind about people dying.
link |
02:33:34.460
What I mind about is people dying in their youth.
link |
02:33:40.460
Prematurely.
link |
02:33:41.460
But some people would say all death is premature.
link |
02:33:44.460
It certainly feels that way.
link |
02:33:46.460
It's died too soon.
link |
02:33:49.460
Anyone who's ever died died too soon.
link |
02:33:52.460
Yeah, well, I mean, if we can become like sequoias and live for hundreds of years
link |
02:33:57.460
or thousands of years, that would be great.
link |
02:34:00.460
Do you ponder your own mortality?
link |
02:34:02.460
Are you afraid of death?
link |
02:34:04.460
I don't think I'm afraid of it.
link |
02:34:06.460
I'm reconciled to the fact it's going to happen.
link |
02:34:10.460
I just feel frustrated because I enjoy life.
link |
02:34:13.460
And I don't want to leave the party.
link |
02:34:19.460
Yeah, it's kind of a fun party.
link |
02:34:22.460
I don't want to leave the party either.
link |
02:34:25.460
So however we got here, we made one heck of an awesome party.
link |
02:34:28.460
And you're right.
link |
02:34:30.460
Having a party with a little bit less violence than it is an even more fun party.
link |
02:34:35.460
Richard, I'm deeply honored that you spent time with me today.
link |
02:34:38.460
Your work is amazing.
link |
02:34:40.460
It includes some of the deepest thinking about our human history
link |
02:34:45.460
and the nature of human civilization.
link |
02:34:47.460
So again, thank you so much for talking today.
link |
02:34:50.460
It's an honor.
link |
02:34:51.460
Thanks for your great questions.
link |
02:34:52.460
It's a really fun conversation.
link |
02:34:54.460
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Rangham.
link |
02:34:58.460
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
02:35:02.460
And now let me leave you some words from Jane Goodall.
link |
02:35:05.460
The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
link |
02:35:09.460
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.